Officials say the pamphlet set off a probe that led them to a doctor believed to have been in the car that exploded. But the blast has also triggered a wave of Islamophobia and anti-Kashmiri sentiment.

Twenty-six days before a huge blast ripped through a crowded thoroughfare in Delhi, killing 13 people, a pamphlet with a green letterhead had appeared in Nowgam, a staid neighbourhood of cinder-block homes and rutted streets on the outskirts of Srinagar, Indian-administered Kashmir’s main city.

Drafted in broken Urdu, the letter proclaimed affiliation with Jaish-e-Muhammad, a proscribed armed group based in Pakistan.

The text was loaded with warnings directed at Indian government forces stationed in the region, and at those in the local population seen as having betrayed Kashmir’s separatist movement.

“We warn the local people of strict action who do not adhere to this warning,” the poster read, cautioning shopkeepers on the highway between Srinagar and Jammu, another key city, against sheltering government forces.

Such missives were once common from local and Pakistan-backed armed groups at the height of the region’s movement to break from Indian control in the 1990s and the early 2000s.

But after the Indian government revoked Kashmir’s special status, scrapped its statehood, and split the area into two federally ruled territories in August 2019, such posters have been less common – and armed violence has falle