Pahalgam Provocation – A Dangerous Trap India Must Not Fall Into
- Prem Shankar Jha | The Wire
- 3 hours ago
- 6 min read
Like the Pulwama attack, this one at Pahalgam is intended is to provoke anti-Muslim fury in India, make the Modi government restore its punitive approach in Kashmir, and release the suppressed fury in the youth that Pakistani establishment hopes will make Kashmir fall into Pakistan’s lap.
Of one thing all readers of this article can be sure: the terrorist attack on tourists in Pahalgam was not the handiwork of Kashmiris, or of any dissident organisation located in Kashmir. The reason for this is simple: for the Kashmiris this would be the equivalent of cutting their own throats with a blunt knife.
The attack is an expression of the frustration that Pakistan’s hard core of Islamist hawks is feeling at the failure of their four-decade-long attempt to wean Kashmiris away from their allegiance to India.
These hawks are able to justify their stranglehold on power only by stoking animosity with India and their hopes had been raised when the Modi government read down Article 370 in 2019, turning Kashmir into a Union Territory that was ruled directly from Delhi. The relative peace that followed in J&K was the peace of the gun which Pakistan’s planners rightly believed would not endure forever.
But the vigorous participation of the people in the assembly elections last October and, more significantly, their decision to concentrate their vote so that only one party – the National Conference – would sweep the Valley and thereby prevent the BJP from forming its first-ever government in the region, upset all their hopes and plans.
So Pakistan reacted with predictable frustration and rage. From 2020 till September 2024, all but a handful of attacks took place in Jammu. After the election results were announced, beginning on October 9, however, there were eight attacks in the Kashmir valley in 25 days, beginning at Anantnag, on October 9, a day after the results were announced, and ending on November 3 in Srinagar. All but one of these were on civilians – migrant workers and the doctors who were attending to them suffered.
The dastardly attack at Pahalgam on April 22 has driven these vicious preceding attacks out of peoples’ minds, But they are eloquent testimony to Pakistan’s frustration that even five years of ruthless suppression and broken promises by the Modi government have not increased disenchantment in the Valley sufficiently for them to give up their desire to remain in India and fight for the full democratic rights that the constitution promises them.
The reasons why Kashmir still wants a solution to the dispute that allows it to stay within India – despite the misery imposed upon them by 35 years of incessant violence – is their conviction that this is not only the best way to protect Kashmiriyat, but also their awareness that it gives them access to India’s huge market. This has enabled Kashmir to aim for economic prosperity. Its people are among the most highly educated in the country.
What Kashmiris want
In an Oxford Union debate against the BJP’s Baijayant Panda six years ago, the late Sitaram Yechury had provided all the human development indices for India and Kashmir. In every index, Kashmir was 10% or more above the national average. The reason is not that it has been better governed than any other part of India (although this may well have been true during the long premiership of Bakshi Ghulam Ahmed, while Sheikh Abdulla was in prison) but because it has consistently attracted tourists from all over the world, and most importantly, is the part of the country where a good education is the most highly prized goal in every family.
Jammu and Kashmir is the country’s single example of export-led growth. So if there is any place in the world that values a complete and peaceful relationship with its neighbours, it is Kashmir. That is the centuries old economic base of the syncretism between Islam, Hinduism and Sikhism that has been the hallmark of J&K.
This is the reason why hundreds of Kashmiris turned out in 2014, many at the risk of their lives, to save the tourists who were trapped by the state’s worst flash flood in modern history that year. And it is also the reason why till now, in 35 years of unrest punctuated by armed insurgency, there has been only one attack on tourists – specifically on pilgrims headed for Amarnath, on August 1-2. 2000, by the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba. That had also taken place in Pahalgam, and provoked much resentment among Kashmiris who saw it as an attempt to scuttle the ceasefire that the entire Hibzul Mujahideen unit headed by Abdul Majeed Dar had declared barely a week earlier. Dar, of course, was assassinated a year later by killers the ISI sent from Pakistan.
As two opinion polls carried out in 2002 and 2009-10 by MORI (now renamed IPSOS) and Gallup have shown, more than 90% of the people of the Valley want only peace and a return to democracy, and fewer than 6% would prefer to be a part of Pakistan. Not surprisingly, therefore, Kashmiris have been totally against the militancy and have been yearning for a return to democracy. They demonstrated this by turning out en masse to vote in the October elections last year, despite the abrogation of Article 370 of the Constitution in 2019.
The main reason for the survival of syncretism in Kashmir is its Sufi-Reshi Islam, and its physical and political isolation from the plains of India during the British Raj. This shielded it from the communal fury unleashed by Partition, which survives in a diluted form till today. While this syncretism has been eroded in the past 35 years, especially by the concerted attack that forced Kashmiri Pandits to flee from the valley in1990, it still remains strong within the rest of the population.
The second reason is Kashmir’s umbilical economic connection with the rest of India. The revenues it garners from tourism is the life blood of Kashmir. In 2023, Jammu and Kashmir received more than 21 million tourists. Of these 446,000, or almost half a million, visited the Amarnath Shrine in just the two months of July and August. The starting point of this pilgrimage is Pahalgam. That is no doubt why the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba and its ISI backers in Pakistan picked it as the place to commit their second mass murder.
It is possible, indeed likely, that the Modi government and BJP will try to take political advantage of this attack in the rest of the country by demonising Muslims, as they did after the Pulwama attack. This is all the more likely now because Narendra Modi and Amit Shah know from the results of the 2024 elections that their political base is beginning to crumble. This would be the height of folly, because it is precisely what the LeT, the ISI, and hard core elements in Pakistan would like Modi to do.
Timing
The timing of the Pahalgam attack is not accidental. It was timed to coincide with the arrival of US vice-president J.D. Vance in India. Twenty five years ago the first mass terrorist attack on Kashmiri civilians took place on March 20, 2000, the exact date on which President Clinton arrived on a state visit to India. That was the massacre of 36 Kashmiri Sikh males, young and old, by terrorists dressed in Indian army uniforms. The intention behind that massacre was to convince the world that the Indian army had killed its own people in a sort of ‘false flag’ operation.
Of course, Sikhs who survived the massacre told reporters that they had harboured suspicions about the identity of the killers when they had visited the village earlier because the Indian army uniforms some of them were wearing, and particularly their boots, had seemed wrong. Barry Bearak of the New York Times was able to interview one of the killers, Mohammad Suhail Malik of Sialkot, Pakistan, whom the Indian army had captured. He admitted that he had participated in the massacre on the direction of the LeT.
Like the Pulwama attack, this one at Pahalgam is intended is to provoke anti-Muslim fury in India, make the Modi government restore the kind of hard, punitive approach in Kashmir that has been relaxed to a great extent since the October election, deepen disenchantment with India and release the suppressed fury in the youth of the region that the Pakistani establishment hopes will make Kashmir fall into Pakistan’s lap. If the Modi government decides to fall into this trap, it will bring war in Kashmir and an explosion of anti-Muslim violence in India several steps closer.
This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire & Galileo Ideas – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.
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