1 week Ago By Thilina Walpola
JD Vance, the Vice President of the United States, arrived in India on 19 April, following a solemn stop at the Vatican, where he became the final high-ranking official to meet the late Pope Francis—an emblematic rebel of the modern Church whose death this week marked the end of a transformative papacy. Vance’s arrival was framed as an endorsement of India’s ascendant geopolitical status, punctuated by public tributes to Prime Minister Modi and the deepening of the Indo-American strategic alliance. This diplomatic spectacle was further amplified by the 9 April extradition of Tahawwur Hussain Rana, a Pakistani-origin Canadian linked to the 2008 Mumbai attacks, representing a rare convergence of legal triumphs between the two nations in their fight against terrorism.
Yet, this orchestration of diplomatic victories quickly unraveled, as within days of these high-profile engagements, Kashmir—a region central to India’s evolving image—was once again thrust into global headlines, not by progress, but by tragedy. On 22 April, a massacre in the idyllic meadows of Baisaran near Pahalgam, once heralded as the face of Kashmir’s resurgence, accentuated a brutal paradox: the strategic narrative of peace and prosperity was violently interrupted by terror, forcing the world to confront the enduring volatility of the region at a moment when India appeared poised for diplomatic consolidation. On 22 April 2025, a massacre unfolded in the meadows of Baisaran near Pahalgam, often romanticized as “India’s Switzerland.
” What had become a symbol of India’s Kashmir renaissance—a picturesque site of family vacations, film shoots, and summer retreats—was reduced to a field of carnage as unidentified gunmen opened fire on a group of tourists. At least 28 civilians, mostly men, were methodically executed, while women and children were reportedly spared. The attack was not merely an act of terror, but a deeply choreographed intervention in India’s domestic and international narrative regarding Kashmir.
It sought not just to kill, but to provoke, destabilize, and symbolically mutilate the emerging image of a peaceful, integrated, and economically flourishing region. The timing of the attack is far too conspicuous to be dismissed as arbitrary. Beyond coinciding with the visit of the American Vice President and coming a few days after the extradition of a high-profile terror suspect, the attack occurred against the backdrop of growing international recognition of India’s Kashmir policy post the abrogation of Article 370 in August 2019.
Since that constitutional transformation, Jammu and Kashmir have experienced what some argue is the beginning of a socio-economic metamorphosis. The region recorded a significant uptick in tourist arrivals—over 3.5 million in 2024 alone—and notable improvements in infrastructure, per capita income, and public order, especially relative to other northern Indian states.
Critics of New Delhi’s policy feared a resurgence of insurgency post-2019, but such forecasts had not materialized at the scale predicted. Instead, the Indian government appeared to have successfully restrained militant mobilization through a combination of strategic military presence, economic incentives, and political integration. In this context, the Pahalgam attack functions as a violent punctuation—an abrupt and bloody interruption in a gradually stabilizing narrative.
Its deliberate orchestration, selective targeting of non-Muslim male tourists, and execution-style killings point to a calculated act of psychological and political warfare. Intelligence sources have attributed the operation to The Resistance Front (TRF), a group often described as a proxy of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistan-based organization responsible for the 26/11 Mumbai attacks. Although the Pakistani state has officially denied any involvement, the attack bears the hallmarks of asymmetric warfare, characteristic of entities which, though ostensibly autonomous, often operate under the shadow and sanction of foreign state apparatuses.
This week, newly declassified US intelligence documents, released by the National Security Archive, highlight a chilling historical continuity with the current crisis. A 1981 memorandum warned of catastrophic consequences from an Indian strike on Pakistan’s Karachi Nuclear Power Plant, with up to 20,000 latent cancer cases in Karachi due to Iodine-131 exposure. The document reflected Washington’s concerns about how quickly a conventional South Asian conflict could escalate to nuclear war.
This was echoed in a 1989 report by the US State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, which deemed a full-scale war between India and Pakistan “improbable,” yet stressed the high risk of escalation through miscalculation, especially in the event of strikes on Pakistan’s nuclear sites. By 1993, a National Intelligence Estimate suggested a one in five chance of war, noting that nuclear rivalry, cross-border militancy, and rising extremism could turn even minor skirmishes into a regional disaster. What emerges from these archival assessments is a grim continuity: terror in Kashmir has consistently been a strategic tool wielded not merely to express ideological dissent but to force geopolitical re-calibration.
This is not a theatre of mindless extremism; it is a crucible of meticulously calibrated violence. From the Chattisinghpora massacre in March 2000, where 36 Sikh villagers were executed during President Clinton’s visit, to the 2001 Jammu and Kashmir Assembly bombing, the 2003 Nandimarg massacre of Kashmiri Pandits, the 2017 Amarnath Yatra ambush, and now the 2025 Pahalgam killings, the pattern is unmistakable. Civilian targeting escalates in moments of diplomatic progress, suggesting an ideological commitment by militant actors to challenge not only the Indian state but also its evolving position within the global order.
The present attack comes at a moment when India is enjoying heightened diplomatic engagement with the Arab Countries and the West. Saudi Arabia, traditionally a close ally of Pakistan, has in recent years pivoted towards India as a key economic and strategic partner. The United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and even Iran have signaled similar re calibrations.
This realignment was most visible during the 2019 India-Pakistan standoff, when the Gulf states played a critical role in deescalation, and again when they muted their responses to India’s abrogation of Kashmir’s autonomy. The Kashmir issue, once a central rallying cry in Islamic internationalism, has lost its salience in the Gulf’s strategic calculus. For militant organizations and their state backers, this diminishing global sympathy poses an existential challenge.
Reinvigorating the Kashmir discourse through acts of horror appears to be the chosen mode of revival. It would be naïve to view the Pahalgam massacre in isolation. The possibility of future attacks targeting soft civilian clusters—tourists, religious pilgrims, migrant workers—across other regions in South Asia cannot be discounted.
Nepal’s porous borders, Sri Lanka’s post-conflict fragilities, and India’s Northeast remain potential theatres for replication. In the wake of this attack, Prime Minister Modi faces a dilemma reminiscent of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s conundrum following the Hamas assault in October 2023. A tempered response could be construed as weakness, emboldening adversaries and fueling domestic political critiques of failed security assurances.
Conversely, a muscular retaliation—especially if aimed at Pakistan or its proxies—risks internationalizing the Kashmir dispute once again, undoing years of diplomatic effort to position it as an internal Indian matter. Moreover, in the context of escalating global multi-polarity and emergent regional axes, a misstep could precipitate a broader crisis, pulling in actors far beyond South Asia. by Nilantha Ilangamuwa.
