This could well be one part of the Union government’s response; the other half could be a military strike in the coming days or weeks. Pakistan had earlier declared that the revocation of the IWT would be “an act of war”. Well, the ball is now firmly in the Pakistan army’s court. 

This is an appropriate response to the attack on defenceless tourists, where Hindu males were singled out and targeted, which was meant to strike terror and deepen sectarian divisions. The message was as much to the people of the country as its leadership, as one terrorist taunted a woman whose spouse he had sought, “Go tell Modi”. 

The Pahalgam massacre, the worst since the killing of 35 Hindus in Doda in 2006, is a major setback to the Union government’s Kashmir policy. Besides the politico-military response, the government may need a change of course for its Kashmir policy that had seen the abrogation of Article 370, a revocation of Jammu and Kashmir’s (including Ladakh) status of a state and a break in diplomatic relations with Pakistan. 

We may not have been paying attention, but the terrorists have been sending us a message over the last couple of years. Even as overall violence came down in Jammu & Kashmir, groups of highly trained terrorists from Pakistan had been carrying out systematic and deadly attacks across the state. They focused their attention on areas outside the Valley such as the Poonch-Rajouri region and the Pir Panjal range, targeting security force personnel but not hesitating to kill civilians as well. 

After the successful conduct of the Lok Sabha and the state Assembly elections, the focus of terrorist activity shifted back to the Valley. Following the swearing-in of Omar Abdullah as chief minister in October 2024, the Valley saw 10 terrorism-related incidents in 17 days. 

During Pakistan army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa’s tenure, efforts were made to stabilise relations with India. But the current chief, Asim Munir, is not too favourably inclined towards India. His recent speech had a distinct anti-Hindu, anti-India edge and he referred familiarly to Kashmir as Pakistan’s “jugular vein”. The fallout between the Pakistan army and the country’s most popular political force, Imran Khan, has badly divided Pakistan and the army itself. Internal challenges are mounting; so, pushing jihad against India in Kashmir is a convenient option. 

The immediate challenge for the Modi government is how it should respond to the terrible attack carried out by the proxy warriors of the Pakistani military establishment. The Modi government’s policy on Kashmir has been consistently tough. It initiated Operation All Out on the ground to defeat militancy in the Valley in 2017, abrogated Article 370 in 2019, and demoted the state to the status of Union territory while bifurcating it. It responded to Pakistan’s actions by conducting “surgical strikes” in 2016 after the terror attack in Uri, and the Balakot strike in February 2019 in response to the Pulwama blast that killed paramilitary personnel. 

Clearly, these did not deter Rawalpindi. The Union government may have responded militarily in Uri and Balakot, but there are scores of other important attacks that it ignored. Within two months of the Uri strikes, in November 2016, the Jaish launched an attack at Nagrota, near Jammu, the headquarters of the Indian Army’s 16 Corps, killing 10 soldiers. In early 2018, there was an attack on Sunjuwan camp near Jammu housing soldiers and their families killing as many as 11 soldiers and a civilian. Since Balakot, there have been numerous strikes that have taken a steady toll of Indian security personnel. 

Clearly, both Uri and Balakot were not much of a deterrent though they were hailed as such: Indeed, Balakot was botched in its implementation and the Uri strike too was limited in its scope. New Delhi has now thrown down the gauntlet that goes way beyond limited military strikes. 

What was effective, at least to some extent, was the global diplomatic effort through the Financial Action Task Force. It was through this process that some punishment, albeit mild, has been meted out to the perpetrators of the Mumbai attack of 2008 — Lashkar chief Hafiz Muhammad Saeed and his deputy Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi have been jailed. Indeed, Pakistan even “discovered” that the attack mastermind Sajid Mir was alive and sent him to prison. Ironically, all of them were booked for money laundering. 

After getting Tahawwur Rana, the Indian response now should be a diplomatic campaign for the extradition of Saeed, Lakhvi, Sajid Mir, as well as ISI officers who went by the alias of Iqbal and Sameer Ali. In addition, it should seek the extradition of David Coleman Headley from the US. These are people already complicit in crimes committed in India. 

Given the sheer scale of the Pahalgam massacre, some manner of deterrent action was a must. The government has come through with one. The challenge now is to build on it to the point that we see the complete elimination of the terrorist infrastructure created by the Pakistan army. 

 Manoj Joshi is the author of a study of Kashmir militancy, Lost Rebellion: Kashmir in the Nineties. The views expressed are personal