Union home minister Amit Shah held a high-level review meeting on the security situation in Jammu and Kashmir last week. Lieutenant governor Manoj Sinha, national security advisor Ajit Doval, Army Chief General Manoj Pande and other top officials from security agencies attended the meeting.
The meeting was held in the wake of a spate of targeted killings in Jammu & Kashmir over the past few weeks. Security arrangements for the upcoming Amarnath Yatra also figured in the meetings. In the latest attack, a bank manager was shot dead outside his office by terrorists in Kulgam district. The Resistance Front, a shadow outfit of the banned Lashkar-e-Taiba terror group, claimed responsibility for the attack. A non-local brick kiln worker was also killed during the day, while another labourer was injured in a separate incident.
A woman teacher hailing from the Samba district of the Jammu region was also shot dead by terrorists at a school in south Kashmir's Kulgam district. Last month, two civilians and three off-duty policemen were killed in the Valley by the terrorists.
Two weeks ago, Shah held a meeting to review security arrangements for the Amarnath Yatra and the overall security situation in Jammu and Kashmir.
Govt assures protection to Kashmiri Pandits
As central security agencies and Jammu & Kashmir police reconfigure their strategy to tackle the spurt in attacks on civilian soft targets in the Valley, J&K government sources have made it amply clear that Kashmiri Pandits and other minorities serving in the state government shall be given adequate protection in the Valley itself and not be transferred out to Jammu division.
Calling the shifting of J&K government staffers to safer locations in district and tehsil headquarters a “temporary move”, an officer said this was being done not “because of what we think” but to take care of the minority employees’ own concerns. “Ethnic cleansing happened in the 1990s. We cannot allow it now. We believe in a multicultural society,” said the officer.
On non-local migrant workers also coming in the line of terrorists’ fire, the officer said that while around 10,000 non-Muslim government employees were being shifted to safer locations, “ultimately, we have to provide security for everybody as per our Constitutional mandate”.
Sources disclosed that the Amarnath yatra would proceed as per schedule as disturbing it would be like playing into the hands of terrorists. “Killings may not stop completely but there will always be ways of controlling them and we will do so,” said an officer.
