Till March 23, Nadimarg was a sleepy village in the Kashmir Valley's Pulwama district. That evening, it became a milestone on Jammu and Kashmir's relentless march to perdition. That evening, just under half of Nadimarg's Hindu population-24 of 52-was wiped out, gunned down, according to the police, by suspected militants dressed in army fatigues.

The following day, the VIP visitors trooped in. When Deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani arrived, he encountered an angry crowd of 200 people, almost entirely Hindu. "We have lost trust in the state Government," they said. "We want to leave Kashmir." Advani could hardly pass the buck. He made the right noises about blaming Pakistan and labelling the massacre as part of the "ethnic cleansing" of the Valley. Representing a government that came to power promising a war against terror, Advani must have been squirming.

PEACE ON PYRE: The public outcry against the killings (above) has put Mufti (below) on the defensive about his "healing touch"

He wasn't the only one embarrassed. Chief Minister Mufti Mohammed Sayeed of the People's Democratic Party (PDP) and his coalition partners in the Congress had been pushed to the defensive too. The migration of minority communities from the Valley has been near ceaseless since militancy attained menacing proportions in 1989. Today, there are only 10,000 Hindus and 35,000 Sikhs left in Kashmir.

"If I stay," says Chandji, whose father and sister were among the victims in Nadimarg, "life will not be the same for me and my family." Chandji, a state government employee, hid himself when there was fierce and continuous knocking at the door of his house. "They said, 'We are from the army and have come for a search operation'," he recalls. "My mother and sister hurriedly pushed me into a chimney, before opening the door."

Minutes later, Chandji's sister and father, along with their neighbours, were lined up and shot. A dozen of those killed were women and children. Some were found with bullet holes in the face.

The killings were a major blow to Mufti's attempts to bring Hindus back to the Valley. "It is a setback to my peace process and healing touch policy," admitted the chief minister, "but it will not deter me from bringing back the Pandits."

Behind the bravado, however, was a very worried man. Since it came to power five months ago, the Mufti Government had few major headaches. Violence was down and the atmospherics seemed to be getting better. The PDP was seen as the mainstream political force most sympathetic to militants.

"The massacre," says Kashmiri political analyst Showket Ahmed, "has sent a message that the situation can get as bad as it was." Coming a day after the murder of Abdul Majid Dar, leader of the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen and a local rather than "foreign" militant leader, it signalled that cross-border terrorism was very much in business.

It also meant the PDP-Congress Government's plans to rehabilitate Pandits in Tulmulla near Srinagar, and Mattan in Anantnag district, are in effect dead. Further, Mufti's "soft line" seems more controversial than ever. It now threatens to become a source of conflict between the PDP and the Congress.

The Congress has never been entirely comfortable with Mufti's "healing touch". The dismantling of the Special Operations Group (SOG), a crack anti-terrorism unit, alarmed security pundits. The freeing of jailed militants became a debating point for the BJP in Gujarat's election in December 2002.

At that time, Congress President Sonia Gandhi asked the Jammu and Kashmir chief minister to go slow on releasing militants. The request was disregarded. Rues a Congress leader: "Mufti and his daughter Mehbooba Sayeed are more concerned about Kashmiri TADA detainees in Uttar Pradesh than about the return of Pandits."

Congress circles are also speculating on how long the coalition will last. Aside from misgivings about Mufti's "healing touch", there are more mundane pulls and pressures. For one, the PDP has kept all the meaty portfolios with itself. Next, Mufti brushed aside Sonia's personal suggestion that political veteran Ghulam Rasool Kar be nominated to the state Legislative Council.

Finally, the Congress chief hit back by meeting All Party Hurriyat Conference leaders Mirwaiz Umar Farooq and Yasin Malik. Almost in response, Advani announced that N.N. Vohra, former home secretary and recently appointed the Centre's all-purpose interlocutor on Kashmir, was free to talk to separatists in the Hurriyat.

In essence, both his coalition partner and the Union Government were putting pressure on Mufti, indicating they were ready to explore options with the Hurriyat, which had boycotted the assembly elections. On its part, the Hurriyat calls the "healing touch" a sham. The SOG may have been disbanded but is now part of the regular police, it argues.

"As for the release of militants," the Mirwaiz says, "55 Hurriyat activists are still in prison." While condemning the massacre, he blames the PDP Government for attempting to bring back the Pandits before conditions were ripe. National Congress President Omar Abdullah is similarly critical.

The crucial piece of the Kashmir jigsaw is, of course, the Pakistan factor. Intelligence sources in Delhi feel the pattern of killing in Nadimarg implicated the Jaish-e-Mohammed (now renamed Khudam-ul-Furqan) and the Lashkar-e-Toiba (now renamed Jamaat-ul-Dawa). A regrouping of terrorist groups in Pakistan had been anticipated. Other than Kashmir, it is evident in the realigning of the Taliban and Al-Qaida forces and of former mujahideen like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar on the Afghan border.

The Ministry of External Affairs in particular has been gnashing its teeth after Nadimarg. Officials say they had warned the US as early as February that Pakistan would take advantage of the war in Iraq, mobilise jehadis near the Line of Control and reignite terrorism to divert attention from domestic turmoil. Yet after the bloodbath on March 23, the State Department in Washington urged India to resume dialogue with Pakistan.

A sarcastic mea spokesman tore into the "double standards" in the US war against terror and wondered why "both in Afghanistan and Iraq military action instead of dialogue had been resorted to". Immediately the Bush Administration started making frantic calls to South Block asking if this meant a change in India's policy on the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, an act Delhi has been fairly uncritical of.

While tempers soon cooled, the fact is India's attempts to tackle the roots of South Asian terror have reached a dead end. No longer is the mea burning the phone lines asking the West to rein in Pakistan. Neither did US Secretary of State Colin Powell nor British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw use the "R" word-restraint-in their conversations with Foreign Minister Yashwant Sinha.

In essence, it is India's job to clean up its backyard, strike terror camps across the loc, whatever. Does the A.B. Vajpayee Government have the will? That's the big question after Nadimarg, as it was after Kaluchak, after Amarnath, after Chithisingh Pora ...

-with Indrani Bagchi