A Hindu financial institution supervisor was shot in what police referred to as a “terror incident” in Indian-controlled Kashmir on Thursday.
A minimum of 16 individuals, each Hindu and Muslim, have been killed in a sequence of focused assaults this yr in Kashmir, the place India has been preventing an armed insurgency for the reason that late Nineteen Eighties.
Each India and neighboring Pakistan declare the Himalayan territory in full, however they management solely elements of it.
Financial institution supervisor Vijay Kumar was attacked inside a department of the Ellaquai Dehati Financial institution in southern Kashmir’s Kulgam. It was the identical place the place a schoolteacher had been shot lifeless two days earlier, native police mentioned.
Video footage circulating on social media purportedly confirmed a masked assailant strolling into the financial institution and firing photographs on the financial institution supervisor with what appeared to be a handgun.
“He obtained grievous gunshot accidents on this terror incident,” Kashmir police mentioned in a tweet, later including that Kumar, initially from western Rajasthan state, had succumbed to his wounds.
The militant group “Kashmir Freedom Fighters” claimed duty for Thursday’s assault on social media.
Militants additionally shot two Hindu staff at a brick manufacturing unit close to Chadoora city on Thursday night time, killing one in all them, police mentioned in a press release.
Hindu households flee
Many Hindu households had returned to Kashmir over the previous decade as a part of a authorities resettlement plan that offered them with jobs and housing.
However the current violence has reportedly compelled lots of them to flee the world. In keeping with a neighborhood chief, greater than 100 households left after the schoolteacher was killed.
Hindu authorities workers additionally staged protests, demanding the federal government relocate them from Kashmir to safer areas, accusing Delhi of constructing them “cannon fodder” to showcase normalcy within the troubled area that did not exist.
“The one answer is relocation,” protesters chanted.
The homicide of a Hindu schoolteacher prompted protests and calls for for relocation
Tensions constructing since 2019
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s authorities in 2019 cut up Jammu and Kashmir, then India’s solely Muslim-majority state, into two-federally administered territories, stripping Kashmir of its semi-autonomous state. He promised to enhance improvement and safety within the area.
However the authorities enacted a slew of adjustments, similar to issuing “domicile certificates” to Indians and non-residents that granted them residency rights and authorities jobs. Delhi additionally eliminated inherited protections on land and jobs throughout a monthslong lockdown and communication blockade.
Muslims in Kashmir have seen such strikes as aimed toward engineering demographic change in India’s solely Muslim-majority area.
jcg/nm (dpa, AFP)