New Delhi, India – Speaking to a rally of supporters in September 2024, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi confidently insisted that his Hindu majority Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) would create new Junmu and Kashmir.
Seven months later, the promise is in ruins. On April 22, an armed group killed 25 tourists and local pony riders in the Indian-controlled Kashmir resort town Pahargam, causing an escalator spiral of tensions between India and Pakistan.
The army of two nuclear-armed neighbors exchanged gunfights for three consecutive days along the conflicted border. India has suspended participation in the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT), which Pakistan hopes for water safety, and Islamabad is threatening to escape from past peace deals. Both countries expelled each other’s diplomats, military obsessions, and hundreds of civilians.
But India is also fighting in the territory it controls. In India-controlled Kashmir, security forces are blowing up the homes of armed fighter families. They stormed the homes of hundreds of rebel supporters and arrested more than 1,500 Kashmiris since the murder of Pahargam.
However, as Indian troops combine dense jungles and mountains to capture still free attackers, international relations experts and Kashmir observers say last week revealed a major winding of Modi’s Kashmir policy.
Pahargam’s attacks “punctured” balloons from the “new Kashmir” story, said Sumantra Bose, a political scientist who focused on the intersection of South Asian nationalism and conflict.
“Targeting tourists”
In August 2019, the Modi government retracted the semi-autonomous position of India-controlled Kashmir without consulting with either political opposition or Kashmiris. Its special status was an important condition for Kashmir to join India after its independence from the UK in 1947.
The Modi government argued that successive governments failed to truly integrate Jammu and Kashmir with the rest of India, and that their semi-autonomous positions have fallen into the hands of separatists trying to destroy the region from India.
The abolition of the constitutional provisions that gave Kashmir special status was accompanied by a great crackdown. Thousands of civilians have been arrested, including leaders of mainstream political parties. Even those who consider Kashmir to be part of India. Phone and internet connections were cut off for several months. Kashmir has been separated from other parts of the world.
However, the Modi government argued that the pain was temporary and necessary to restore Kashmir to what he described as a state of “normality.”
Since then, the arrests of civilians, including journalists, have continued. The boundaries of electoral districts have been changed in the way that Jammu, the Hindu majority in Jammu and Kashmir, saw greater political influence than the majority of Muslim Kashmir Valley. Non-Kasimiris is issuing residency cards that were not permitted by 2019, and fears that the Modi government is trying to change the demographics of the region.
And while the region held its first elections for the state assembly in 10 years in the second half of 2024, the government of newly elected Prime Minister Omar Abdullah has been denied the many powers that other local governments enjoy. Instead, make important decisions.
In all of that, the Modi government promoted tourism in Kashmir and pointed to a surge in visitors as evidence of the supposed normality that returned to return after 40 years of armed resistance to Indian rule. According to government figures, 3.5 million tourists visited Kashmir in 2024.
But long before the Pahargam attack in May 2024, Abdullah, the then opposition leader, who was now the prime minister of the region, warned against suggesting that tourism numbers reflect peace and stability in Kashmir.
“situation [in Kashmir] It’s not normal and I don’t talk much about tourism being an indicator of normalcy. When they link normalcy with tourism, they put tourists at risk,” Abdullah said last May. “You’re targeting tourists.”
Al Jazeera contacted Abdullah to comment on the current crisis, but has not yet received a response.
The Modi government story that Abdullah warned on April 22nd is exactly the blood-splattering of Pahargam pastures, said Praven Doti, senior analyst at International Crisis Group. “New Delhi and its security agencies began to buy their own assessments of peace and stability, and assuming that extremists would never attack tourists, they were satisfied,” he said.
Until Pahargam attacked, the armed fighters were greatly spared Kashmir tourists, Donsi noted, with their importance in mind to the region’s economy. “But if they’re pushed into the wall, they’re only two men with guns to prove that Kashmir is not normal,” he said.
