Terrorists killed 26 tourists holidaying in a picturesque location of Kashmir on April 22 after checking their Hindu identity. The attack came while US Vice President JD Vance was in India for a four-day personal-professional tour and a day before an Indian delegation was scheduled for trade talks in Washington. The timing calls for some deeper geo-political analysis!
A day before the attack, India and the US announced the terms of reference of a bilateral trade deal that would translate into $500 billion of bilateral trade by 2030. This goal is important for India, the currently fifth largest economy, to achieve its $7 trillion economy goal by 2030. India is estimated to become the third largest economy after the US and China by 2030. This global rise translates into many things geopolitical in the changing scheme of global order.
A globally rising India with economic might would challenge much in the Indo-Pacific and the global South. It would create a new alternate to US and China on global leadership platforms while both the US and China would vie for its attention, alliance and market.
In the geopolitical scheme of things India’s tilt towards the US is obvious because despite its huge bilateral trade with China, it can’t trust the communist regime on the long and treacherous, disputed border, particularly after the bloody 2020 Galwan conflict.
In this entire context, let’s look at Pahalgam in South Kashmir. It is almost equidistant from both the disputed border with Pakistan on the west and the disputed border with China on the east. Both these borders are extremely militarized and the attack comes as a distraction and an instigator for India to take some drastic military step against Pakistan that has long sponsored terrorism inside Jammu and Kashmir while also calling it contested.
There was a similar attack in Kashmir’s Ganderbal district in October last year when terrorists killed seven Indian workers at a tunnel construction site at another popular tourism spot called Sonamarg. It also came with geopolitical messaging because the tunnel connects Kashmir region which shares a border with Pakistan, with Ladakh region which shares a de facto border with China.
The responsibility for that attack was taken by The Resistance Front (TRF), an offshoot of Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba. After this attack a statement was released by People’s Anti-Fascist Front (PAFF), a Pakistan terror outfit, which applauded TRF and called the terrorist operation “strategic” aimed at disrupting India’s army deployment on the eastern border, stating it was “against our military interests and those of our Chinese friends,” reported the Times of India. Tuesday’s Pahalgam attack was carried out by the same Resistance Front.
This time, the terrorists ascertained the Hindu identity of the tourists before killing them. When a woman told them to kill her after seeing her dead husband, they told her they are leaving her alive so that she can tell “Modi.”
Since first coming to power in 2014, the Modi government has made serious efforts at changing the Kashmir narrative from one of conflict and terrorism to one of development, peace and normalcy. In 2019, the government brought constitutional changes to abrogate Article 370 that gave special status to Jammu and Kashmir as a state within India and brought the region directly under federal rule.
From that day forth, the government has tried to come strict on terrorism modus-operandi, encouraged tourism, investment and industrialization in J&K and held elections for a legislature.
The Pahalgam attack was a fight back against this assertive narrative of the Modi government in Kashmir. India spends a minimum of $8,180 to $9,349 (7-8 lakhs) on each cordon and search operation (CASO) to neutralize terrorists inside Kashmir, according to a 2021 report published in The Epoch Times.
And every day there were around 50-60 CASOs in Kashmir in that period out of which only two to three were turning successful. Kashmir is a geopolitical theater that neither Pakistan nor China would want to resolve because a peaceful Kashmir would assert India’s rise and embolden its growth story.
(The Author is a MOFA 2025 Taiwan fellow with over two decades of journalistic experience including in Jammu and Kashmir)
