More than 5,000 Kashmiri Pandit employees, recruited under the Prime Minister’s special employment package since 2008, continued to stay away from offices in the Valley on Monday, even as a month has passed since a Pandit employee was shot dead by militants in his office in Budgam.
However, top government officials were hopeful that the employees will rejoin duty within the next two weeks.
Most of the Pandit employees termed the recent government measures, which included posting to district headquarters and safer places, as insufficient to address their security concerns. The community was frightened by the back-to-back targeted killings in May this year, which included one Kashmiri Pandit, two Hindus from Jammu, one Hindu from Rajasthan and three local Muslim policemen.
