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The Kashmir crisis in its present form can be traced back to the India-Pakistan war of 1971 and the birth of Bangladesh. Pakistan suffered the humiliation of a crushing defeat, a formal surrender with around 93,000 prisoners of war, and, most of all, the country being split into two. A firm realisation also dawned on Pakistan, that it could not match India in conventional terms, and hence she launched a well-crafted strategy of ‘death by thousand cuts’. Started initially in Punjab in the early 1980s, it was more successful in Jammu and Kashmir later, and continues to date.
As a professional, one must grudgingly give full marks to our adversary for crafting this ‘low cost-high gain’ strategy. Using terrorists from across the borders and separatist elements within, they succeeded in tying down a disproportionately large force. Not only this, their handlers from across the borders kept reinventing and realigning the modus operandi of terrorists and other force multipliers, depending on the context and the situation.