India has closed a key land border with Pakistan, cancelled a water-sharing treaty and barred Pakistan’s citizens from entering under a visa exemption scheme after Tuesday’s attack by Islamic militants in Kashmir that killed 26 tourists.
India’s defence minister, Rajnath Singh, said those who carried out and planned the Kashmir region’s worst attack on civilians in years, including those “behind the scenes”, would see a swift response.
Announcing the downgrading of relations with Pakistan, the Indian foreign secretary, Vikram Misri, told a media briefing that cross-border connections to the attack had been “brought out” at a special meeting of the security cabinet, after which it was decided to act.
Misri said India was suspending the Indus water treaty “until Pakistan credibly and irrevocably abjures its support for cross-border terrorism”. Pakistan has denied involvement in the attack and said its prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, would chair a national security committee meeting on Thursday to respond.
Indian security forces fanned out across the Himalayan region of Kashmir on Wednesday as the army and police launched a massive manhunt for the perpetrators of the attack on Tuesday that killed at least 26 tourists, all men.
Amid rapidly rising tensions in the region, which has been riven by militant violence since the start of an anti-Indian insurgency in 1989, survivors said the militants had asked men they had rounded up to recite Islamic verses before executing those who couldn’t.
Asavari Jagdale, from India’s western state of Maharashtra, who lost her father and uncle in the attack, told local media that she and her family hid inside a nearby tent along with other tourists when the shooting started.
When the militants reached their tent, Asavari said, they asked her father, Santosh Jagdale, to come out and recite an Islamic verse. “When he failed to do so, they pumped three bullets into him, one on the head, one behind the ear and another in the back,” she said. “My uncle was next to me. The terrorists fired four to five bullets into him.”
Debasish Bhattacharyya, a Hindu who teaches at Assam University and who grew up in a Muslim neighbourhood in the state, told Reuters he had been spared because he was familiar with Islamic verses.
The militants ordered him and those nearby on to their knees and when the others started chanting the verses, he followed along.
“I knew the words and at that moment it was probably the only way to save our lives. Those who failed were killed,” he said, adding that they fled when the gunmen left, and trekked through a forest for two hours.
A little-known militant group, the Kashmir Resistance, claimed responsibility for the attack. Posting on social media, it expressed discontent that more than 85,000 “outsiders” had been settled in the region, spurring a “demographic change”.
The attack, reportedly involving four gunmen, took place in a meadow in the Pahalgam area of the scenic Himalayan federal territory. The dead were 25 Indians and one Nepalese national. It was the worst attack on civilians in India since the 2008 Mumbai shootings.
The prime minister, Narendra Modi, cut short a two-day visit to Saudi Arabia and returned to Delhi on Wednesday morning. He held a meeting with his national security adviser, the foreign minister and other senior officials at the airport, and a special security cabinet meeting was called for later on Wednesday.
The incident is being viewed as a major escalation in the regional conflict, in which attacks targeting tourists have been rare. The last deadly attack took place in June 2024 when at least nine people were killed and 33 injured after militants caused a bus carrying Hindu pilgrims to plunge into a deep gorge.
The Kashmir Resistance claimed those attacked on Tuesday “were not ordinary tourists; instead, they were linked to and affiliated with Indian security agencies”.
The attack prompted an immediate exodus of tourists from the region, with airlines operating extra flights from Srinagar, the summer capital of the territory. Local television showed tourists carrying their bags to taxis and filing out of a hotel in Srinagar.
“How can we continue our trip in such a situation?” Sameer Bhardwaj, a tourist from Delhi, said to the news agency ANI. “We need to prioritise our safety. We can only travel if our minds are relaxed but everyone is tense here. So we cannot continue to travel.”
Gulzar Ahmad, a taxi driver in Pahalgam, said: “This attack will impact our work but we are more concerned about the loss of lives. No matter what we do in the future, our tourism industry has been stained by this attack. The perpetrators must receive exemplary punishment so that no one dares to commit such an act again.”
The attack occurred during a four-day visit to India by the US vice-president, JD Vance, who called it a “devastating terrorist attack”.
Omar Abdullah, the region’s top elected official, posted on social media: “It’s heartbreaking to see the exodus of our guests from the [Kashmir] valley after yesterday’s tragic terror attack in Pahalgam. But at the same time, we totally understand why people would want to leave.”
There has been an increase in the number of targeted killings of Hindus, including migrant workers from other Indian states, in the disputed Himalayan region since Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party government unilaterally revoked Kashmir’s limited autonomy in 2019 by imposing a communication blockade and jailing activists and political leaders.
It split the state into two federally administered territories – Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh – and allowed local authorities to issue domicile certificates to outsiders, enabling them to apply for jobs and buy land. Since then, civil liberties and media freedom in the region have been severely curtailed.
Pakistan’s foreign office spokesperson, Shafqat Khan, issued a statement saying Pakistan was “concerned about the loss of tourists’ lives in the attack”, and extended condolences to the victims.
