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Srinagar: Every time T.N. Dhar* leaves for the office, his wife and children cast a grimacing look, as if to restrain him.

“They are fearful about my safety,” he tells The Wire from his apartment in Veervan, a sprawling residential complex for returnee Kashmiri Pandits set amid the rolling hills of Baramulla district.

Dhar, who is employed at the Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh high court, was among thousands of Kashmiri Pandits who were displaced in the early 1990s, during the outbreak of militancy in the region. But he and many others like him opted to return in 2008 under the Rs 16,000 crore rehabilitation package announced by former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

Conversations with Dhar are suffused with joy-tinged nostalgia as he recalls the “beautiful years” of living as a teenager in Sogam village in Kashmir’s Kupwara district. “We used to live very amicably alongside our Muslim neighbours to the point that we would stay at each other’s places overnight,” he recalls.

But he soon retires into a grim silence. “Today we don’t,” he laments. “That trust has broken since.”

Over the last few days, Pandits living in camps like Veervan are gripped by a sense of fear as back-to-back threat letters from purported militant groups have surfaced on social media warning employees of a “sudden calamity” because of their perceived closeness to New Delhi.

Issued under the banner of United Liberation Council, which the police describe as a front for Lashkar-e-Taiba, the letter surfaced on August 23. It named six Kashmiri Pandit employees in the purported ‘target-list’, along with their Jammu-based addresses. The letter accuses the employees of “trying to implement the RSS agenda” in Jammu and Kashmir, and of other alleged “traitorous acts and conducts”.

It was the second such letter that surfaced within a month. On August 7, a previous letter under a similar letterhead had threatened six Kashmiri Pandits working in the J&K’s revenue department. The letter accused them of “behaving disrespectfully” with the locals, and of having “New Delhi’s backing”.

Personal information leaked

The back-to-back threats have raised fresh concerns, especially about how the militant groups were able to access precise details – including the information about their cellphone contacts, their workplaces and their postal addresses based in Jammu – about them, even as the region has witnessed an intense crackdown on terrorist networks over the last seven years.

The threats are also coming at a time when the government is reopening cases pertaining to the murders of Kashmiri Pandit individuals during the peak of the  militancy in the 1990s.

In June, J&K’s State Investigative Agency (SIA) filed a 737-page chargesheet naming Jammu & Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) chairperson Yasin Malik as the prime accused in the brutal killing of Sarla Bhat, a nurse at the neonatology ward at Sher-e-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences (SKIMS) in Srinagar.

Bhat was abducted by militants from the SKIMS hostel on April 18, 1990, and her bullet-riddled body was retrieved 13 km away in Malabagh neighbourhood of Srinagar the following day.

Earlier this month, the SIA also raided nine locations in Kashmir in connection with the probe into the killings........

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