‘Burst balloon': How Pahalgam attack shattered Modi's Kashmir narrative

Al Jazeera

28-04-2025

New Delhi, India — Addressing a rally of supporters in September 2024, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi confidently asserted that his Hindu majoritarian Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) would create a new Jammu and Kashmir, 'which would not only be terror-free but a heaven for tourists'.
Seven months later, that promise lies in tatters. On April 22, an armed group killed 25 tourists and a local pony rider in the resort town of Pahalgam in Indian-administered Kashmir, setting off an escalatory spiral in tensions between India and Pakistan, which New Delhi accuses of links to the attackers – a charge Islamabad has denied.
The armies of the two nuclear-armed neighbours have exchanged gunfire for three days in a row along their disputed border. India has suspended its participation in the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) that Pakistan counts on for its water security, and Islamabad has threatened to walk out of past peace deals. Both nations have also expelled each other's diplomats, military attaches and hundreds of civilians.
But India is simultaneously waging a battle on territory it controls. In Indian-administered Kashmir, security forces are blasting the homes of families of suspected armed fighters. They have raided the homes of hundreds of suspected rebel supporters and arrested more than 1,500 Kashmiris since the Pahalgam killings, the deadliest attack on tourists in a quarter of a century.
Yet, as Indian forces comb dense jungles and mountains to try to capture the attackers who are still free, international relations experts and Kashmir observers say the past week has revealed major chinks in Modi's Kashmir policy, which they say appears to be staring at a dead end.
The Pahalgam attack 'punctured the balloon of the 'New Kashmir' narrative', said Sumantra Bose, a political scientist whose work focuses on the intersection of nationalism and conflict in South Asia.In August 2019, the Modi government withdrew the semi-autonomous status of Indian-administered Kashmir without consultation with either the political opposition or Kashmiris. That special status had been a critical condition for Kashmir to join India following independence from the British in 1947.
The Modi government argued that successive governments had failed to truly integrate Jammu and Kashmir with the rest of India, and that the semi-autonomous status had played into the hands of secessionist forces that seek to break the region from India.
The abrogation of the constitutional provision that gave Kashmir its special status was accompanied by a major crackdown. Thousands of civilians were arrested, including leaders of mainstream political parties – even those that view Kashmir as a part of India. Phone and internet connections were shut off for months. Kashmir was cut off from the rest of the world.
Yet, the Modi government argued that the pain was temporary and needed to restore Kashmir to what multiple officials described as a state of 'normalcy'.
Since then, the arrests of civilians, including journalists, have continued. Borders of electoral constituencies were changed in a manner that saw Jammu, the Hindu-majority part of Jammu and Kashmir, gain greater political influence than the Muslim-majority Kashmir valley. Non-Kashmiris have been issued residency cards – which was not allowed before 2019 – to settle there, sparking fears that the Modi government might be attempting to change the region's demography.
And though the region held the first election to its provincial legislature in a decade in late 2024, the newly elected government of Chief Minister Omar Abdullah has been denied many of the powers other regional governments enjoy – with New Delhi, instead, making key decisions.
Amid all of that, the Modi government pushed tourism in Kashmir, pointing to a surge in visitors as evidence of the supposed normalcy that had returned to the return after four decades of armed resistance to Indian rule. In 2024, 3.5 million tourists visited Kashmir, comfortably the largest number in a decade, according to government figures.
But long before the Pahalgam attack, in May 2024, Abdullah – now, the chief minister of the region, then an opposition leader – had cautioned against suggesting that tourism numbers were reflective of peace and stability in Kashmir.
'The situation [in Kashmir] is not normal and talk less about tourism being an indicator of normalcy; when they link normalcy with tourism, they put tourists in danger,' Abdullah said in May last year. 'You are making the tourists a target.'
Al Jazeera reached out to Abdullah for a comment on the current crisis but has yet to receive a response.
On April 22, that Modi government narrative that Abdullah had warned about was precisely what left the meadows of Pahalgam splattered in blood, said Praveen Donthi, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group. 'New Delhi and its security agencies started buying their own assessment of peace and stability, and they became complacent, assuming that the militants will never attack tourists,' he said.
Until the Pahalgam attack, armed fighters had largely spared tourists in Kashmir, keeping in mind their importance to the region's economy, noted Donthi. 'But if pushed to the wall, all it takes is two men with guns to prove that Kashmir is not normal,' he said.
