Hindu bank manager fatally shot in Indian-controlled Kashmir | NEWSRUX

SRINAGAR, India — Assailants fatally shot a Hindu financial institution supervisor in Indian-controlled Kashmir on Thursday, stated police, who blamed militants preventing towards Indian rule for the assault.

Police described the taking pictures in southern Kulgam district as a “terror incident” and launched a search operation for the attackers. The financial institution supervisor, Vijay Kumar from India’s Rajasthan state, died at a hospital following the taking pictures.

The Muslim-majority area has witnessed a spate of focused killings in current months. On Tuesday, suspected militants, additionally in Kulgam, shot and killed a Hindu schoolteacher, Rajini Bala.

After that killing, Hindu authorities staff staged protests in a number of areas, demanding the federal government relocate them from Kashmir to safer areas within the Hindu-dominated Jammu area.

Lots of of Hindus who had returned to the area after 2010 as a part of a authorities resettlement plan that supplied them with jobs and housing fled the Kashmir Valley after the killing of Bala, in line with Kashmiri Hindu activists. Some 4,000 Kashmiri Hindus, who’re domestically often called Pandits, have been recruited for presidency jobs underneath this system.

These staff have been on a strike since Could 13 after a Hindu income clerk was killed inside an workplace advanced in Chadoora city.

Within the aftermath of the clerk’s killing, tons of of Pandits — an estimated 200,000 of whom fled Kashmir after an anti-India insurrection erupted in 1989 — organized for the primary time simultaneous avenue protests at a number of areas within the area demanding higher safety.

Final 12 months, suspected rebels killed a minority Sikh and a number of other Hindus, together with immigrant staff from Indian states, in a wave of focused shootings within the area.

Kashmir is split between India and Pakistan and each declare it in its entirety. Most Muslim Kashmiris within the Indian-controlled portion help the insurgent aim of uniting the territory, both underneath Pakistani rule or as an impartial nation.

When Kashmir changed into a battleground within the Nineteen Nineties, assaults and threats by militants led to the departure of most Kashmiri Hindus, who supported India’s rule, with many believing that the insurrection was additionally geared toward wiping them out.

Many of the area’s Muslims, lengthy resentful of Indian rule, deny that Hindus had been systematically focused, and say India helped them transfer out or allowed their flight in an effort to forged Kashmir’s wrestle as Islamic extremism.

These tensions had been renewed after Prime Minister Narendra Modi got here to energy in 2014 amid a pointy rise in communalism in India, and the Indian authorities pursued a plan to accommodate returning migrant Kashmiri Hindus in new townships.

Muslim leaders described such plans as a conspiracy to create communal division by separating the inhabitants alongside non secular traces, notably after India stripped the area’s semi-autonomy in 2019 and eliminated inherited protections on land and jobs amid fears of demographic change.