Fear looms over both communities after recent targeted killings of minorities in Kashmir by militants

During the Friday sermons, the speakers at minarets of many mosques gave out solidarity messages to the minorities. The clerics made fervent appeals to the members of the minority community to not leave the Valley.Bhan said that he too had heard a few mosques making calls to the community to stand with minorities and there was a need to amplify such calls.Sanjay Tickoo, president of Kashmir Pandit Sangresh Committee, a committee of non-migrant Kashmiri Pandits, said that appeals and assurances made by the Muslim clerics would serve as a potential confidence building measure for the minorities. He said that there was a need for more such measures by the majority community.”We don’t need police protection; we need the security of people living here. We are safe among the people”, said Tickoo.Tickoo said that only seven non-migrant families had left the Valley following the spate of recent killings.Following the break out of militancy in the Valley in the 1990s, the region had witnessed a mass migration of Pandits and only 808 such families had stayed put.However, in 2008, when the then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announced a rehabilitation policies for the community, 3841 youth got jobs and moved back to the Valley.“Of them, 1400 to 1600 have left for the Jammu after the recent attacks”, said Tickoo.He, however, was quick to add that they had not left permanently.Javed Ahamd, a post graduate student, said that although the recent developments had caused a sense of deep unease among the minorities, it had also unsettled the majority community.



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