On April 8, just two weeks before the attack, Indian Minister of Home Affairs Amit Shah, who is widely seen as Modi's deputy, was in Srinagar, Kashmir's largest city, to chair a security review meeting. Abdullah, the chief minister, was not a part of the meeting – the most recent instance where he has been kept out of security reviews.
Analysts say this underscores that the Modi government views Kashmir's security challenges almost exclusively as an extension of its foreign policy tensions with Pakistan, not as an issue that might also need domestic input for New Delhi to tackle it successfully. India has long accused Pakistan of arming, training and financing the armed rebellion against its government in Indian-administered Kashmir. Pakistan claims it only offers moral and diplomatic support to the secessionist movement.
The Pahalgam attack has shone a light on the folly of the Modi administration's approach, Donthi said.
'Projecting this as a security crisis that is being fuelled entirely by Pakistan can make it useful politically, domestically, but it's not going to help you resolve the conflict,' he said.
'Unless the Indian government starts engaging with the Kashmiris, there can never be a durable solution to this violence.'
So far, though, there is little evidence that the Modi government is contemplating a shift in approach, which appears shaped 'to cater to domestic jingoism and hyper-nationalist rhetoric', Sheikh Showkat, a Kashmir-based political commentator, said.
The focus since the Pahalgam attack has been to punish Pakistan.
Since 1960, the IWT – the water-sharing agreement between India and Pakistan – survived three wars and has been widely hailed as an example of managing transnational waters.
Under the treaty, both countries get water from three rivers each, from the Indus Basin: three eastern rivers – the Ravi, Beas and Sutlej – to India, while three western rivers – the Indus, Jhelum and Chenab – carry 80 percent of water to Pakistan.
But the future of that pact is uncertain with India suspending its participation in the treaty after the Pahalgam attack. Pakistan has responded by warning that attempts to stop or divert water resources would amount to 'an act of war'. Islamabad has also warned that it might suspend its participation in all bilateral treaties, including the 1972 Simla Agreement, signed after their 1971 war, which in essence demarcates the Line of Control, the de-facto border, between them.
'Pakistan genuinely views this matter [the loss of water] in existential and even apocalyptic terms,' said Bose, the political scientist. 'India knows this – and it signals a policy of collective punishment towards Pakistan, which impacts tens of millions of people.'
However, experts have raised several questions about India's and Pakistan's announcements.
How can India practically stop water when it does not have the capacity to hold these powerful rivers? Can it divert water, risking flooding in its own territory? And if Pakistan walks away from the Simla Agreement, is it in effect signalling a state of war?
'All of these measures are juvenile, on both sides,' said Bose, but with 'concrete implications'.
For its part, India has been seeking to renegotiate the IWT for several years, claiming that it does not get its fair share of the water. 'The recent Kashmir crisis gives [New] Delhi an opportunity, a pretext to pull the trigger on the treaty,' said Showkat, the Kashmiri-based commentator.
Two days after the Pahalgam attack, Modi was touring Bihar, the eastern state due for elections later this year. Addressing an election rally, the prime minister said that he would chase the attackers 'to the end of the earth'.
To Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, a Modi biographer, such speeches are reflective of what he argues is the sole objective of Modi's Kashmir policy: 'maximising the core electoral constituency of the BJP in the rest of the country by being tough on Kashmir'.
Since independence, the BJP's ideological parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, has viewed Kashmir as an unfinished project: The RSS for decades called for the region's special status to be scrapped, and for a firm security-driven approach to the Muslim-majority region.
'Now, the only thing is, 'We want revenge',' said Mukhopadhyay, referring to the jingoism that currently dominates in India.
Since the attack, several Kashmiris have been beaten up across India, with landlords pushing out tenants and doctors turning away Muslim patients. Social media platforms are rife with inflammatory content targeting Muslims.
The International Crisis Group's Donthi said that the Pahalgam attack, in some ways, serves as 'a shot in the arm' for Modi's government. While the security challenges in Kashmir and the crisis with Pakistan represent strategic and geopolitical tests, 'domestically, it is a great position for the Modi government to be in'.
He said this was especially so with a weak opposition largely falling in line – the principal opposition Congress party has backed a muscular response to Pakistan for the attack.
However, Bose, the political scientist, argues that the Modi government was not focused on short-term political calculations. Modi's comments in Bihar, and the largely unchecked hate against Kashmiris and Muslims spreading across Indian social platforms and on TV channels, were reflective of the BJP's broader worldview on Kashmir, he said.
Kashmir is an ideological battle for Modi's party, he said, adding, 'This government is never going to change its Kashmir policy.'