For as long as my living memory can recall, military presence has been an intrinsic part of Jammu and Kashmir’s landscape. After the 1990 insurgency, every inch of the land was mapped, particularly in the Kashmir region, and military presence became much more dense than it was during my childhood.
Unless you moved to the wilderness or trekked up to some very remote villages, the army, paramilitaries or police have had a formidable presence everywhere during the last three and a half decades – their personnel, bunkers or installations are visible to the naked eye from any space that is less or more frequented by public.
It is, then, shocking as to why a tourist spot that the government was promoting as the ‘mini-Switzerland of Kashmir’ should have been left completely unprotected.
There was no security at the ridges surrounding the Baisaran meadow on the day that 25 tourists and a local pony operator were brutally gunned down. There was none at all along the track leading to the meadow and it took them over an hour to reach the place, before which locals had already rescued most of the survivors.
According to a Deccan Chronicle report, one of the two Central Reserve Police Force companies assigned to Baisaran was redeployed elsewhere earlier this year.
The government’s sheepish admission of security lapses while making evasive, factually incorrect and unrealistic excuses is unacceptable. The security oversight is of catastrophic proportions, revealing murderous incompetence.
Was it a case of inefficiency or the government getting misled by its own political narrative of normalcy? The tourist killings are preceded by incidents that reveal stories of security blunders, demonstrating the consistency of breaches.
While Prime Minister Narendra Modi and home minister Amit Shah, who physically reviewed the security in Srinagar less than two weeks before this incident, have repeatedly claimed that terrorism has been completely decimated in Jammu and Kashmir, security officials have been more guarded in saying ‘it is well under control’.
Despite the normalcy narrative, Kashmir continues to be among the world’s most militarised regions, with forces, after 2019, focused primarily on civilian panoptic surveillance and control rather than addressing genuine security threats.
Has this misalignment of priorities compromised actual strategic interests while suppressing the local population?
Are the gaping security holes due to all or some of these reasons? Without a realistic and holistic appraisal and assessment of the same, there is no way it can be ensured that such incidents will not repeat.
Any rational approach to the April 22 killings would be a twin-pronged investigation aimed at assessing and plugging the systemic failure on the one hand and nailing the culprits on the other.
The Indian response should have been well thought-through, calibrated, focused based on facts and done with surgical precision. Instead, the government’s response is anything but assuring on these fronts.
Not only has the knee-jerk response skirted the vital security lapses, but it has also been based on assumptions without evidence. Within hours of the incident, even before security forces could reach the spot, accusatory fingers were pointed at Pakistan, which further fueled the crisis by describing it as a false-flag operation.
None of these accusations are supported by investigations or evidence, even as relations between India and Pakistan are at an all-time low, in the backdrop of which the Pakistan army chief made appalling inflammatory remarks and in which the Balochistan train-hijacking took place.
It is also a fact that Pakistan has been consistently meddling in Kashmir and last year’s attacks in the Pir Panjal are said to carry the pugmarks of the Pakistan army and its intelligence operative, the Inter-Services Intelligence.
There are also as yet-unverified claims by The Resistance Front, a local insurgency group with connections with the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Tayyaba and its affiliates.
The suspicions are strong enough to tempt us to join the dots, but such bland assumptions do not fully stand the test of scrutiny.
A few hours after the incident, television channels were quoting unnamed security officials and brandishing a photograph of the alleged perpetrators – all of them named, including two foreigners and two locals. This, even as all the attackers managed to leave without a trace – much before the security forces could arrive.
This makes it even more difficult to sift fact from fiction. The crisis has accentuated with India and Pakistan’s armies not only standing eyeball-to-eyeball, but both sides announcing a slew of tit-for-tat measures, including the suspension of the Indus Water Treaty and putting the Simla agreement in abeyance. The practicality of these steps, though, remains questionable.
While strategic experts opine that this conflagration may be low-key and may not blow into a full-fledged war between two nuclear neighbours, the consequences of any simmering hostilities are borne by the people living in Jammu and Kashmir, particularly those at the borders. Such calculations are based on a modest appraisal of past experiences and the limitations of the two countries.
In a changing geopolitical world, the guardrails against any adventurism between two nuclear powers, however, are much weaker.
The US has distanced itself from the matter, though its president, Donald Trump, did provide some comic relief in these bleak times with his description of the India-Pakistan dispute as being over 1,000 years old, dating back the crisis to well over ten centuries before the birth of Pakistan.
While the borders remain fragile, the disproportionate crackdown within Kashmir is equally worrying. If the attackers, as is being presumed on the Indian side, were from Pakistan, local support at some level cannot be ruled out. But the scale of retaliation as seen in the demolition and damaging of around a dozen houses, suggesting collective punishment for the families of named terrorists and alleged conspirators, and unspecified hundreds of detentions, is highly disproportionate.
It is improbable that hundreds of people would be involved in a conspiracy that the massive Indian security paraphernalia could not even get a whiff of. By recent official estimates, the number of militants operating in Kashmir was a double-digit figure and out of these, the local militants were less than ten.
Looking at the scale of the ongoing operations, are we to believe that their assessment or calculation was wrong, or that the government was lying to the nation?
In contrast to the recent claims of the government, the scale of detentions is disproportionately high and the action of demolishing the homes of terrorists cruel, because they impact families who cannot be blamed for the actions of their members.
Such actions signaling collective punishment against Kashmiris, who showed exemplary maturity in the aftermath of the Pahalgam killings, is both unjust and counter-productive, with consequences as severe as turning the population within Kashmir – already excessively suppressed – more alienated, if not hostile.
In the event of that, any misadventure at the borders with Pakistan, or a possible escalation on the eastern front with Pakistan’s ally China taking advantage of the situation, would be unsustainable and damaging for India, where extremely divisive and hateful rhetoric is already weakening the country from within.
Neither India nor Pakistan can afford prolonged tensions, much less a war. The only way forward is for both India and Pakistan to take a step back and agree to a moratorium on irresponsible finger-pointing. War hysteria and tensions need to be scaled down, and the historic tensions and the present crisis need to be tackled diplomatically.
While Pakistan must acknowledge India’s major concern of terrorism, India should do its due diligence of investigating the Pahalgam attack and then share evidence of the same with Pakistan to compel it to cooperate so that the perpetrators are brought to book.
Even though past experiences on evidence-sharing and cooperation have been failures, this is the only way out of this impasse and for pursuing justice for the victims of Pahalgam.
As for Kashmir, the Pahalgam incident exposes India’s failed scorched earth policy and its inherent dangers. An accelerated version of this policy, as the ongoing actions in Kashmir corresponding to nationwide cries for an Israel-like action and ‘flattening Kashmir’ suggest, is just the reverse of what the government should be doing.
(This article has been written by Anuradha Bhasin. She is the managing editor of the Kashmir Times and author of A Dismantled State: The Untold Story of Kashmir After 370, published by HarperCollins in December 2022.
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