In an incident in January, 23 Hindu civilians were gunned down in a village north of Srinagar, the state's summer capital. The incident occurred in a part of the Kashmir Valley that was home to more than 100,000 Hindus before the insurgency, many of whom fled at an early stage of the conflict to Hindu majority areas around Jammu, in the southern part of the state.

A second incident in April occurred in a remote mountain district in the Udhampur district, between Srinagar and Jammu. In that attack, 29 Hindu villagers, including 13 women and children, were killed.

The April massacre caused a wave of outrage across India that was compounded by the accounts given by survivors, who said the killers struck after the villagers refused demands from the gunmen that they become Muslims and prove their conversion by eating beef. This is forbidden among Hindus, who regard cows as sacred. The survivors said that the killers forced other villagers to watch as they singled out their victims, killing many of them by cutting their throats.

Since it began in 1989, the Kashmir insurgency has taken at least 20,000 lives -- India's estimate -- and perhaps as many as 50,000 -- the figure given by Muslim guerrilla groups. At least half the casualties have been civilians. Many have been victims of what international human rights groups have described as a pattern of abuses by Indian security forces and Muslim insurgents. In scores of cases documented by the rights groups, the two sides have made civilians their targets.

But the massacres of Hindus in recent months have raised especially strong feelings elsewhere in India, especially in the period since March, when a new Government took power in New Delhi headed by the Bharatiya Janata Party, a Hindu nationalist group that has traditionally followed a hard-line policy on Kashmir.