War clouds are looming over nuclear-armed neighbours India and Pakistan, following last week’s terror attack in the disputed Jammu and Kashmir region, in which 26 tourists were killed.
The countries’ armies have continued to exchange small-arms fire along their de facto border in Kashmir, ending a ceasefire that had prevailed there since 2021.
The development comes amid escalating military tensions after the terror attack in Pahalgam on April 22nd that India claimed was backed by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISID).
A militant group called the Resistance Front initially claimed responsibility for the attack but later retracted the claim, saying it had been the victim of a “cyber intrusion”.
After the attack, India commenced mobilising its military and conducted several long-range precision missile firings over the weekend, describing the actions as military exercises.
Indian Air Force fighter squadrons rehearsed high-intensity strike operations across diverse landscapes, including Kashmir’s Himalayan terrain, while the Indian Navy began deploying several of its frontline assets, including its aircraft carrier, to the Arabian Sea near southern Pakistan’s Sindh province coastline. The Indian Army also conducted joint heliborne manoeuvres with the air force in mountainous territory.
News agencies reported corresponding deployments by Pakistan, which has denied any role in the Pahalgam terror attack. Its government has called for a “neutral, transparent and credible” investigation into the Pahalgam killings, a call India has rejected.
Simultaneously, India’s defence ministry has issued a fiat barring social and other media organisations from effecting live coverage of military operations and troop movements, claiming it could aid “hostile elements and compromise national security”.
Indian leaders, including prime minister Narendra Modi and senior security officials, say they are convinced of Islamabad’s complicity in the attack, based on “irrefutable” but undisclosed information.
Security officials said the Resistance Front was an offshoot of the UN-proscribed Lashkar-e-Taiba (Army of God) Islamist militant organisation, which has headquarters near the Pakistani city of Lahore, and whose ISID-backed cadres were responsible for the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks on two hotels, a cafe and a Jewish seminary in which 166 people died.
Unreservedly backed by MPs from his ruling Hindu nationalist Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) and those from the opposition, Modi declared that India was determined to “identify, track and punish each of the culpable terrorists and their backers” - a euphemism for Pakistan’s military and political establishment.
“We will pursue them to the ends of the earth and India’s spirit will never be broken by terrorism,” Modi declared at a public rally in eastern Bihar state last week, speaking uncharacteristically in English in a bid − said commentators − to convey India’s aggressive intent to the world.
In his monthly nationwide radio broadcast to the country, Modi further declared on Sunday that the “perpetrators and conspirators of this attack [in Kashmir]” would be served “the harshest response”.
The prime minister also received strong support for his stance on social media, as well as from television news channels, newspapers and military veterans, including former service chiefs of staff, all of whom have advocated rooting out the “terrorists’ sponsors” in Islamabad.
On the day after the Pahalgam attack, India retaliated by placing “in abeyance” the bilateral Indus Waters Treaty, a river water-sharing pact between the neighbours, brokered by the World Bank in 1960 after negotiations lasting a decade. Pakistan has described this move as an “act of war”.
India also called for a sharp reduction of staff at the respective high commissions in Delhi and Islamabad, withdrawal of defence attaches, closure of the only land border between the neighbours and expulsion of all Pakistani nationals.
Pakistan responded by threatening to suspend the Simla Agreement of 1972, signed after its third war with India since independence, closed its airspace to Indian flights and cut off all bilateral trade.
