The Wailing Vale: The Inevitable Collapse of India’s Kashmir Policy

The veil of peace that enveloped the Vale of Kashmir was shredded permanently on April 22nd, 2025. At least twenty-six tourists were massacred and several others injured in the meadows of Pahalgam, Anantnag District, by The Resistance Front (TRF). An offshoot of Lashkar-e-Taiba, with suspected links to the Pakistani ISI, the terrorists were armed with automatic guns.

Illustration by The Geostrata

They identified their victims as Hindus before executing them in front of their families. One woman, left widowed by the violence, was spared with the statement, "I won’t kill you. Go tell this to Modi." 

It is rather evident, then, what the agenda of the terrorists was. The selection of Pahalgam, a town known for its tourist footfall, seems to be calculated to rupture the narrative of peace and economic progress following New Delhi’s post-2019 approach. As with earlier terror attacks, the intent has always been to generate fear through symbolism.

The TRF, under a fresh acronym but with an old agenda, is still performing from the same playbook. And like all performances, the audience matters, domestic and international. In the wake of this attack, it is no longer tenable to pretend that Kashmir has returned to ‘normalcy.’ The theatre may have changed, the rhetoric may have evolved, but violence remains an abject spectacle.  

Ever since the abrogation of Article 370, the Kashmiri economy has been in steadfast recovery, and the tourism industry is especially booming. The abrogation initially hit the Valley hard economically, but by 2025, it had largely recovered. Parallely, recorded data (refer to Figure 1) pointed towards a reduction in major terror attacks in Kashmir over the past years, even though the Indian Army conducted just as many operations to weed out terrorists.

Prime Minister Modi even advocated for Kashmir as a destination of significant tourist and pilgrimage value during the recent G20 events in India. Pahalgam was a locus of the tourism-led revival in the Valley. In attacking it, militants shattered the illusion that development equals peace. 

The timing was meticulously chosen to exploit geopolitical and domestic fault lines, and it is indeed reminiscent of the 2016 Uri attack’s timing post-Modi’s U.S. visit. It coincided with Modi’s Saudi visit and U.S. Vice President JD Vance’s India trip (April 20-23), ensuring that the attack was seen globally.

Pakistan’s chief of Army, General Asim Munir, on April 16th, stated that “ (The Pakistani) stance is absolutely clear, it was our jugular vein, it will be our jugular vein, we will not forget it. We will not leave our Kashmiri brothers in their heroic struggle.”

Facing a projected GDP growth rate of just around 2.7% in 2025 and ongoing security challenges from Baloch insurgents and the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), Pakistan seems to have recycled its earlier survival tactics of creating mass hysteria and spectacle via Kashmir. 

The massacre prompted immediate high-level responses. Prime Minister Narendra Modi cut short his Saudi Arabia visit on April 22, and returned to New Delhi on April 23, where he had an airport briefing with National Security Advisor Ajit Doval and External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar.  Home Minister Amit Shah travelled to Srinagar and met the aggrieved families of the victims.

That same evening, the PM chaired a 2.5-hour Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS). The decisions were taken to hold the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) in abeyance, close the Attari border, expel Pakistani military attaches, and reduce diplomatic staff. An all-party meeting was scheduled for April 24.

Meanwhile, the Pakistani response has been to suspend the 1971 Shimla Agreement, shut down its airspace to Indian airlines, and tighten its military posture. It has warned that suspending the IWT would be considered an act of war.

Globally, the condemnations have come swiftly. The United States decried the attack as a "heinous and cowardly act" and expressed solidarity with India.

The European Union, France, and Australia have been echoing the same sentiment. But beneath the condemnation lies an unspoken calculus of power: Pakistan remains too geopolitically convenient to alienate. For the United States, Pakistan is both a problem and a pressure valve in South Asia.

With Washington focused on countering China, Pakistan is the most plausible check in the neighborhood and also offers them some foothold in Afghanistan. For China, Pakistan is indispensable, it has been its all-weather ally, its economic partner, and its access route to the Arabian Sea. Beijing will not jeopardize the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor over an act of terror in Kashmir, no matter how gruesome. 

