Kashmir simmers but Pakistan’s game has no winners
Summary
- The massacre of tourists in Kashmir’s Pahalgam has come as a rude shock. The public discourse in India is now dominated by the question of how the country will retaliate.
The Indian security establishment could hardly have received a more explicit warning of an impending terrorist strike in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) than from the lips of Pakistan’s new army chief, General Asim Munir. Five days before the attack, while addressing a conclave of Overseas Pakistanis in Islamabad on Wednesday, General Munir had pledged that Pakistan would continue to stand by the Kashmiri people in what he called their “struggle against Indian occupation."
“It was our jugular vein, it is our jugular vein, we will not forget it," Munir said. Congress Party Member of Parliament Kapil Sibal cited Munir’s ‘jugular vein’ statement as clear evidence that the attack was state sponsored.
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In the indiscriminate murders at Pahalgam, at least 26 tourists were shot to death by a jihadist death squad in the Baisan meadow in South Kashmir. In chilling accounts of that incident, six heavily armed foreign terrorists, clad in army-style fatigues, emerged from the forest around the sunlit meadow before starting off their gruesome killing.
Identifying tourists as Hindu or Muslim by asking their names, or demanding that they recite verses from the Quran, non-Muslims were pulled aside and shot to death. The massacre had a clear communal motive, even though one local Muslim was killed too.
The Pahalgam bloodbath evoked clear memories of the Chittisinghpura massacre, which involved the mass murder of 35 Sikh villagers on 20 March 2000 in the village of Chittisinghpura in Anantnag district of J&K, not far from the site of this incident. At that time, it was speculated that it was a cold-blooded diversion aimed at bringing the Kashmir issue to the world’s attention.
Given the chronological echo of the Chittisinghpura incident, which occurred on the eve of US president Bill Clinton’s state visit to India, there is fevered speculation today over whether Tuesday’s murders had also been timed with the ongoing visit to Delhi of US Vice-President J.D. Vance.
Perhaps it was also timed with the visit to Saudi Arabia of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who cut short his tour, lamented the “heinous act" and pledged that the attackers would be brought to justice.
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The Resistance Front, a known proxy of the Pakistan-based jihadist group Lashkar-e-Taiba—as also of the Pakistan Army’s spy agency, the Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI)—issued a statement taking responsibility for the carnage carried out by six gunmen dressed in fake ‘uniforms.’
In the same ‘jugular vein’ address, the Pakistan Army chief reminded the Pakistani people that peace with India would not be easily achieved, given that they were two different nations. “Our religions are different, our customs are different, our traditions are different, our thoughts are different, our ambitions are different." Invoking Pakistan’s foundational ideology, the ‘two-nation theory,’ the Pakistan Army chief stated: “We are two nations, we are not one nation."
There is consternation in Kashmir at the way armed terrorists singled out and killed non-Muslims and tourists from other states. It remains to be seen whether there are further attacks directly targeting outsiders and non-Muslim visitors to the state.
Kashmiri militants tend to shy away from causing local casualties or damage to the residences of people who live there. Local fighters have a stake in keeping the local economy functional. Typically, an average Kashmiri family has one member tending to the fields, another earning from the tourist trade, a third employed by the state government and another tending to livestock. Everyone wishes to keep this employment going. Any disruption or disturbance comes as a direct economic blow to the local Kashmiri economy.
Across India, there was simmering public anger. Defence minister Rajnath Singh promised a swift response to the perpetrators of the bloodiest attack on civilians in Kashmir in decades. Singh pledged that India’s response would be delivered “loud and clear." In a speech in New Delhi, Singh promised retribution, not just aimed at those who executed the attack, but also at those who planned this from behind the scenes.
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The question that dominates public discourse in India in the wake of the Pahalgam attack is: How is the country likely to retaliate? After a similar attack in 2019, when 40 Indian policemen were killed, India had carried out cross-border air strikes on what appeared to be a terrorist camp in Pakistan. To that, Pakistan retaliated, triggering a complete breakdown in bilateral ties between both countries.
India-Pakistan relations remain vitiated. In August 2019, the Modi government revoked Kashmir’s semi-autonomous status and re-organized the state into two federally administered Union territories: J&K and Ladakh.
There is evidence to indicate that this was widely condemned by the residents of Kashmir, who experienced large-scale arrests and the suppression of fundamental rights. The armed rebellion has tapered off in recent years, but reports of targeted killings of civilians and security forces have continued.
In 2024, the entire region held its first local elections since the 2019 revocation of the undivided state’s autonomy. Several newly elected lawmakers urged a partial restoration of Article 370, the Indian constitutional provision that provided partial autonomy to J&K.
The author is a former colonel in the Indian Army.
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