The rabid speech of Pakistan army chief General Syed Asim Munir on April 16 may have been the green signal for The Resistance Front, a proxy of the Pakistan-based terrorist outfit Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), to massacre tourists at Pahalgam. With Munir reiterating that Kashmir was the jugular vein of Pakistan and the unfinished agenda of Partition, the terrorists struck to demolish the normalcy restored in the Kashmir Valley post abrogation of Article 370 in 2019.

The plan was to weaken the Union government’s argument about a return to normalcy, stall the huge flow of tourists, and keep the Kashmiris economically deprived, disgruntled, and frustrated. The place of massacre was chosen after reconnaissance to ensure that the terrorists could cross over to Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), thus ensuring total deniability for their handlers in Rawalpindi. At a time when India’s Parliament had passed the Waqf Amendment Act, the terrorists deliberately targeted Hindu tourists after segregating them (24 of those killed were Hindus) in a bid to polarise people on religious lines. The Pahalgam attack was designed to restore the popularity of Munir and his army in Pakistan, which was in decline after a series of reverses in Balochistan and skirmishes with the Taliban over the recognition of the Durand Line as the international border with Afghanistan. It was expected that India’s diplomatic and military retaliation would be limited to a firefight including artillery duels across the Line of Control (LoC) in Kashmir. Rawalpindi did not expect that India would respond in Punjab and........

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