On 12 September in New Delhi, the BRICS group did something that would have been hard to imagine ten years ago. Under India’s leadership, it issued a statement strongly condemning the 22 April 2025 attack in Jammu and Kashmir, in which 26 people were killed. Seventeen months after the tragedy at Pahalgam’s Baisaran meadow, India can say it has achieved something very difficult: the people responsible for the attack are dead. The evidence against those who supported them is clear and a major group of countries has publicly condemned the act.
The timing is striking. Within days of the declaration, security forces reportedly killed the last surviving member of the Lashkar group that agencies had linked to the attack. He had evaded capture in the forests for years. Before this is seen as a cause for celebration, we need to think about what each of these results means and what still remains to be done.
Security forces started Operation Mahadev near Srinagar on 22 May 2025 after receiving intelligence about the presence of the Pahalgam attackers. On 28 July, security forces killed the alleged mastermind and two other terrorists in the forest belt on the city’s outskirts after signals from a satellite phone helped locate the men. Officials later said forensic, documentary and testimonial evidence showed that all three were Pakistani nationals and senior Lashkar-e-Taiba operatives who had hidden in the Dachigam-Harwan forests since the day of the attack.
On 29 September, the last man on the list, Lashkar commander Mohammad Asif, alias Hashim Musa Fauji, was reportedly killed by security forces in an encounter in Budgam district. A rugged ‘LoRa Ultra’ device was reportedly found near his body. Security agencies had linked him to several attacks, including Pahalgam, after years of operating in Jammu and Kashmir. He was reportedly the last surviving member of a four-member Lashkar-e-Taiba group active since 2022, the other three having been killed in separate operations between December 2024 and September 2026.
India has also built a significant legal record. The NIA’s December 2025 chargesheet is 1,597 pages long. It names seven accused, including two organisations treated as one entity: Lashkar-e-Taiba and its proxy, The Resistance Front (TRF).
The chargesheet also names a Pakistan-based handler, Sajid Jatt, who, according to the NIA, gave orders from Lahore. The NIA also arrested two residents of Pahalgam who helped the attackers by providing shelter and supplies. This shows that local help, not just foreign gunmen, made the massacre possible.
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The diplomacy India earned
Bullets can kill men, but a chargesheet builds a case that can be presented to the world. That evidentiary record has been put to work.
Consider how hostile the diplomatic terrain was in the first days after the attack. The UN Security Council’s 25 April statement condemned the killings, but references to TRF and LeT were reportedly dropped after objections from Pakistan and China. Pakistan’s foreign minister even boasted of a diplomatic success in blocking India’s bid to name the TRF.
The ground has shifted since then. In July 2025, Washington designated TRF a Foreign Terrorist Organisation and Specially Designated Global Terrorist, three months after it claimed responsibility for the attack. A later UN document mentioned TRF’s claim of responsibility, which was no small thing given the earlier resistance.
BRICS then followed, first in Rio de Janeiro, where all 11 leaders signed a statement condemning the Pahalgam massacre, and now in New Delhi, where the text calls for zero tolerance toward state-sponsored cross-border terrorism and commits members to act on terror financing and safe havens. BRICS includes China, the country that helped dilute the Security Council statement. Getting it to sign such language matters.
The caveats India must not ignore
Honest analysis, though, requires noting what the declaration does not say. BRICS condemned the attack but did not name Pakistan. That omission is not an accident. Consensus bodies produce language everyone can live with, and a text that condemns safe havens without identifying one is a text China and others can sign without changing their behaviour.
Beijing’s reaction to the American TRF designation was also telling: it strongly condemned the attack but responded only by urging regional countries to enhance counter-terrorism cooperation. Condemnation costs nothing. Listing a Pakistan-based group at the UN’s 1267 Committee, where decisions are taken by consensus, costs a great deal. India should treat BRICS as a gain in legitimacy, not as proof that Beijing has changed its mind.
The second caveat is operational. There is a quieter lesson in how the hunt unfolded. The Mahadev breakthrough came from a signal that gave the attackers away, but LoRa sets were also recovered from their hideout. The men who came after them have learned from that. LoRa sets are long-range radios that send nothing over the telecom network, so the conventional tools for listening in and tracking do not work on them.
Officials say the sets are not completely untraceable: two recovered after Operation Mahadev were sent to the National Technical Research Organisation, and intelligence units can reportedly narrow a signal to a 3-5 km radius, which is hard in dense forest. Spectrum scanners and jammers are reportedly being tuned to LoRa frequencies.
The point for policymakers is that signals intelligence alone will not carry the next phase. A terrorist who can talk to his handlers without touching a tower can only be caught through human sources, spectrum monitoring on the ground and tracing whoever delivers his food and batteries.
Also, eliminating these gunmen is not the same as dismantling the network that sent them. The handler named in the chargesheet remains out of reach, and the NIA has said its investigation is continuing. Recent reporting has also raised the question of why terror strikes continue in Kashmir even though militancy is at historic lows — a question that deserves a serious answer rather than a press release.
What India must do next
First, India should convert declaratory language into enforcement. The American designation of TRF is expected to boost India’s case for getting it listed by the UN Security Council’s 1267 Committee. New Delhi will likely face challenges because China has a permanent seat and Pakistan is on the Council. India has already been sharing information about TRF with the 1267 monitoring team since 2023. It should continue doing that. The NIA dossier should be used as a diplomatic tool, not just a one-time report. India should also keep pushing for the Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism. The BRICS document itself calls on members to finalise this convention.
Second, India must close the local gaps. The attackers were given shelter by local residents. Using information to guide police work, building trust in the community and keeping tourist areas safe are not as exciting as actions that cross borders. But these are the things that stop the next Baisaran from happening.
Third, India should treat off-grid communication as a strategic problem: invest in spectrum surveillance and technical intelligence capabilities, track the import and sale of such radio equipment, and pair technical tools with human sources in the high forests.
Fourth, India needs a clear plan for stopping threats. The military action under Operation Sindoor showed strength. However, strength alone is not a plan unless it has clear rules, ways to handle things getting worse, and a real understanding of what help from other countries can and cannot do.
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Closing the loop
Pahalgam has produced closure of a kind: the killers dead, the plot documented, much of the world on India’s side. That is a real achievement, and the families of the 26 who died deserve to know it was not in vain.
But justice for the past is not security for the future. The measure of success will not be how many declarations carry the word “Pahalgam”, but whether the next attack is stopped before it begins. On that test, India’s work is far from finished.
Tehmeena Rizvi, PhD, specialises in Women, Peace and Security studies in South Asia with a particular focus on Afghan Migration and the Kashmir region. She tweets @TehmeenaRizvi. Views are personal.
(Edited by Asavari Singh)