One night two weeks ago, Gulshan Kumar Sharma heard a knock at the door and a voice calling out, "Didi" -- older sister, in Hindi. When he answered, the 28-year-old Hindu farmer was gunned down on the threshold of his mud house.
Family members, neighbors and local officials attribute the killing to "militants," members of one of several Islamic outfits that regularly wreak havoc in these craggy, sparsely populated foothills of the Himalayas. Today, having finished the last rites, the others of Mr. Sharma's Hindu clan began a sorry, fearful exodus from this mostly Muslim area, trickling down from their hilltop homes with possessions - bedding, plastic water jugs and trunks - loaded on their backs.
"We have been here 10 generations," lamented the dead man's uncle, P. N. Sharma, 62, a reed of a man and a retired English teacher, as he made the 30-minute trek from his home down to the road. "We have been here during all three wars. We've never migrated."
With India and Pakistan facing the prospect of a fourth war, the story of the subcontinent's 54-year- old division between Hindus and Muslims is being played out in the remote hill towns of the Indian state of Kashmir, not in the epic communal unrest of the past but in small-scale, day-to-day savagery.
During the last 15 days, three members of a family were slain in another village in this district, called Rajouri. Before that, another two were slain in a house perched on a hill, more than three miles from the nearest road. In another village, four members of a family were killed in late December.
Two weeks ago in a village in the Poonch district, a three-hour drive from here, six members of a family, including a 6-month-old baby, were slaughtered just after sundown; a seventh member of the family is being treated in a hospital in Jammu. In another village in the same district, an elected village chief was killed last week.
The civilian administrator of the Poonch district, Ejaz Iqbal, says he hears of an incident every two or three days. Houses have been burned, too, another official said.
India is a mostly Hindu nation, and this portion of Kashmir is the country's only majority Muslim state. India and Pakistan have fought two of their three wars over Kashmir, and India is threatening to go to war again if Pakistan does not clamp down on Islamic insurgents who use Pakistan as a staging ground for a low-level insurgency against Indian forces here.
In the last few years, the militants who roamed the Kashmir valley have made this area their home. Mr. Iqbal believes that many of them come from the Pakistani side of Kashmir, where Pakistan's president has promised to rein in the militant groups. They make their forays through these thickly forested hills, which are nearly impossible to police, sowing mistrust, fear and sorrow for the people who live here, Hindus and Muslims who have lived side by side sometimes for generations.
Often, the victims are Hindus. Other times, they are Muslims, who are, or who are thought to be, sympathetic to the security forces. Sometimes the targets are, like Mr. Sharma, members of village defense committees, a relatively recent invention of the police, in which civilians are armed with rifles. Other times, like the family in the Poonch, the victims are those who have rejected the offer of arms.
Anxiety here has only grown in recent weeks, as soldiers and security officials who had been assigned to patrol these remote hamlets have been moved closer to the border and so-called Line of Control dividing India and Pakistan, said Anil Goswami, the Jammu district divisional commissioner who oversees the entire southern swath of this province.
The militants, whom he described as mostly Pakistani and natives of Pakistan-held Kashmir, had been given a freer reign to terrorize the local residents and foment what he called a communal conflagration. Thankfully, he added, nothing of the sort has happened. "They want to terrorize the Muslims into keeping quiet," he said. "They want to terrorize the Hindus and Sikhs into running away from their homes. That is the game plan."
The village defense committees have only sometimes succeeded at their task. Nor have the police or security forces, even when they are assigned to patrol areas with a vulnerable community, been able to stave off the attacks.
The hamlets in these hills are often four- or five-hour treks from the nearest road. The mud houses, painted turquoise blue in the local custom or adorned with intricate designs, are scattered far from one another amid terraced fields and banana trees. To visit a neighbor is often a long hike through these perilous hills.
"Why do the militants do these things? To create panic," Mr. Iqbal declared. "Sometimes, militants are used by the locals to sort out their problems. Sometimes, militants feel the people are army informants."
Last summer, in Kotdara, another village in Rajouri where members of Mr. Sharma's extended family live, there was a massacre. Sudesh Kumar Sharma, a resident of Kotdara, said the villagers still didn't know who was responsible. But he said a neighbor had given shelter to the gunmen.
Today, as he helped his kinfolk pack up and leave Nerojal, Mr. Sharma said there was "chaos and confusion" in the hamlet where his relatives lived. "Everybody's feeling unsafe in these circumstances," he said.
When the people of Nerojal begged the police for more protection, they were told there was no one available. Today, the police who had been stationed here since the killing joined them in leaving. They said they had received orders to pack up too, though they did not know where they would be sent.
As twilight approached, the Sharma household was frantic with last-minute packing, stuffing clothes into burlap sacks. But the Sharmas had no place to go, they said, save the streets and schoolyards of the nearest town, Rajouri.
Soon the trail through the hills was a sweating caravan of men and women carrying their cherished possessions down to the road, hurriedly. "There is every apprehension of a mass killing here," said the dead man's uncle, P. N. Sharma.
Just as sad, in his eyes, was that no one was leaving the Muslim houses. The Muslim neighbors had not come to the protection of his family, he said. But he bore no enmity. "It was beyond their power, because here, they're also victims," Mr. Sharma said. "If at all they do, they'll be massacred."
Fakiruddin Gujjar, 40, a Muslim farmer who lives on the next hill, had come to pay his respects at the Sharma home. He had urged them not to leave. But he said he knew that he could not protect them either.
"These are our neighbors; this is
our home," he said, standing in their courtyard. "We cannot live without
them."