History keeps score. In 1972 the Black September killers walked out of Munich because sovereign immunity hand-cuffed Europe. In 2025 TRF gunmen walked into Pahalgam confident the world would again outsource outrage to hashtags. They are half-right; we grieve, we tweet, and we move on. But Kashmir is no longer a remote valley; it is the litmus test of global resolve against state-sponsored terror.
Pakistan’s duplicity is an open dossier. FATF grey-listing (2018-22) barely dented its war-chest because petrodollars kept the financial arteries open. Arun Shourie labelled this “strategic mendicancy”milking Western fears of a failing nuclear state while fertilising jihad.¹ The Pahalgam attack proves the scam endures: Belgian rifles cost money, satellite phones need airtime, and a month’s training in PoK runs about USD 5,000 per recruit. That cash did not fall from Himalayan pine trees.
International law is clear. Article 2(4) of the UN Charter forbids the use of force “by or on behalf of” a state. When Rawalpindi arms TRF, it violates jus cogens norms and renders itself liable to counter-measures. Precedent exists: the U.S. “secondary sanctions” regime broke Iran’s banking spine without a single Marine crossing the Shatt-al-Arab. Why should Pakistan enjoy immunity?
Diplomats will protest: Pakistan is “too nuclear to fail.” Yet deterrence cuts both ways. As Efraim Karsh has shown in his study of Middle Eastern coercion, regimes that monetise brinkmanship respond only when the purse strings tighten.³ Sanctions targeted at the ISI’s commercial front companies-Shaheen Foundation, Fauji Cement, Bahria Town-would raise the cost of jihad without impoverishing Pakistani civilians. India should lobby Washington and Brussels for a TRF-ISI Sanctions Act, mirroring the U.S. Katz-Magnitsky tool kit.
Narrative control is equally vital. Within hours of the massacre, think-tankers in London were already blaming “Hindu majoritarian policies.” This false equivalence insults the dead and launders the killer’s manifesto. As historian R.C. Majumdar insisted, “facts must be allowed to ruin theory.” Fact: unarmed tourists, including Muslims from Hyderabad, were shot for refusing a doctrinal password. Fact: the killers broadcast a video pledging allegiance to Lashkar’s emir. Any analysis omitting these axioms is propaganda.
The United Nations finally has a chance to justify its rent. India should invoke Articles 6 and 7 of the Charter to demand suspension of Pakistan’s voting rights until it dismantles PoK camps under international verification. Israel lost committee seats for far less. If Beijing vetoes, let the free world build a Coalition for Counter-Proxy Terror-Quad 2.0-with automatic asset freezes on entities linked to TRF.
Domestically, New Delhi must internationalise grief. Host the families of slain Emirati and Nepali tourists in Srinagar; let their testimonies tour European parliaments. Shashi Tharoor once quipped that “colonialism ended when its moral cost exceeded its economic benefit.” Apply the same calculus to Pakistan: raise the moral cost until petrodollar benefactors decide the jihad franchise is no longer worth underwriting.
There is a final, starker incentive. The Sharada Peeth corridor project, once envisioned as a peace gesture, must now be frozen. No pilgrim trail while pilgrim blood stains the grass of Baisaran. Diplomacy without conditionality is décor. Conditionality without enforcement is theatre. Pahalgam calls for neither décor nor theatre; it calls for economic asphyxiation of terror’s patron state.
Munich taught us hostage crises metastasise when sponsors walk free. Pahalgam, more brutal, teaches that tourists can be gunned down for the sacrilege of vacationing under a Tricolour. Enough. Close the purse, choke the proxy, sanction the sponsor—before the next meadow turns red.
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