Back to Bedlam? Kashmir Braces for Return of 'Search & Cordon' Era Post Pahalgam

Without a solid policy, India's response to terror will remain defeatist and ad-hoc, writes Kishalay Bhattacharya.

India does not have a concrete policy against terror, leaving authorities scrambling for ad-hoc measures in wake of any unforeseen attacks. 

(Photo: Vibhushita Singh/The Quint)

If policy means a well-laid-out course of action adopted and pursued by the government, India is yet to formulate a counter-insurgency or counter-terrorism policy. But its counter-insurgency experience is so rich and varied that it is surprising India doesn’t have a policy.

India’s insurgency campaigns have been long drawn and expensive and it has survived so far because of certain resilience among the people in those theaters or simply because the insurgencies have become spent forces. On a policy level, however, there is an absence of a coherent national policy to address such conflicts.

'Naya' Kashmir, Old Demons

Kashmir 2025 is clearly a different terrain; people protesting on streets against the terrorist attack, newspapers expressing protest by printing blank front pages, and schools and colleges shutting down to observe the same protest. In the Pahalgam attack site, the residents jumped to help, with one even taking on the terrorists and sacrificing his life.

The chilling, blow-by-blow accounts of survivors witnessing their fathers, uncles, husbands, partners, shot down at point blank range has evoked one of the strongest Kashmiri responses ever. However, the Indian State’s response is predictably retributive, archaic, and naïve.

Kashmir is international, while Manipur is provincial. Why is it that the Indian Prime Minister cut short his overseas tour for Kashmir but refuses to speak or visit Manipur, even when a civil war rages on for two years now in the hill state? The question was posed to me by a student in my class after the Pahalgam attack. Another student asked why a terrorist attack by an Islamist group evokes genocidal comments from the Indian establishment including some sections of the media, my former colleagues.

I asked an army officer under the Northern Command, who requested anonymity, what the immediate response would be. The officer gave the expected response to The Quint:

“It's going to go back to the nineties era of 'cordon and search' operations, limited activation of LoC, some transborder operations, and heightened exercises by all the three services close to the borders."

A 2019 report on Kashmir by the UN Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner alleged the Indian State had committed gross violations in the geopolitically conflicted region.

It specifically talked about the dreaded 'cordon and search' operations, “a much-criticised military strategy employed by the Indian security forces in the early 1990s, that was reintroduced in the Kashmir Valley in 2017."

According to national and international human rights organisations, 'cordon and search' operations enable a range of human rights violations, including physical intimidation and assault, invasion of privacy, arbitrary and unlawful detention, collective punishment and destruction of private property.”

Though State impunity in conflict is well known to most of us, they also observed that The Armed Forces Special Powers Act 1990 (AFSPA) remains a key obstacle to accountability. The Jammu and Kashmir Public Safety Act (PSA) 1978, “one that is used most frequently to stifle protests and political dissent", also provides another legal basis for arbitrary detention. The report cites the Supreme Court of India that described the system of administrative detention, including PSA, as a “lawless law”.

Justifying Past Wrongs Won't Make it Right Today

The war in Kashmir fuels the government’s stated agenda and they feel vindicated about the violent state action adopted in the past, as they can justify what is about to be unleashed.

Acting against Pakistani citizens visiting India by cancelling their visas including medical visas, ratcheting up pressure on the neighbouring country diplomatically and suspending the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) seem to be the most potent ways of assuring a nation of a billion people that India is “strong”.

The cutting off of water is a first by India and Pakistan has already framed it as an "act of war". It may not be too distant before US President Donald Trump jumps in like he did in his last term to end the conflict between the two nations. China is watching and has always been Pakistan’s all-weather friend—and India well knows its own inadequacies in escalating to a full-fledged war opening both sectors.

India should also be acutely aware that China is an upper riparian state and controls water flow. But we inhabit a warmongering world.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s opening election rally in Madhubani, Bihar on Thursday, 24 April, seized the moment with hyperbole. Meanwhile, the three murderers have escaped, and the Indian security forces are engaged in another encounter in Udhampur.

