When Mahesh, 35, learned that he had been apparently targeted for assassination, he ran. In that instant, he was cast, if unconsciously, as a flesh-and-blood symbol of the fear that has gripped the Pandit community in Kashmir and to escape which they have been agitating for weeks now.
Mahesh’s flight from home, in the evening on May 31, was also tragically ironic: he had spent that day protesting at Batwara Park in Srinagar against the killing of a Hindu teacher in south Kashmir and now he was running for his own life.
