peak in India was close to 10 million. Given that the Hindu population in East Pakistan was around 11 million in 1971, this suggests that up to 8 million, or more than 70% of the Hindu population had fled the country. The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Sydney Schanberg covered the start of the war and wrote extensively on the suffering of the East Bengalis, including the Hindus both during and after the conflict. In a syndicated column "The Pakistani Slaughter That Nixon Ignored", he wrote about his return to liberated Bangladesh in 1972. "Other reminders were the yellow "H"s the Pakistanis had painted on the homes of Hindus, particular targets of the Muslim army" (by "Muslim army", meaning the Pakistan Army, which had targeted Bengali Muslims as well), (Newsday, 29 April 1994). India The Godhra train burning on 27 February 2002 killed 59 people, including 25 women and 15 child Hindu pilgrims. In 2011, the judicial court convicted 31 people saying the incident was a "pre-planned conspiracy". This event eventually led to escalation into the 2002 Gujarat riots. On 2 May 2003, eight Hindus were killed by a Muslim mob at Marad beach in Kozhikode district, Kerala. One of the attackers was also killed. The judicial commission that probed the incident concluded that members of several political parties were directly involved in planning and executing the killing. The commission affirmed "a clear communal conspiracy, with Muslim fundamentalist and terrorist organisations involved". The courts sentenced 62 Muslims to life imprisonment for committing the massacre in 2009. There have been a number of more recent attacks on Hindu temples and Hindus by Muslim militants in India. Prominent among them are the 1998 Chamba massacre, the 2002 fidayeen attacks on Raghunath temple, the 2002 Akshardham Temple attack allegedly perpetrated by Islamic terrorist outfit Lashkar-e-Taiba, and the 2006 Varanasi bombings (supposedly perpetrated by Lashkar-e-Taiba), resulting in many deaths and injuries. North-east In Tripura, in 2000 the National Liberation Front of Tripura (NLFT) attacked a Hindu temple and killed a spiritual leader there. They are known to have forcefully converted Hindus to Christianity. In Assam, members of the primarily Christian Hmar ethnic group have placed bloodstained-crosses in temples and forced Hindus to convert at gunpoint. In Meghalaya, in 2020 the Hynniewtrep National Liberation Council (HNLC) threatened Bengali Hindus to leave Ichamati and Majai regions. Punjab The period of insurgency in Punjab around Operation Blue Star saw