FEAR RETURNS TO THE VALLEY

For the past fortnight, a Kashmiri Pandit social activist in Srinagar (name withheld for security concerns) has been living under police protection. A posse of policemen knocked on his door around midnight on October 5 and shifted him to a more secure location, a kilometre from his house. “They told me I was on the militants’ radar and needed to go with them,” he says.

Only a few hours earlier, militants had killed Makhan Lal Bindroo, a 68-year-old Kashmiri Pandit who owned a pharmacy in the Iqbal Park area of Srinagar. Bindroo,