Military operations are underway. Given how they have been conducted over the years, one can imagine how the everyday lives of ordinary Kashmiris will be upended by this. Excessive force that amounts to abuse and torture violating citizen rights is not new to Kashmir. In wake of the nationally polarising attack, it will only be stepped up in the coming days.

It is well known that the Indian government has responded to insurgencies and terrorism (differentiated only by religious affiliations) more as a tactical response.

It has learned on the job how to manage different levels of violence, so as to give an impression of a semblance of ‘law and order’. The State’s response to armed conflicts has primarily been through force because it views conflict only through the lens of national security.

In November 2024, Union Home Minister Amit Shah addressing a counter-terrorism meet by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) had nothing new to say except asking security agencies to take a “ruthless” approach. He also announced that very soon, a national policy will be framed.

If there is no policy, then surely there is no strategy either. There is a tactical response that is generally reactive, and the tactic is a boiler plate use of brute force. This is defeatist in nature.

That is because insurgency is a dynamic process dependent upon certain factors like geography, ethnography, demography. Counter-insurgency or terrorism tactics must adapt to the given situations and engage with the various problems to be effective rather than apply the imperatives of conventional military and geopolitical thinking.

The point I am making is that a policy is different from a tactic. Even the Indian Army doctrine developed in 2006 (it took them 59 years to recognise the absence of a policy) states that cross-border wars can be strategised only if there is a policy.

There were attempts at generating ad hoc policies after Kargil and another one to counter the Maoist violence, but with limited success.

Lost in Translation: Terrorism, Militancy, Insurgecy or Extremism?

The English translation of the Latin word 'insurgere' was first recorded as early as 1765. Since then, the word has been defined and redefined but commonly what it meant in international law is an uprising against a constituted government that “falls short of revolution, rebellion, or civil war.”

The word 'terrorism' in the modern world can be traced to Maximilien Robespierre during the French Revolution, and a 26-year-old revolutionary Vera Zasulich, who shot the Governor of St Petersburg in 1878, to protest the Russian state’s repression of domestic political protest.

There has been a total failure in India to clear the blur that exists between the definitions of insurgency, militancy, separatist violence, extremist violence, armed resistance groups, terror groups, underground outfits, fundamentalist terror groups and left-wing extremists.

The Indian Army includes most of these under the term ‘sub-conventional’. The media has been liberal in tagging groups with any of these definitions and the government has never clarified its own stand regarding the differences in terminology.

Counter-insurgency ops and counter-terrorism ops include military expeditions or paramilitary deployment assisting the police to ensure that the affected areas are kept under ‘strategic control’.

There are enough studies on the methods of counter-insurgency operations, their successes, and inadequacies. But it is intriguing to note that despite such a long and sustained counter-insurgency experience, the Indian State continues to grope for answers in the dark when faced by such challenges.

Insurgency in India is as old as the Indian State. So, one can, therefore, conjecture that counter-insurgency in some form or the other would be as old. Terrorism, as the State defines, is now several decades old.

Yet, the classic responses are to first use force, then split, surrender, and rehabilitate under an endless “peace process”, create surrendered terrorist forces (like the Ikhwans in Kashmir) to counter the active cadres, and of course use slush funds to buy some acres of “cessation of hostilies”.T

Every “peace process” has only legitimised a further spiral of violence and created a cycle of corruption. There is no political initiative or vision of an inclusive, sustainable development model which alone can be the strongest driver for a counter-terrorism policy.

Political machinations have compromised at every level using armed groups to their advantage. Thus, as a nation, India does not have a defined policy of zero-tolerance towards the state agencies using violence as a means to an end. Or a strong foreign policy to counter-proxy wars. Or even a robust communication policy to counter rampant narratives.

The only narrative that suits the government of the day has been gifted by the terrorists in Pahalgam when they picked their victims based on religion. This shall fuel the government’s political agenda—and Kashmir will continue to be the India-Pakistan collateral.

(Kishalay Bhattacharjee is Professor and Dean, Jindal School of Journalism and Communication and author most recently of 'Where the Madness Lies: Citizen Accounts of Identity and Nationalism'. This is an opinion piece, and the views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)