The Pahalgam Massacre: From Tragedy To Resolution – Analysis

The barbaric slaughter at the Baisaran Maidan near Pahalgam in the Kashmir Valley on April 22, 2025, has left India with one core question – how must the nation respond? It is abundantly clear that the response must be harsh, but that alone cannot suffice. India’s response must create enduring deterrents and must address the persistent challenge of Pakistan-backed terrorism that has caused so much harm in Jammu & Kashmir (J&K), in particular, and substantial harm across the rest of the country as well.

An effective response is possible only against the backdrop of great strategic clarity on the part of the national leadership, as well as of those who will be tasked to design and execute the plans and policies to realize the country’s objectives. Crucially, no truly successful response can be devised in an environment of incoherence, hysteria or muddled goals. Unfortunately, this, precisely, is the environment that not only prevails, but appears to have been intentionally orchestrated.

The recurrent memes, the common language and patterns of argument evident in much of the public discourse – and particularly on channels and media that are known to be close to the present regime in New Delhi – coinciding as they do with the language of the political leadership, suggest a coordinated effort to create a milieu that pushes for a quick and theatrical response – one that serve to slake the emotional demands for immediate, visible and violent reprisal. Such a response would certainly serve the partisan political interests of the current regime – but it is unlikely to serve national interests.

It is useful to examine the principal streams of distortion that dominate the present discourse, and that could push national responses in a direction that is likely to be unproductive, or possibly even counter-productive.

One of the central and astonishing elements of the orchestrated frenzy in the media is the nonsense purveyed on General Asim Munir’s speech to overseas Pakistanis on April 16, 2025 – most commentators, with rare unison, prefer the descriptive ‘rant’. It is difficult to believe that any of these impassioned observers has, in fact, seen and heard the speech – which is now being projected as the unique provocation or signal for the terrorists to engineer the Pahalgam massacre. In all this, one would be led to believe that terrorism in J&K commenced after Munir took over as Pakistan’s chief of Army Staff, or even, perhaps, on April 22, 2025, with the massacre at Baisaran Maidan. The most significant point commentators have picked up is Munir’s use of the old trope, that Kashmir is, and will remain, Pakistan’s jugular vein, and that lasting peace was impossible without a solution to the Kashmir issue. This, it has been widely argued, was the direct provocation for the Baisaran Maidan attack. Memories are, of course, notoriously short, but is it, in fact, possible to forget that these phrases have been around for decades, and that Munir is merely parroting what he has been handed down by a succession of his predecessors? That General Pervez Musharraf, something of a media darling in India, used the phrase repeatedly?

Others have been horrified by the fact that Munir quotes the Qur’an in his speech – incontrovertible evidence, in their eyes, that he is an Islamist fanatic – and conclude that he, uniquely, is the source of every act of terrorism in J&K. Still others have successfully read Munir’s mind, to expose to the more innocent among us, the motives and vision of this evil monster, provoking at least some commentators to suggest that India should ‘bump off a few Generals’ and wilder elements on social media arguing that Munir should be one of these.

Any sense that Munir is the core of the problem of terrorism is a distortion of reality. It has been noted that Munir was the Director General of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) at the time of the Pulwama attack, which killed 40 Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel in February 2019 – and provoked the Balakot air strike. But the Army Chief at that time was General Qamar Javed Bajwa, who thought to have adopted a ‘soft’ approach to India and the Kashmir issue.

What is missed in these various commentaries is the fact that the ‘core issue’ of Kashmir is now an idea unique to Munir, or to any particular generals who preceded him. It is the core of the very ideology of Pakistan, and an objective shared by every single Army Chief in Pakistan, as well as by most, if not all, political leaders. Significantly, there have been nine Chiefs of Army Staff in Pakistan since 1988, when the current jihad in J&K commenced, and every one of them as remained committed to the ‘core issue’ of annexing Kashmir. Terrorism has escalated or declined over the intervening years, but this has been a function of a range of other factors – the international tolerance of terrorism, Pakistan’s opportunistic alliances with America and the West, Pakistan’s internal strengths and vulnerabilities, among others – but the dedication to the ‘Kashmir cause’ has never flagged, even, as at present, in Pakistan’s darkest moments. Munir, consequently, is not an oddity, he reflects the enduring strategic aims of the Pakistan Army, and its instrumentalization of Islamist terrorism as their principal instrumentality. This is not the idiosyncratic project of a fanatical ‘Mullah General’; it was shared equally by the succession of westernized, whiskey bibbing Generals as well, and will be enthusiastically inherited by Munir’s successors. A failure to recognize this reality will distort the spectrum of strategies and tactics that are being considered in response to the Pahalgam massacre.

