Sushant Singh
On April 24, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi stood before a crowd in the northern state of Bihar and, in a rare shift from his usual Hindi, delivered a warning in English: “India will identify and punish every terrorist and their backers. We will pursue them to the ends of the earth. India’s spirit will never be broken by terrorism. Terrorism will not go unpunished.” The message, spoken just two days after the deadliest attack on civilians in Indian-administered Kashmir in over two decades, was not just for domestic consumption or for Pakistan, which New Delhi blames for the attack; it was a signal to the world that India was preparing a forceful military response.
Kashmir is now once again one of the world’s riskiest flash points. It is not yet clear which group was responsible for the April 22 attack, which killed 26 tourists in Pahalgam, a scenic hill station in Kashmir, but the atrocity has brought India to a sadly familiar juncture. Previous episodes of terrorist violence in Kashmir have led India to strike its neighbor Pakistan, which Indian officials insist is the source of the militancy that still plagues the disputed territory. Modi’s rhetoric this month echoes the speeches he made in 2019 before Indian jets struck Pakistan after a suicide car bomb in Kashmir killed 40 Indian paramilitary soldiers. That year, Pakistan hit back, downing an Indian fighter jet and capturing its pilot, and the two nuclear-armed countries neared the precipice of a widening conflict.
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