The Wire Staff 
New Delhi: Ahead of the polling for the Anantnag-Rajouri Lok Sabha constituency, two back-to-back militant attacks in south Kashmir have left a former Bharatiya Janata Party sarpanch dead, while a tourist couple from Rajasthan was injured, officials said on Sunday, May 19.
The attacks took place barely days after Union Home Minister Amit Shah visited the capital, Srinagar, to review security preparedness in the Valley, and a week ahead of the polling for the Anantnag constituency, raising fears that the violence might shadow the participation of voters in the upcoming election.
In the first incident, Aijaz Ahmad Sheikh, a former sarpanch of the ruling BJP, was shot by unknown gunmen in Hirpora village of south Kashmir’s Shopian district on Saturday evening. A driver from Delhi, who was accompanying a foreign couple, was shot by suspected militants earlier this year in the same area.
A senior police official said that the victim was rushed to a hospital in Shopian where he succumbed to injuries. Sources said that Sheikh had suffered critical injuries in abdomen and head due to which he could not be resuscitated.
Following the incident, a team of J&K Police and the army launched a search operation in Hirpora village which continued till late in the night. However, no arrests have been made in the case so far.
As the security forces were carrying out a search operation in Shopian, a tourist couple from Rajasthan was shot by suspected militants in Yannar village of south Kashmir’s Anantnag district on Saturday evening.
A senior police officer said that the victims identified as Tabriz and his wife Farah received injuries in the shooting and they were rushed to a hospital where their condition is reported to be stable.
The uptick in violence in Kashmir coincides with the election for Anantnag-Rajouri Lok Sabha constituency, which will go to polls on May 25.
Former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Mehbooba Mufti is in the polling fray along with the National Conference’s senior tribal leader Mian Altaf Larvi and J&K Apni Party’s Zaffar Manhas, who was earlier associated with the Peoples Democratic Party led by Mehbooba.
Anantnag and Shopian districts, where the two attacks took place on Saturday, are part of the delimited Anantnag constituency which has been redrawn to include Rajouri and Poonch districts that were part of Jammu Lok Sabha constituency before the 2022 delimitation exercise, and two assembly segments – Budgam and Beerwah – of Srinagar Lok Sabha constituency.
Last month, suspected militants struck in the Bijbehara locality of south Kashmir’s Anantnag district, resulting in the shooting death of a migrant worker from Bihar. A week earlier, Dilranjeet Singh, a driver from Delhi who was accompanying a German couple, was shot and injured on April 8 at a resort in the Shopian district by suspected militants.
In February, Amritpal Singh, a migrant worker from Amritsar in Punjab, was shot and killed at Shalla Kadal locality in downtown Srinagar’s Habba Kadal area. Another migrant worker, Rohit Mashi, who also hailed from Amritsar, was injured in the attack and succumbed later.
At least four civilians have been shot dead in targeted attacks by suspected militants in Kashmir this year so far, raising questions about the BJP-led Union government’s claims that normalcy had been restored in Jammu and Kashmir following the reading down of Article 370 in 2019.
The uptick in violence this year is reminiscent of a deadly wave of targeted killings in Kashmir in 2022 in which ten migrant workers and four Kashmiri Pandits were shot dead, forcing the minority community and non-local workers to flee the Valley.
The J&K police have blamed The Resistance Front, a suspected offshoot of Lashkar-e-Toiba, for the attacks, claiming that it was a Pakistan-backed conspiracy to “disturb the peace” in Kashmir following the 2019 events.
While there were 31 targeted attacks on civilians in 2022, the violence dipped last year with 14 such incidents reported in Jammu and Kashmir. However, at least four policemen were killed in these attacks, while the number of casualties suffered by security forces also increased in 2023 compared to 2022.