scorecardresearch
Thursday, March 28, 2024
Support Our Journalism
HomeOpinionModi govt, Pakistan, China are all to blame for deadly Kashmir CRPF...

Modi govt, Pakistan, China are all to blame for deadly Kashmir CRPF bombing

Earlier, only the generals in Rawalpindi were held responsible. Today, Beijing’s leaders will have to accept their share of the blame.

Follow Us :
Text Size:

Millions of Indians will by now have seen the twisted wreckage of buses carrying dozens of Indian paramilitary soldiers from the Central Reserve Police Force, or CRPF; at least 40 of them died when a car loaded with explosives rammed into their convoy as it passed through Pulwama district of India’s Jammu and Kashmir state. Jaish-e-Mohammed, a group of militant Islamic extremists who pioneered suicide bombings in the disputed region of Kashmir, claimed responsibility for the attack. As one Kashmiri politician wrote on Twitter, it was “reminiscent of the dark days of militancy pre 2004-05.”

Jaish-e-Mohammed is based in Pakistan. Its leader, Masood Azhar, gives speeches freely and the group has built a sprawling training complex in the city of Bahawalpur, which features a wall painting of suitably militant-looking horses bearing down on Delhi’s Red Fort. Periodically, the Pakistani government pretends to crack down on militant Islamists such as Azhar; in fact, the terrorists continue to raise funds, recruit and strike at will across Pakistan’s borders. Nor is it just India that suffers. The Afghan government tells all and sundry that it cannot defeat the Taliban as long as the militants are supported by Pakistan. Just a day before the Kashmir attack, the Pakistan-based Sunni extremist group Jaish al Adl killed 27 members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, also using a car bomb.

Pakistani officials often like to say that their country is among the foremost victims of Islamist terrorism. Perhaps. But, their response has been at best to accommodate extremism, and at worst to try and convince terrorists that their efforts are best turned outwards, towards India, Afghanistan or Iran. Indian government officials — like the Afghans — are caught in a bind. They have little leverage over the militants’ patrons within the Pakistani military establishment. Nor are the Americans any longer influential enough to help: Jaish-e-Mohammed went quiet in the mid-2000s at American insistence but reemerged soon enough.

The Pakistani military has found a new patron: the People’s Republic of China. Beijing has repeatedly blocked attempts by India at the United Nations to declare Azhar a “global terrorist,” freeze his assets and prevent him from travelling. Nobody can quite understand why the same country that runs prison camps for ordinary Muslims in Xinjiang is protecting a self-confessed jihadi militant. Earlier, only the generals in Rawalpindi were held responsible for attacks such as this one in India. Today, Beijing’s leaders will have to accept their share of the blame.

The India of the past would grit its teeth and absorb a blow like this. But Indian public opinion is no longer as patient as it was during the attack on Parliament in 2001 or the siege of Mumbai in 2008. The big box-office success of the past year in India has been a dramatization of the cross-border strikes on militant camps in Pakistani Kashmir launched in retaliation for a similar (albeit less bloody) Jaish-e-Mohammed attack a few years ago. India’s ruling party, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, won state elections following those strikes and it has adopted the movie’s catchphrase as its own. Modi faces reelection in a few months; he’ll be under tremendous pressure to respond as he did then.

Yet Modi’s government has a lot of introspection to do as well. The militants released a video of the man driving the explosive-laden car: He was a local, from Gundibagh village in Pulwama. In the decade before Modi took office in 2014, homegrown Islamist militancy in Kashmir had largely died out. In the past five years, it has tragically come roaring back, fed by a series of cynical moves by the government in New Delhi meant to shore up its popularity in the rest of India.

Modi’s colleagues in the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party have tried to paint other Indian politicians as being sympathetic to terrorists. The BJP formed an opportunistic alliance in order to enter Jammu and Kashmir’s state government for the first time, and then abandoned that alliance in a manner that further alienated Kashmiris from Indian democracy. Party supporters own television channels that regularly paint all Kashmiris, not just terrorists, as the enemy.

Crowd-control tactics in Kashmir have become ever more brutal, angering locals. And anyone who speaks up for the basic rights of Kashmiris under India’s liberal constitution is considered, in a delightful Indian neologism, “anti-national.” In the process, a once-quiescent Kashmir has been set alight once again.

It’s possible Pakistan may want to stir up trouble in Kashmir. But, if it succeeds, then it is New Delhi that will have failed. India’s prime ministers, of every ideology and party, have long sought to control anger in Kashmir and, in the long term, win the state back to the Indian mainstream. Modi abandoned that policy, making his successors’ task infinitely harder.


Also read: 39 jawans killed after terrorists bomb CRPF convoy on Kashmir highway

 


 

Subscribe to our channels on YouTube, Telegram & WhatsApp

Support Our Journalism

India needs fair, non-hyphenated and questioning journalism, packed with on-ground reporting. ThePrint – with exceptional reporters, columnists and editors – is doing just that.

Sustaining this needs support from wonderful readers like you.

Whether you live in India or overseas, you can take a paid subscription by clicking here.

Support Our Journalism

SourceBloomberg

6 COMMENTS

  1. What a column! I think you too are to blame by writing such illogical cosmetic analysis column.
    “Modi govt, Pakistan, China are all to blame for deadly Kashmir CRPF bombing”
    Why dont you blame yourself for being a columnist & not being a Jawan who can teach behavioral skills?
    “Crowd-control tactics in Kashmir have become ever more brutal, angering locals.”
    Shame on you writing such a column & well introspect practically before pinning down blame on Armed forces.

  2. NO way this BOMBER was demanding KASHMIR FREEDOM !! this was a typical ISIS or TALIBAN type attack to establish CALIPHATE and local kashmiris and political parties have failed to PREVENT this !! CENTER can do no talking here they have to be eliminated !! SO keep your shitty analysis in your ass!
    NO CHINA SUPPORT and PAK was on the BURNERS !! PAK is small potato CHINA is the big fish !! NEW game has begun and the way TALIBAN is gaining importance in AFGH we will see kashmir too affecting !

  3. It is self inflicting to Blame policies of Central Government/Modi for this acts of terrorists. It is also futile to Blame China and or any other country. “Unless we understand that Pakistan is not a country but an ideological mind set, we will never win this ‘war’.” Unfortunately we are not yet prepared to recognise the real enemy and merely fighting against the symptoms.

  4. Crowd-control tactics in Kashmir have become ever more brutal, angering locals…

    This shows the true face of hypocrite pseudosecular press. Probably you people are equally responsible as Pakistan is.
    I think you should be sent for crowd control instead of Indian Army to pacify the stone pelters and terrkrists.
    Disgusting and shameful

  5. > “Modi govt, Pakistan, China are all to blame for deadly Kashmir CRPF bombing”

    Probably, the kashmiris are responsible for this deadly attack.
    Like any civil society, there are always religious majorities and minorities that live in a place, but you don’t walk around asking to be separated from the mainland. That’s ludicrous. Stop complaining that the government hasn’t done anything to your state. This is India, the government has very little good impact on the people, not that they are inefficient, but it’s simply a complex country to govern with a complex political system, deal with it.

    Let’s not forget the suicide bomber in this attack is a local, a kashmiri.

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

Most Popular