The dominant discourse in India is distorting the policy spectrum in many other ways as well, displaying levels of stupidity, of ignorance and of conformity to which the entire system has been reduced. It must be emphasised that those who engage in the echo chambers reflecting partisan political interests, disgrace themselves, dishonour the dead, and betray the national interest with their falsehoods and their willingness to become propaganda tools. Among these are the impatient, who demand immediate and visible retribution – including open warfare or ‘surgical strikes’ across the border – with little concern for costs or for any real strategic gains or the lack thereof. As one eminent talking head expressed it, “Action is required. It is now or never.” There is also the distortion of reality that pushes the falsehood of a growing an unprecedented crisis in J&K, the idea, for instance, that this was the first time that Hindus had been singled out and selectively murdered in J&K. The truth is, the jihad in J&K started 35 years ago with the targeted killing of Hindus, and this remained a continuing trend throughout the terrorism of the past decades. Another ‘expert’ argued, contra-factually, that rising terrorism in J&K was part of a trend of ‘rising terrorism’ across the world, while the reality is that global terrorism peaked in 2014-15, and has since been in broad decline – though 2023-24 saw some upward movement, principally as a result of Hamas inflicted fatalities in Israel. There are also continuous and insidious attempts to communalize the issue, or to push the blame onto the Valley leadership and population. One eminent expert thus blamed tensions between the elected Union Territory government and the Centre for the gaps in security – when the reality is, security is entirely in the charge of the Centre, through the Lieutenant Governor.

The incoherence of this discourse eclipses the overwhelming reality of the ground – that, in the protracted conflict with Pakistan in J&K – India is the victor. The tragedy of the thousands of lives lost notwithstanding, it is Pakistan that is staring into an abyss. Pakistan’s strategists threatened to balkanize India; their country, today, is itself on the threshold of balkanization. They believed they could bleed India with a thousand cuts; multiple insurgencies, internal political strife, and ethnic and sectarian conflicts are bleeding Pakistan on a daily basis. They thought they could disrupt and collapse India’s economy; it is their own economy that is teetering on the edge of collapse. It was noted, more than two decades ago, “From a geo-strategic perspective, as far as India is concerned, Kashmir is a holding operation, even in the absence of an effective competitive strategy. If India holds on to Kashmir for another fifteen or twenty years, Pakistan will destroy itself, even without India doing anything substantial to secure this end.”

It is useful to note that terrorism in J&K has collapsed from a peak of 4,011 fatalities in a single year, 2001, to 127 fatalities in 2024. Domestic recruitment is minuscule, and foreign (Pakistani) infiltration has been reduced to a tiny trickle. .

It is not ‘now or never’ for India. The imperative is to frame a response within a protracted conflict paradigm that would ‘erode the strengths and exploit the vulnerabilities’ of the target system. Every instrumentality of unrestricted warfare needs to be systematically exploited to this end, within a timeframe, not of weeks or months, but of years and decades. The problem is not a particular act of terrorism; it is the Pakistani state, the ideology that underpins it, and the strategic framework that has positioned it in relentless enmity with India.

Childish impatience and partisan political calculations must not define the national response to the Pahalgam massacre. The lawless demolition of properties of the families of terrorists may feed a sense of schadenfreude within a certain political constituency, but it brings odium to India and undermines the rule of law. A flash in the pan ‘retaliation’, however theatrical, may, again, appease India’s worst political constituency, but it would fail to address the real challenge. Only a comprehensive, sustained strategy that brings all instruments of state power into play against Pakistan will yield the real and enduring victory that the Indian state and nation need.