It’s more than 70 days since the agitation began with the assassination of Rahul Bhat, a clerk who was shot inside the premises of his tehsil office in Budgam. It was a well-planned murder. Apart from Bhat, over the last few months, terrorists have killed a Pandit pharmacist, a Hindu banker from Rajasthan, a Hindu brick worker from Bihar, a Sikh school principal, and a Dalit school teacher.

The 36-year-old teacher, Rajni Bala, was killed on the last day of her posting at a school in Kulgam, south Kashmir. Bala had made multiple requests for a safe posting, citing threats from terrorists. The administration finally acceded to this plea by relocating her to a secure area within the Valley. But it proved too late. Raj Kumar Bala, her husband, also a teacher, was finally posted out of Kashmir after his wife’s assassination.

But the demands of more than 5,000 Pandits — and hundreds of other non-local Hindus — have been overlooked. The invisibilisation of their anger and fear is especially ironic, given the politics of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Despite the abrogation of Article 370 and Kashmir’s special status, the Pandits are caught in the space between what protesters describe as “lives and livelihoods.”

The rehabilitation scheme was first rolled out in 2008 during the Manmohan Singh years. Pandita argues that every government employee has now been forced to sign a bond — he has signed one too — which stipulates that this is a non-transferable posting. Agitators say this illiberal technicality is being held against them.

In March 2021, the Narendra Modi government announced that 520 migrants had returned to the Valley to take up jobs, another 2,000 were “likely to return under the same policy”. The government offered cash incentives of ₹7.5 lakh per family, along with transit accommodation. But if you speak to protesters, they will tell you that 80% of the community lives in rented accommodation, unsafe from a security perspective, with “four families having to share a single kitchen,” says Pandita.

Another Pandit employee, whose identity was withheld on request, said, “The entire Kashmiri Pandit community looks up to PM Modi. Why won’t he share our suffering and pain…Can the government guarantee our security in writing? Can they assure us that when we are teaching no one will shoot us from behind? We fear for our lives; we fear our families. We ask, what is our fault? An entire generation faded and withered away in camps in the 90s… we are witnessing the same cycle of violence today and the government is just sitting on it.. Address our single-point demand for the right to life.”

The government informed Parliament this week that of the 118 civilians killed since August 2019, 21 were targeted killings of Hindus, including Pandits, Sikhs, and other Hindus. “This is when there are hardly any Hindus left in the Valley,” the Pandit employee points out, the anguish breaking his voice. “The community witnessed massacres. We lost our only home. We need empathy now. Why is the government forcing us to work in the Valley against our will?”

The suffering of Kashmiri Hindus has long been at the heart of Right-wing politics. Unfortunately, it has sometimes been weaponised to win elections, troll journalists, and make political speeches and nationalist assertions. But today, as thousands of men and women protest peacefully, asking only that they not be coerced into working in an environment where they don’t feel secure, no one is prepared to heed their sentiments.

A rehabilitation scheme, by definition, should be aimed at delivering justice and compensation for the violent trauma of the past. Employment by diktat surely cannot be an illustration of compassion.

Barkha Dutt is an award-winning journalist and author

The views expressed are personal