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Will this be a turning point for the people of Kashmir?
What happened in Pahalgam on 222 April at Baisaran meadow near Pahalgam, in J&K was not an attack by Islamic terrorists. It was an attack by Pakistan using Islamic radicals to inflict one of thousand cuts on India. In a 1965 speech to the UN Security Council, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, former Prime Minister and former President of Pakistan, declared a thousand-year war against India. Pakistan Army Chief General Zia Ul Haq gave form to Bhutto’s “thousand years war” with the ‘bleeding India through a thousand cuts’ doctrine using covert and low-intensity warfare with militancy and infiltration. The primary aim of any terror strike is not killing of uniformed personnel or civilians. It is to create shock and awe and achieve the aim plus of instilling fear, hatred and uncertainty among people and creating unrest in the society. The Pahalgam action has achieved all these.
The strategic model of terrorism by Pakistan – the dominant paradigm in terrorism – posits that terrorists are political utility maximizers. According to this view, individuals, in this case motivated by Islam to do the bidding of their masters, resort to terrorism when the expected political gains minus the expected costs outweigh the net expected benefits of alternative forms of protest. The terrorism in J&K practiced by Pakistan is State terrorism couched as being done by non-state actors and using hired, individuals highly motivated by militant Islamic ideals and controlled by the state of Pakistan.
Separating and killing “Hindus” in this particular terror strike has nothing to do with Islam or elimination of Kafirs. It is to create perceptions for Frederick Forsyths and Robert Ludlums of the experts, commentators, media, social media etc. to spin tales, without distinction between fact and fiction, and create unrest in the Indian society at large. The repeated airing of the unfortunate lady in Pahalgam, who lost her husband, declaring that the terrorist killed her husband because he was a Hindu, is what the terrorists wanted to be aired repeatedly. The Indian media, as always, obliged. This, as intended, will create communal disharmony throughout India, if the perception is allowed to grow. The selection of target has more implications. Those killed were tourists from all over India, thus giving the incident an all-India flavour, besides the communal hue. A few military guys killed, as has been the usual acts by terrorists recently, will not definitely catch the imagination of a Nation as this incident has done. Another aspect well thought out by Pakistan is, this incident will definitely create a political turmoil. Unfortunately, political priorities among the many political parties in India cares more for electoral success than National interests. The social media is full of agenda fault findings and “exposing” the military “inadequacies” of the Nation’s military in a bid to bring out the inadequacies of the Government. The most telling effect is the set back to the recovering economy of the valley. Its main money spinner, tourism, has been thrown into disarray. All the progress in the valley vis a vis POK will now be niched. The people who will suffer the most are the locals. They know it after tasting economic advancement in increased tourism in the past few years.
The media and the social media in India will lap it up and including all of us will keep forwarding and re-forwarding and re-re-re-forwarding to proliferate what we think as the “truth” or “fact” aiding and abetting the terrorists.
A reassuring factor post this terror attack was the positive reaction of the people of the Kashmir valley. The newspapers in Kashmir, all of them, put out a black front page today in protest against the terror attack. The papers urged all stakeholders — government, security agencies, and civil society — to come together in ensuring that Pahalgam’s meadows once again resonate with peace, not gunfire. Prayers for peace and condemnation meetings were held in all mosques in the Valley. Tuesday, religious organisations, trade bodies, political parties and many other groups called for a shutdown in Kashmir. Responding to the strike calls, all the towns in the Valley on Wednesday observed a shutdown and condemned the brutal attack. In South Kashmir’s Shopian, locals said such an attack was barbaric and against humanity. I do not think the terrorists can succeed in the valley any more.
Is Pakistan a terrorist state?Pakistan Army Chief Asim Munir, in an address on 16 April, defending the two-nation theory, emphasized that Pakistanis were different from “Hindus”. An outfit linked to the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) known as The Resistance Front has taken responsibility for the cowardly and downright condemnable terror on unarmed civilian tourists in Pahalgam on Tuesday. LeT is a terrorist (officially declared) orgaistaion headquartered and functional from Pakistan Hence, the international community should declare the Pahalgam terror attack as perpetrated by the State of Pakistan and declare Pakistan officially as a terrorist state
(The author is an Indian Army veteran and a contemporary affairs commentator. The views are personal. He can be reached at kl.viswanathan@gmail.com )
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