On a Wednesday morning, a little before the clock struck 11, two Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) militants carried out a fidayeen (suicide) attack on a Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) camp near a public school in Bemina area of Srinagar. On that fateful March 13, the CRPF personnel had been put on standby deployment in wake of a strike call announced by the separatist groups. Repulsed by the first responders from the CRPF and the Srinagar district police, the attack ended with the death of five CRPF personnel and the two militants.
A week later, on March 19, LeT cadres killed 18-year-old Suhail Ahmad Sofi in Baramulla district. Militants followed the youth into a mosque and pumped bullets into him while he was hiding in the hamam (fire place) of the mosque. The youth, a school dropout, had participated in officially sanctioned programmes and had become an anathema for the militants for whom any form of association with the state militates against the azadi project.
The militants carried out yet another attack on March 21. Firing on a vehicle of the Border Security Force (BSF) at Methain Bypass in the outskirts of Srinagar, killing a security personnel.
These attacks, three in about a week’s time, may still appear to be isolated in a state where space for militancy is largely seen to have shrunk over the past years. Militancy-related fatalities have consistently dipped in Jammu and Kashmir since 2001, below the 1,000-mark in 2007 and the 200-mark in 2011. In 2012, only 117 fatalities were recorded. Even the March 13 attack came five months after the October 19 attack by the LeT last year on a convoy of the Indian Army near Srinagar railway station.
Amid such relative tranquillity, data, however, reveals a steep ascendancy in militancy-related fatalities in recent months. While the killing of civilians and security forces in the first three months of 2013 have already surpassed 50 per cent of the fatalities recorded in entire 2012 in the same categories, data further points at a renewed militant attempt to up the ante since September 2012. Over 50 per cent of the 117 militancy-related fatalities in 2012 had been recorded in the last four months of that year. The trend could very well indicate a serious attempt to revive militancy in the state.
The preparations that went into orchestrating the March 13 attack underline just that. Investigations have revealed an elaborate month-long preparation involving Pakistani militants and their handlers across the border, repeated recce of the attack site, and careful selection of the site in the vicinity of a cricket ground to induce civilian deaths which can subsequently be blamed on the security forces.
A well thought-out strategy is also evident in the attacks on the civilians as well. Since 2012, the Panchayati Raj institutions have come under a well-designed violence pattern. Threats and actual attacks have resulted in the resignation of hundreds of sarpanch, a fact that the state government has attempted to play down. Among the civilians killed so far in 2013—majority in the Baramulla district—are Bashir Ahmad Wani, a sarpanch of Kalantra village shot dead by militants at his residence on February 24, and Habibullah Mir, another sarpanch, killed in the Sopore area on January 11. Apart from the fact that Sofi’s killing is the continuation of the same strategy against civilians seen to be aligned with the state, its brazenness complements the meticulously planned March 13 attack well.
The significant increase in the direct involvement of Pakistani militants in recent attacks could point at a new strategy linked to the perceived weakness of local jihadists by their sponsors across the border. Intentions and augmented capacities of the militants to carry out attacks is supported both by oral incitements by LeT chief Hafiz Saeed and by the ability of the militants to infiltrate into India.
On January 29, the BSF inspector general of the Jammu Frontier asserted that not a single incident of infiltration from Pakistan had taken place in the last six months in the Jammu region (Jammu, Samba and Kathua districts). The claim is buttressed by the fact that majority of the foiled infiltrations and militant attacks in recent past have taken place in the Srinagar region.
The relative peace that dawned upon Jammu & Kashmir could very well be a thing of the past. After all, even the illusion of control the Pakistan civilian government brought upon the militants has disappeared pending the May 11 elections in that country.
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