Dealing with Pakistan and dealing with Kashmir
On April 8, just two weeks before the attack, India’s Home Minister Amit Shah, widely seen as Modi’s representative, was in Srinagar, Kashmir’s largest city, and chaired the Security Review Conference. The Prime Minister, Abdullah, was not part of the meeting. This is the latest case of him being locked out of security reviews.
Analysts say this highlights the Modi government views Kashmir’s security challenges almost exclusively as an extension of foreign policy tensions with Pakistan. India has long accused Pakistan of armed, training and funding armed rebellions against the government in India-controlled Kashmir. Pakistan argues that it only provides moral and diplomatic support for the separatist movement.
The Pahargam attacks shed light on the stupidity of the Modi government’s approach, Don said.
“Projecting this as a fully fueled security crisis by Pakistan can make it politically useful domestically, but it does not help resolve the conflict,” he said.
“Unless the Indian government begins to engage with Kashmiris, there is never a durable solution to this violence.”
But so far there is little evidence that Modi government is considering a change in its approach that appears to have been shaped “to respond to domestic jingoism and hypernationalist rhetoric,” said Kashmir-based political commentator Sheikh Shokat.
The focus since the attack on Pahargam was to punish Pakistan.
Since 1960, the IWT (Water Value Agreement between India and Pakistan) has been widely welcomed as an example of surviving three wars and managing the oceans across borders.
Under the treaty, the two countries each consume water from three rivers. From the Indus Basin to the three eastern rivers of Rabbi, Beads and Satorej, to India, three western rivers (Indus, Jeram and Chenab) carry 80% of the water to Pakistan.
However, the future of the agreement is uncertain and India has halted participation in the treaty following the attack on Pahargam. Pakistan responded with warning that attempts to halt or divert water resources amounted to “acts of war.” Islamabad also warns that participation in all bilateral treaties, including the 1971 Shimla Agreement, could be suspended.
“Pakistan is really looking at this issue [the loss of water] Political scientist Bose said, “I know this – and it shows a policy of collective punishment against Pakistan.
However, experts raised several questions about the announcements in India and Pakistan.
How can India actually stop the water if it doesn’t have the ability to hold these powerful rivers? Can it divert water and put floods at risk on its own territory? And if Pakistan is away from the Shimra Accord, does it effectively indicate a state of war?
“All of these measures are boys on both sides,” Bose said, but with “specific meaning.”
India has been trying to renegotiate the IWT for several years and claims it has not gotten a significant proportion of the water. “The recent crisis in Kashmir has been causing [New] Shokat, a Kashmir-based commentator, said:
Will Modi change his Kashmiri approach?
Two days after the attack on Pahargam, Modi was touring Bihar in the eastern state, which is scheduled for election later this year. In response to election rallying, the Prime Minister said he would chase the attackers “to the end of the earth.”
For Modi’s biographer Niranjan Mukopadyay, such a speech reflects what he argues and claims it is the sole purpose of Modi’s Kashmir policy.
Since independence, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the parent of the BJP ideology, sees Kashmir as an unfinished project. For decades, they have been asked to discard the region’s special status and have called for a robust security-driven approach to Muslim big names.
“The only thing now is, ‘We want revenge’,” Mukopadyai said, referring to Jingoism, which currently controls India.
Since the attack, several Kashmiris have been beaten all over India, with landlords pushing tenants away and doctors chasing Muslim patients. Social media platforms are full of inflammatory content targeting Muslims.
Donthi of International Crisis Group said that Pahalgam’s attacks would in some ways serve as a “arm shot” for Modi’s government. The security challenges in Kashmir and the Pakistan crisis represent strategic and geopolitical tests, but “at home, it is a great position for the Modi government to take part.”
He said this is especially true of weak opposition, which are largely lined up.
However, political scientist Bose argues that the Modi government is not focusing on short-term political calculations. Modi’s comments in Bihar and the largely unconfirmed hatred of Kashmiris and Muslims across India’s social platforms, he said, reflected the BJP’s wider worldview regarding Kashmir.
Kashmir is an ideological battle for Modi’s party, he said, adding, “This government will never change Kashmir’s policies.”
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