Pahalgam Attack Tears Apart Kashmir's Fragile Peace Once Again

The massacre has smashed the large tourism potential for this year just when the peak season was set to begin.

The fallout of the Pahalgam attack needs coordinated and incisive decision-making at the highest level.

(Photo: Aroop Mishra/The Quint)

In 37 years of violence in Kashmir, there has never been such a brutal attack on civilians as the one in Pahalgam on Tuesday, 22 April, when terrorists killed at least 27 people. The massacre is almost comparable to the suicide bombing at the gates of Srinagar’s cantonment in December 1999, although that specifically targeted the Indian Army.

This attack did not really come out of the blue. There have been scores of terrorist attacks in Jammu & Kashmir over the past 11 months, starting with an attack on a bus carrying Hindu pilgrims at the very moment Prime Minister Narendra Modi took the oath of office for his third term last year. Since then, most attacks have targeted armed forces, and have concentrated on areas in the Jammu Division of the Union Territory, rather than the Valley.

These attackers are extremely well-trained and have been able to take down even army officers.

Despite repeated warnings from some of us that this was an extremely dangerous trend, the national security set-up has appeared surprisingly blasé.

It is tragic that it has taken such a devastating cost in innocent lives for the country to confront the lethal threat it faces.

Fractures at the Top

One of the problems that has hobbled India with regard to governing J&K over the past three or four years has been the covert but at times debilitating internal differences at the highest levels of power.

There have been signs of diverging approaches of Home Minister Amit Shah and National Security Advisor Ajit Doval. Modi appears to have largely sided with the latter, and it appears that Shah may now be placed in the firing line.

Shah had visited J&K to review the security situation just a few days before the attack, and was despatched again by the Prime Minister on Wednesday morning.

The fallout of the Pahalgam attack certainly needs coordinated and incisive decision-making at the highest level. However, calling the most important decision-makers in the government to brief the Prime Minister at the airport as soon as he returned from Saudi Arabia probably had more to do with messaging than with the most efficient way to handle the challenge.

Unified Opposition Support

In a rare show of unity, the Opposition acted responsibly—perhaps more so than elements of the ruling establishment in recent months.

The Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi, declared that the whole country stands united against terrorism. Within the Union Territory, Chief Minister Omar Abdullah castigated the attack in the strongest terms, and Jammu and Kashmir People's Democratic Party (PDP) leader Mehbooba Mufti called for a protest bandh across Kashmir.

Lieutenant-Governor Manoj Sinha must shoulder the responsibility for ground operations—and the failure of the forces to prevent the attack in the first place. The home department and security fall directly under his jurisdiction, and he had ordered a sweeping set of transfers in the police department just a few days before the tragedy.

The fact is that the security forces have been hugely stretched during the three days preceding the attack owing to a gale-strength storm, which caused the Jammu-Srinagar highway to cave in at some places. Various uniformed forces were trying to help those stuck on the highway, and get the highway repaired.

Tourism Will Slump

Abdullah will have to contend with the economic fallout of this terrible attack. It has smashed the large tourism sector of the economy, just when the peak season (May and June) was set to begin.

A Gurugram-based travel agent told me on Wednesday morning that clients were cancelling J&K bookings in droves. He predicted that it would take at least a couple of years for confidence to be restored—possibly longer.

The closest event to this was the abduction of six foreign trekkers in 1995 by a shadowy terrorist group called Al Faran—believed to be linked to Harkat-ul Mujahideen. The Norwegian among the six was beheaded, a US citizen escaped, and the other four (two from the UK and one each from the US and Germany) were never heard of again.

The demands of their captors included the release of Masood Azhar, who was released along with two others when an Indian Airlines aircraft was hijacked in December 1999. Azhar launched the lethal Jaish-e-Mohammed outfit soon after his release.

The abduction of those trekkers in 1995 had taken a heavy toll on tourism to the Valley, for a trickle of foreigners used to come there even when Indian tourists had ceased to go since 1990. Tourism began to boom again around 2004. In the two decades since, there have only been a couple of incidents of tourists being targeted.

Kashmiris had evidently made it clear to terrorist handlers in Pakistan that they must not interfere with their income from tourists. A few Kashmiris demonstrated against terrorism near Lal Chowk on Wednesday, but most were left trying to assess what this brutal rupture might mean for their futures.

In light of the history of such horrific events spinning off worse violence, the government must respond with sagacity, taking the nation unitedly along.

(The writer is the author of ‘The Story of Kashmir’ and ‘The Generation of Rage in Kashmir’. He can be reached at @david_devadas. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)