For a time, she thought it might be a nightmare, borne into her mind by the cold spring wind blowing off the high mountains: Wild-haired, savage-clawed, fangs bared, evil had emerged from the forests like the witches of local myth, marching from home to home, feeding on the blood of infants and their mothers. Through the darkness, Vidya Devi watched as the psychopathic carnival slowly unfolded, without a single bullet fired. Twenty-two children, women and men were slaughtered, one by one, their throats slit through; seven, who barricaded themselves in their home, were burned alive.
Two days after the April 1998 massacre, then-home minister LK Advani and Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah flew in to survey the carnage in Prankote and Dakikote. They discovered Vidya sitting, catatonic, amid piles of bodies: Local police, it turned out, had not yet completed the long hike into the mountains.
Almost certainly, the jihadists who killed ten people near the Vaishno Devi pilgrim registration centre at Shiv Khori withdrew north-west, intelligence officials say, passing the hamlets of Prankote and Dhakkikote on their journey into the high-altitude forests around Gool and Gulabgarh.
Local jihadist Manzoor Ahmad, who guided the Prankote killers to the hamlet, was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2003. The killers, believed to have been a cadre of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, were never located. The perpetrators of dozens of similar communal massacres in Kashmir remain unidentified. Lashkar operative Muhammad Suhail Malik, who confessed to killing 36 Sikh residents of Chattisinghpora, was acquitted for lack of evidence and repatriated to Pakistan in 2015.
As Assembly elections loom in Kashmir, the message delivered in Reasi by Islamabad’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate couldn’t be clearer. From 2021 on, the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad have repeatedly demonstrated that they’re capable of picking off Indian military personnel in ambushes, while suffering almost no casualties of their own.
Timed just minutes before Prime Minister Narendra Modi took office for the third time, the Reasi carnage is a message from the ISI, warning it can further step up the pain for India in Kashmir, and inflict crippling political damage.
The jihad rising
Even as the Prime Minister paraded his hawkish credentials during the Lok Sabha campaign—reminding Pakistan he was willing to cross the Line of Control to attack jihadists, and promising to make the country “wear bangles”—a less-noticed polemic was emanating from across the border, too. Lashkar-e-Taiba commanders held a commemoration rally for jihadist Abdul Wahab, killed by the Indian Army near Sopore. “The martyrs are calling on us not to forget their sacrifice of blood,” one poster advertising the rally read.
Led by Kashmir-region Jaish-e-Muhammad chief Masood Ilyas Kashmiri—not connected to the more famous al-Qaeda-linked jihadist Muhammad Illyas Kashmiri—hundreds of cadre also marched in Mirpur and other towns demanding an escalation of jihadist operations against India. Together with his commander, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, Kashmiri is accused by the National Investigation Agency of organising a 2022 attack targeting Modi.
Earlier, in the summer of 2022, the Jaish held its first public rally since the Pulwama crisis in 2019, where jihadists fired shots in the air in memory of slain terrorist Hafiz Arsalan. An audiotape of that rally, obtained by ThePrint, shows Kashmiri claimed responsibility for a 2021 attack on police in Srinagar, and called for financial donations to fund the purchase of assault rifles, which he said cost the organisation over Rs 7 lakh each.
“Flowers are being offered to the mujahideen who are sacrificing their lives, and a minute’s silence is being observed in their memory,” Kashmiri said at the rally, in unusual public criticism of the Pakistan Army. “Yet, at the same time, our leaders are doing nothing to confront the Indian Army.”
The Lashkar has also become increasingly open about its operations inside Kashmir. Following the assassination of a senior Lashkar operative in Rawlakote, allegedly by Indian intelligence, the organisation proclaimed it had killed three Indian soldiers as retaliation in an ambush near Kokernag. Led by Lahore-based Sajid Jatt, the Lashkar’s one-time chief for southern Kashmir, the terrorist group has succeeded in staging several high-profile attacks on Indian troops.
Election-time polemic might suggest the new government in Delhi will reach for its coercive toolkit to deter this terrorist revival—but that’s easier said than done.
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Lessons from Pulwama
Late in the summer of 2018, Ifsandyar Ali Khan Pataudi, a polo-playing aristocrat serving in the ISI, met senior Research and Analysis Wing officer R Kumar at a London hotel. Efforts by Prime Minister Modi to reach out to Islamabad had floundered, leading to Indian strikes across the Line of Control in Uri. The ISI had hit back, as scholar Manoj Joshi notes, with a series of savage Fidayeen attacks. The secret meeting was the outcome of efforts by National Security Advisor Ajit Doval and Pakistan Army Chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa to put a lid on the tit-for-tat killing.