India’s stronger ties with the U.S. are real, but not unconditional. There are economic and military collaborations, as well as diplomatic alignments like the Quad. But the U.S. may not risk its leverage over Pakistan to side with India on Kashmir. Condemnation is free. Action comes with a cost. 

Meanwhile, the nature of warfare in the Himalayas itself has evolved. Traditional war with Pakistan, although it would be emotionally satisfying for a domestic audience seeking revenge, would be strategically wasteful. The nuclear shadow still looms over us, and the international community would intervene diplomatically within hours. Most crucially, defeating Pakistan on the battlefield won’t dismantle the jihadi networks embedded in its society.

What is far more likely is a targeted surgical strike. India has executed them before, post-Uri in 2016, post-Pulwama in 2019, and a strong precedent exists. A large-scale retaliatory strike on terror camps and infrastructure across the LoC is the likely next step. It would send a message. It would calm public outrage.

It would remind Islamabad again that it must bear the cost of proxy warfare. Additionally, security measures will ramp up in Kashmir, but this has historically led to the valley being fertile ground for even more insurgent jihadism. This, indeed, seems to be what Pakistan wants. For a nation that has never won a war against India, they’ve somehow benefited more than the victors through their losses. 

In this sense, the Pahalgam massacre has torn the scab off a much deeper wound: the ISI’s manipulations wanted to fuse the idea of Azadi in Kashmir with terrorism and jihad. And they have largely succeeded.   

Azadi, as it once existed, was a secular, political call for autonomy. It had roots in the Kashmiri identity, in the common Kashmiriyat of the residents of the valley. The people thought of their land as being bargained into either the Indian or Pakistani side.

The situation in Kashmir was complicated, and it did not exactly align with the communal lens that the British had donned to partition.

While the majority of the population was Muslim, the ruler, Maharaja Hari Singh, was Hindu. Jawaharlal Nehru, who would later become India's first Prime Minister, was also a Kashmiri Hindu, but he had stronger ties with the popular Sheikh Abdullah than Pakistan’s Jinnah. Post-accession, most Kashmiris asked for political independence. 

The idea of nationalism is intertwined with the idea of political dignity, and so is the case with Kashmir. However, in the 1980s, it took on an ugly communal turn. The Pakistani propaganda machinery and the political climate of the time convinced the Kashmiri Muslim that his political dignity was dependent on the political indignity of the Kashmiri Hindu, not only because he was Hindu but because he was Indian.

He needed to be evicted, for the idea of political freedom was not possible without it. This communal lens to Azadi was crystallised in the atrocities of the 1990s, with the planned genocide of the Kashmiri Pandits. Presently, Azadi has an inherently communal undertone, and so pants were pulled down in Baisaran and victims were made to recite the kalimah.

Image Credits: Rightful Owner

There are too many roads left unexplored when it comes to Kashmir, but India has chosen the imaginary one, riddled with potholes, crumbling bridges, and the delusions of the common Indian. India looks at Kashmir as a paradise lost and focuses only on the geopolitics of the matter.

Within Kashmir, it does not contemplate its own faults. India may believe that pretending all is well will help them sail over the Indus, but in reality, they’re only avoiding the truth. They’ve failed disastrously at de-communalization, failed to redefine Kashmiriyat so that it doesn’t point to terrorism, and failed to create any semblance of a counter-narrative. 

Action may be stronger than words, but propaganda is the strongest of them all. The only sustainable path forward for India is to reach the heart of the Kashmiri people, to invest in a political participatory machinery that truly resonates with them. Only through genuine engagement can there be any hope of reconciliation.

Wars may happen, strikes may occur. Water may be cut off, and maybe one day, even terror funding. But the damage has already been done. You cannot heal a wound by attacking the person who inflicted it, though you can stop him from stabbing you once more. What is needed to heal the wound is disinfectant, surgery, and time.

Until then, the blood-soaked Vale will weep.

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BY SAEE JOSHI

TEAM GEOSTRATA

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