Kashmir 2021: How the Valley changed after the killings of religious and ethnic minorities

Ramresh Paul Singh learnt of his wife’s death through an image forwarded to him on WhatsApp on October 7. It showed a woman in a floral blue kameez, her face fallen to one side as she lay on the ground, her eyes half closed.

“I had never expected something like that to happen to ordinary people like us. I am still in shock” said Singh, a bank employee. His wife, Supinder Kour, a Kashmiri Sikh like him, had been principal of a government school in Srinagar’s Eidgah area.

Another image circulated that same morning showed a man lying in a pool of blood, his body slumped against a wall, a mobile phone still in his hand. He was Deepak Chand, a Kashmiri Hindu, who taught at the same school in Srinagar.

That October morning, two militants had barged into the school, singled out the two non-Muslim teachers and shot them dead.

Two days earlier, militants had shot dead three other civilians in Srinagar. They included ML Bindroo, a Kashmiri Pandit who owned a pharmacy chain in Srinagar and was among the few from the community who had not left the Valley when militancy spread in the 1990s. Virender Paswan, a panipuri seller from Bihar, had also been shot dead…

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