The terrorist attack at Pahalgam in the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir in India this week represents the most significant development between India and Pakistan in six years. The 26 victims killed were primarily tourists from India but included locals and one citizen of Nepal. Previous major terrorist attacks after 2013 — such as at Uri in 2016 and Pulwama in 2019 — had primarily targeted military, paramilitary, or police personnel and facilities. But this incident represents a potentially dangerous shift to civilian targets, and assumed a communal character with the perpetrators attempting to identify non-Muslims. The attack took place at the beginning of the tourist and religious pilgrimage season in Jammu and Kashmir, and comes after several years of relative peace and normalcy in the Union Territory, including local elections that enabled the return to power of Chief Minister Omar Abdullah. The fact that Indian prime minister Narendra Modi was in Saudi Arabia and U.S. vice president J.D. Vance was in India at the time of the attack may have been coincidental.
India has assessed clear cross-border links to the attack. Pakistan’s armed services and intelligence have long used non-state terrorist proxies against India, with a tradition of proxy warfare going back to 1947. Soon after, Pakistan developed a deliberate strategy of asymmetric warfare using infiltration, which contributed to the outbreak of war in 1965. After the 1970s, similar strategies were employed against Afghanistan. The use of terrorism further developed after 1989, with over 100 training camps established for groups including Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), and Hizbul Mujahideen. Terrorists from these and other groups were infiltrated across the Line of Control with the help of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and covering fire by the Army. From the 1990s onwards, Pakistan’s nuclear weapons acted as an additional deterrent against military retaliation from India and various information operations have continued unabated, extending into the digital age. Although cross-border attacks reduced in frequency and intensity after 2008 and again after 2013, the broad infrastructure that enables the financing, recruitment, training, equipping, and infiltration of Pakistan-based terrorists has never been dismantled.
India-Pakistan diplomatic ties have been in deep freeze since 2019, with no high-level bilateral engagements, no High Commissioners (equivalent to ambassadors) to each other’s countries, and no Most Favored Nation (MFN) trading privileges. In response to the latest developments, India has announced further diplomatic measures, including a suspension of the Indus Waters Treaty of 1960 and greater restrictions on border crossings, visas, and diplomatic activity. The Indus Waters Treaty, negotiated by the two countries with the World Bank in the 1950s, gives India exclusive rights to three major rivers in Punjab; allows the Indus, Jhelum, and Chenab rivers to flow to Pakistan; enables run-of-the-river hydroelectric projects; and compensated Pakistan for the building of replacement canals. For its part, Pakistan has announced a suspension of visas, rail links, and the use of airspace by Indian airlines. It has also threatened to suspend the 1972 Simla Agreement which, among other measures, demarcated the Line of Control between the two countries. There has long been a simmering belief in New Delhi that the terms of both the Indus Waters Treaty and Simla Agreement were overly generous to Pakistan.
It is also probable that India will retaliate kinetically, either through military or unconventional means. In the past, India engaged in a large-scale military mobilization in 2001-02 following a terrorist attack on the Indian parliament; made ground-based strikes against terrorist staging grounds across the Line of Control in 2016 in response to the killing of 19 Indian soldiers; and used air strikes against a training camp in 2019 after 40 paramilitary personnel were killed by a suicide bomber, which was followed by a dogfight between Indian and Pakistani air forces. The intention behind these steps has been to increase the unpredictability of Indian responses and compel Pakistan to discontinue its policy of employing terrorist proxies. At the same time, Pakistan retains a sizeable defense apparatus and is in possession of nuclear weapons. India’s military responses in 2016 and 2019, while unprecedented, were proportional and targeted in order to reduce the probability and scope of escalation. Keeping these factors in mind, a sufficiently strong response by New Delhi would send a clear message to Pakistan — and to the world — that a resumption of indiscriminate terrorist attacks is unacceptable.
Dhruva Jaishankar is the Executive Director at ORF America. He is the author of Vishwa Shastra: India and the World, on which parts of this article are based.