Jammu After Amarnath Terror Attack

The shock and horror of the Anantnag terror strike may also have brought in its wake a steely political resolve to turn back the clock in Kashmir

- Asit Jolly

Srinagar has turned sombre. The July 10 attack on a bus ferrying pilgrims back from the Amarnath shrine in Anantnag ominously signals that the new breed of militants in the Valley are intent on pushing boundaries that have long been held sacred amidst Kashmir’s syncretic Sufi traditions.

Dangerously pushing the ‘threshold of tolerance’ in the Valley, the incident, coming in the wake of the lynching of a police officer in Srinagar’s Jamia Masjid mosque, the disfigurement of six policemen at Achabal and the cold blooded murder of a young army officer while on leave, raises concerns on the efficacy of New Delhi’s muscular Kashmir policy as well as the Mehbooba Mufti government’s capacity to deliver on the ground.

Seven pilgrims from Gujarat and Maharashtra, six of them women, were killed in what is the fourth major terror attack targeting the sacred Hindu pilgrimage since 2000, the year the Jammu & Kashmir government handed over administration of the pilgrimage to the Shri Amarnathji Shrine Board, with the state governor as its chairman.

On August 1, 2000, Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) militants used hand grenades and Kalash nikov rifles to kill 27 people, including devotees, porters and police personnel, at a yatra base camp in Pahalgam. Thirteen more people were killed in a grenade attack en route to the shrine, at Sheshnag, on July 20 the following year. And in a repeat of the attack in 2000, eight pilgrims were gunned down in their sleep at the camp at Nunwan on August 6, 2002.