As the unspeakable horror of Pahalgam began playing out on Tuesday, my phone began getting flooded with messages from friends in Jammu and Kashmir.
"Aaj Kashmir mein insaniyat ka katal huwa…" said one. (Today in Kashmir, humanity was killed…)
"Kuch mat keh sakte, aaj bahuut dukhi hai hum, sab roh rahe hain..." said another. ("I'm lost for words, deeply saddened, we are all in tears…")
The brutal massacre of some 26 unsuspecting tourists happened in the upper reaches of Baisaran, near the tourist hub of Pahalgam, which had remained completely immune to terrorists' ire even at the height of the militancy in the late nineties. The attack has exploded the bubble that the Muslim Kashmiri would never be harmed.
Operation Pahlagam has the Pakistan Army written all over it.
A Pakistan Army, already bristling at the growing counter-narrative in recent months that Jammu and Kashmir had chalked up nearly 100,000 tourists in the first few weeks of April.
A Pakistan Army looking to settle scores with an India that was cosying up not just to the United States, but to its former mentors, the Gulf states of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
And critically, a Pakistan Army that was shamed and embarrassed by the March 11 Jaffar Express hijacking, which saw the rebel Baloch Liberation Army, take control of a train travelling from Quetta in Balochistan to Peshawar in the north, and target over 200 Pakistan military personnel. Many of them were Punjabi-speaking and in mufti. It was an act that Rawalpindi has consistently, and with no proof whatsoever, blamed India for.
Baloch insiders say that their gunmen went from compartment to compartment looking for Pakistan Army soldiers.
Pahalgam saw the terrorists ask the victims their names before they shot them dead.
Is Pahalgam the payback? And was the Pakistan Army Chief General Hafiz Asim Munir's invective-ridden anti-India speech at the Kakul Military Academy last week, where he described Kashmir as 'the jugular vein', the red light, the signal that the false peace, to keep the Line of Control free from terror attacks, was at an end? It had been a promise made by the well-meaning former Pakistan Army Chief General Qamar Jawed Bajwa during his backchannel talks with senior Indian officials.
The timing of the Pahalgam massacre to coincide with Prime Minister Narendra Modi's high-profile visit to the Saudi city of Jeddah, on the very day that US Vice President JD Vance and his Indian-origin wife were being feted in India, is a favoured Pakistan Army tactic. It was the same in 2000 when the Chattisinghpora massacre took place just as US President Bill Clinton touched down in Delhi.
But more than a tad unnerving are the reports that are now emerging that the terrorists had foreknowledge of the antecedents of the group of tourists.
Equally curious, is Pakistan's shift, training its guns on Muslim-dominant Kashmir, rather than the Hindu-centric Jammu. Kashmiri tourist agents in Srinagar freely admit that tourism may be a drop in the ocean when it comes to Kashmir's economy at barely 12%. But the footfalls in its famed apple and walnut orchards, the rise in house-boat rentals on Dal Lake, its AirBnbs, restaurants and dairy farms, have kept Kashmiris in good nick after years of unrest and violence; with the added bonus that schools and shops have stayed open.
While some still fear that new laws could open the doors to Indians from outside Kashmir taking over their land and property, the separatists' cause has lost a fair bit of its sheen, as Muslim Kashmiris shed years of poverty and deprivation for a better life.
To Kashmiris, therefore, Pakistan distancing itself from Pahalgam cuts little ice. The Resistance Front (TRF), which was quick to claim responsibility for the attack on the group of 40 tourists in the trekking trail, is a Lashkar-e-Taiba affiliate and a known proxy of the Pakistan Army.
Created to foment anger among the local populace after the 2019 bifurcation of the state after the abrogation of Article 370 and amalgamation of Jammu and Kashmir into the Indian Union as a Union Territory, it targeted Hindu Pandits and was behind the shocking attack on pilgrims in Reasi in 2024. Informed sources now say that the 100-250 strong TRF, maintains sleeper cells within Kashmir that it can activate at will, as it did in Pahalgam.
The reasoning behind Pakistan staying the hand of terror groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-E-Mohammed until now, however, may have less to do with General Bajwa's promise and more to do with the fact that Pakistan’s resources are stretched now.
Not only does it have to contend with the BLA in Balochistan, which openly claims that while "the Pakistan Army is visible on the streets in the day, it's the BLA that rules at night", it has less than an amicable relationship with their former protege, the Taliban regime in Kabul. Rawalpindi accuses Kabul of giving shelter to the BLA and to the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) in Afghanistan, giving it a free run into its troubled Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province. The TTP also has links to Islamic State (Khorasan), which operates across the Afghanistan-Pakistan badlands and has attacked Pakistan frontier posts at will.
As India's top leadership wrestles with whether Pahalgam needs a Pulwama-like Balakot retaliation, the fact is General Asim Munir has raised the stakes by putting Delhi on the spot on how it levels the score. By raising, as many say, the prospect of a larger confrontation, the General may not have fully understood the Washington playbook. Pakistan's political elite, as much as the Army, has struggled to come to terms with the fact that, without a US military presence in Afghanistan, Pakistan has become largely irrelevant to the discourse.
With President Donald Trump condemning Pahalgam, General Munir's ploy to get Trump's attention, and offer to intervene as he did when he served as president the last time, has run aground.
But for India, it can no longer ignore the relentless terror threat from Rawalpindi, which has over the last year demonstrated that it can deploy militants from across the Line of Control at will. After Pahalgam, Delhi, which has clearly not broken the back of militancy, may refuse to restore statehood to J&K. It needs now to craft a punishing response to Rawalpindi's long game and knows that it needs Washington on its side. Will Vance hold the key?
Neena Gopal is an author and foreign policy analyst.