The effort seemed to fall apart in 2019, after a bombing by the Jaish claimed the lives of 40 central police personnel in Pulwama. India hit back across the Line of Control using air power, bombing a Jaish seminary in Balakote. Islamabad used its own combat jets to retaliate, almost hitting the headquarters of the 19th Infantry Brigade in Rajouri
“Each Indian coercive effort since 2001-2002,” the former commander of Pakistan’s Mangla-based I Strike Corps, Lieutenant-General Tariq Khan noted “erode our position of deterring war through our nuclear capability.” Thus, failing to challenge the Indian assault would lead Pakistan to“become more and more vulnerable to an asymmetric conventional threat.”
The two countries backed off at the brink of full-scale war, though, and the secret channel led to a ceasefire on the Line of Control in February 2021. General Bajwa delivered on his promises to curb jihadist activity. The Jaish’s chief, Masood Azhar Alvi, was moved into protective custody, the organisation’s Bahawalpur headquarters placed under government administration, and its military training camps evacuated.
Fighters from the Jaish were discreetly encouraged to turn their attention northward. The United Nations Security Council monitors reported, in May 2022, that the Jaish was operating eight training camps in Afghanistan’s Nangarhar, under the Taliban’s supervision. Kashmiri is believed to have been one of the operatives sent to Afghanistan, where he served several months in prison before being released after the fall of Kabul in 2021.
For his efforts, General Bajwa sought political concessions from India on Kashmir—among them, the restoration of the scrapped Article 35A of India’s Constitution, which gave the state of Jammu and Kashmir the right to designate “permanent residents” entitled to purchase land.
There was little interest in New Delhi, though, to do a deal. Pakistan’s flailing economy, strategists in India believed, prevented it from risking another crisis over Kashmir, which would damage its hopes of securing investments and normalising its foreign exchange reserves. India also believed the risk of being sanctioned by the multinational terror-finance monitor, the Financial Action Task Force, would restrain Islamabad.
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Gambling on Kashmir
Facing resistance from his own Corps Commanders over his India policy, Indian intelligence officials believe, and with no political concessions on the table, General Bajwa soon lifted some restraints on cross-Line of Control jihadist operations. The first significant jihadist attack after Pulwama, the execution of five sleeping soldiers at Chamrer, took place late in 2021. General Asim Munir, who took charge as Army chief in November 2022, is thought to have authorised further jihadist operations, leading up to the Reasi killing.
Islamabad is now letting it be known that it doesn’t think India has the stomach for war—not, in any case, for incidents that fall short of spectacular events, like the Pulwama bombing.
The ISI knows that, even as Assembly elections draw closer, India is confronting renewed political challenges in Kashmir. The victory of secessionist politician Sheikh Abdul Rashid, campaigns claiming India is threatening Islamic morals in Kashmir, and a snowballing row over a blasphemous social media post: All these point to the persistence of unresolved conflicts.
Experience shows Islamabad isn’t delusional. The communal killing campaign which began in 1998 severely damaged the National Democratic Alliance government’s nationalist credentials, and compelled it to impose the Disturbed Areas Act across Jammu. Thousands of Hindu refugees fled from their mountain villages, deepening communal strains and hardening the lines of division between Hindus and Muslims in Kashmir. Even though additional troops were pumped into the region, the killings continued until the military crisis of 2001-2002.
Little imagination, of course, is needed to see why using jihadists to pressure India is a high-risk gamble. The gunshots that claimed ten lives could easily have cost far more, and a coalition government facing a future political crisis could easily be tempted to retaliate.
Following the 1998 carnage in Reasi, three crises—Kargil, the stand-off of 2001-2002, and Balakote—brought two nuclear powers to the edge of war. Last week’s killings show both countries remain mired in a dangerous deadlock. Both need to be aware that a fourth war might be closer than their leaders imagine is possible.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. He tweets with @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)
This is loser talk — you don’t cow down to a bully because he can do nothing better. You get up and smash his nose!
And nukes are no danger — no Pakistani general or fauji foundation is going to let go of their billion dollar grift by getting nuked in the process and turn it into zero dollars. So you need to stay the course, pick them apart and hurt them in the same coin! Please stop behaving like a loser!
Every terror attack in India orchestrated by Pakistan should be returned in kind with ‘terror’ attacks on non-civilian entities in Pakistan.