On the morning of April 22, 2025 the alpine meadow of Baisaran was turned into an abattoir. Four to six gunmen of The Resistance Front-an off-shoot of Lashkar-e-Taiba-herded tourists together, demanded they recite the shahāda, then opened fire when voices faltered. The choice was simple: accept Islam or die. Twenty-six lay dead, two dozen more writhed in blood. The choreography of selection-and-slaughter echoed the Islamist pogroms that emptied the Valley of its Pandits in 1990: identity first, extermination next.
The killers did not improvise. Surveillance drones mapped tourist movement days in advance; Belgian FN-SCAR rifles and Chinese-made QBZ-95 carbines arrived across the Pir Panjal drug corridor; handlers in Muzaffarabad relayed real-time coordinates. Nearly 60 percent of neutralised militants this year carry Pakistani citizenship—statistical proof, not diplomatic rhetoric. As KS Lal observed while tallying the medieval demographic toll of jihād, “numbers have consequence; ideology supplies the warrant, but demography delivers the blow.”⁴
Islamabad’s strategy is older than the LoC. In 1947 it armed the laškars; in 1989 it laundered dollars through the Afghan jihad pipeline; in 2025 it outsources murder to plausibly deniable cut-outs like TRF. Brahma Chellaney calls this a “hydraulic system”: each time international pressure blocks Jaish-e-Mohammad, the water merely finds another channel. Pahalgam proves the hydraulics still function.
The Kinetic-x counter-terror grid has thinned infiltration by 27 percent since 2021, yet soft tourist circuits stay porous. Sita Ram Goel warned that “democratic states which romanticise non-violence are too slow to read the grammar of jihad. Precisely so: Call-centre helplines were activated in Delhi while the guns still barked in Baisaran.
The larger war is epistemic. In seminar rooms from Columbia to Jawaharlal Nehru University, the massacre will be reframed as “sub-altern rage against settler-colonialism.” Shrikant Talageri’s reminder that Islam arrived with the sword, not the Silk Road, will be air-brushed as “communal. Human-rights industry press-releases will list “root causes”-never the creed that sanctifies killing an unarmed kafir.
What, then, constitutes proportionate retaliation? First, freeze all cross-LoC trade until Rawalpindi hands over TRF commanders; economic chokepoints bite where dossiers do not. Second, expand the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act to criminalise lobbying for terror proxies on Indian soil. Third, dismantle digital-hawala rails; every rupee that slips through Binance or Tether tightens a Kalashnikov’s trigger. Finally, tell the Valley’s politicians the GoI will fund tourism reconstruction only in districts that meet an annual benchmark of terror-free days-linking livelihoods to local vigilance.
In The Calcutta Qur’an Petition Goel wrote, “No civilisation survives by ignoring the doctrines that animate its enemies.”⁸ Pahalgam is Kashmir’s grisliest reminder that doctrines kill. The meadow where tourists once rode ponies now carries the stench of cordite and coagulated faith. Unless India and its allies treat Pakistan’s proxy war as an act of interstate aggression—with the punitive architecture such aggression merits—the Valley will keep harvesting bodies for prime-time ticker tapes. Memory must therefore become policy: remember Baisaran, and legislate as though memory burns.
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