India has announced a raft of measures downgrading its ties to Pakistan, days after gunmen killed 26 people in the tourist town of Pahalgam in the disputed region Kashmir.
India’s Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri told a media briefing on Wednesday that cross-border linkages of the April 22 attack in Indian-administered Kashmir had been “brought out” and that the government had decided to act against Pakistan.
He said India would immediately shut its main land border crossing with Pakistan and suspend a water treaty that allows for sharing the waters of the Indus river system between the two countries.
He also said Pakistani nationals would no longer be able to travel to India under the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) visa exemption programme.
On Thursday, India’s Ministry of External Affairs followed up by declaring that all Pakistani nationals’ visas were being revoked, and that no new visas would be issued. Existing visas would expire on April 27, it said, while medical visas would become void after April 29.
“All Pakistani nationals currently in India must leave India before the expiry of visas, as now amended,” said the ministry, which also advised all Indian nationals to avoid travel to Pakistan.
In a further slight, Misri said India was declaring defence advisers in the Pakistani high commission in New Delhi persona non grata and reducing the numbers of its own high commission in Islamabad to 30 from 55.
In response, the office of Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif announced its own retaliatory measures against India, including the closure of airspace to all Indian-owned or operated airlines and the suspension of visas to Indian nationals under the SAARC programme.
The office objected to India’s move to suspend the Indus waters treaty, warning that Pakistan would consider any attempt to divert water as an act of war
It claimed there is no evidence linking Pakistan to the Pahalgam attack and urged India to “take full responsibility for its failure to provide security to the people”.
Modi vows to ‘identify, track, punish’ attackers
A little-known group, the Resistance Front (TRF) claimed responsibility for the attack in a social media message, in which it expressed discontent that more than 85,000 “outsiders” had been settled in the region, spurring what it called a “demographic change”.
Indian police have since issued wanted notices for two Pakistanis and one Indian suspected of being involved. The attack’s victims include 25 Indians and one Nepalese national killed and at least 17 others wounded.
Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry has expressed concern about the loss of tourists’ lives in Indian-administered Kashmir and extended condolences to the loved ones of those killed and injured.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi cut short his two-day visit to Saudi Arabia and returned to the capital early on Wednesday. He decried the attack as a “heinous act” and pledged to pursue the attackers “to the ends of the earth”.
“I say to the whole world: India will identify, track and punish every terrorist and their backer,” Modi said on Thursday.
India’s Defence Minister Rajnath Singh said that India would not “just reach those people who carried out the attack” but also “those who planned this from behind the scenes on our land.”
Tourists flee
Kashmir has seen a spate of deadly attacks, including against migrant workers from Indian states, since New Delhi ended the region’s semi-autonomous status in 2019 and drastically curbed dissent, civil liberties and media freedoms.
Tuesday’s attack was a setback for Modi’s government, which has repeatedly made claims of “normalcy” in Kashmir since the region’s semi-autonomous status was revoked. New Delhi has vigorously pushed tourism and the region has drawn millions of visitors to its Himalayan foothills and exquisitely decorated houseboats.
Ajai Sahni, executive director of South Asia Terrorism Portal, a platform that tracks and analyses armed attacks in South Asia, said “zero militancy in Kashmir is an impossible objective to realise, at least in the absence of a political solution within the state”.
“The normalcy narrative creates a situation where groups are encouraged to engineer attacks,” Sahni said. “There is no normalcy in Kashmir.”
Following the attack, panicked tourists started to leave Kashmir. Monojit Debnath, from the eastern Indian city of Kolkata, said Kashmir was undoubtedly beautiful, but his family did not feel secure anymore.
“We are tourists, and we should think about what safety we have here for us,” Debnath told the Press Trust of India news agency as he was leaving Srinagar, the region’s main city, with his family.
TRF said the “individuals targeted were not ordinary tourists”. “[Instead], they were linked to and affiliated with Indian security agencies,” it said in a separate statement, adding that it would step up its activities in the region.
India’s government has not commented on the claim.
Attacks by armed groups have afflicted Kashmir, claimed in full but ruled in part by both India and Pakistan, since an anti-Indian rebellion began in 1989. Tens of thousands of people have been killed, although violence has tapered off in recent years.
