Kashmir simmers but Pakistan's game has no winners

The big question that dominates discourse after the Pahalgam massacre is how India will retaliate

- AJAI SHUKLA

The Indian security establishment could hardly have received a more explicit warning of an impending terrorist strike in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) than from the lips of Pakistan's new army chief, General Asim Munir. Five days before the attack, while addressing a conclave of Overseas Pakistanis in Islamabad on Wednesday, General Munir had pledged that Pakistan would continue to stand by the Kashmiri people in what he called their "struggle against Indian occupation." "It was our jugular vein, it is our jugular vein, we will not forget it," Munir said. Congress Party Member of Parliament Kapil Sibal cited Munir's 'jugular vein' statement as clear evidence that the attack was state-sponsored.

In the indiscriminate murders at Pahalgam, at least 26 tourists were shot to death by a jihadist death squad in the Baisan meadow in South Kashmir. In chilling accounts of that incident, six heavily armed foreign terrorists, clad in army-style fatigues, emerged from the forest around the sunlit meadow before starting off their gruesome killing.

Identifying tourists as Hindu or Muslim by asking their names, or demanding that they recite verses from the Quran, non-Muslims were pulled aside and shot to death. The massacre had a clear communal motive, even though one local Muslim was killed too.