Security staff are patrolling in a street in the morning after activists opened fire without discrimination on tourists near Pahalgam at cashmere under Indian control on April 23.
Dar Yasin / AP
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Dar Yasin / AP
Mumbai, India – The day after a deadly attack against tourists killed 26 people in the mountain city of Pahalgam to cashmere administered by the Indians, Indians announced that it closed a border with Pakistan, downgrading its diplomatic ties and suspended a crucial water treaty.
The Industry Water Treaty exposes how India and Pakistan use water with six rivers that circulate in both countries. It was negotiated by the World Bank in 1960 and affects hundreds of millions of people on each side of the border.
The Indian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Vikram Misri, told journalists on Tuesday evening that the treaty will remain suspended until Pakistan “in a credible and irrevocably abolition its support for cross -border terrorism”. He added that no Pakistani national will no longer be authorized to India as part of a special visa program and asked these visa holders in India to leave the country within 48 hours.
Pakistan military advisers serving in the country’s high-commissariat in New Delhi have a week to leave India. Misri said India would also withdraw its Islamabad counterparts. These decisions, he said, were made at a meeting chaired by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who interrupted a visit to Saudi Arabia to return to India after the news of the Tuesday attack.
Misri’s announcement occurred a few hours after the Pakistani Minister of Defense, Khawaja Asif, denied Pakistani participation in Tuesday’s attack.
“It is the result of a Hindutva government (Hindu nationalist) operating and killing religious minorities, including Christians and Buddhists,” as a Pakistani news channel. The attackers, he said, were the “rebels” of India.
Pakistani Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif called for a meeting of the National Security Council to tackle the situation on Thursday morning.
India has long accused its Western neighbor of catching up and sponsoring armed activism to cashmere administered in India, accusations that Pakistan denies. The Muslim majority cashmere region has been challenged between India and Pakistan since they became independent nations in 1947. Each country claimed cashmere in its entirety. They fought three wars on it. Pakistan controls a smaller part of the region, known as Azad Cachemire.
Tuesday’s attack on Indian civilians has been called the worst since the armed men stormed the streets of Mumbai in 2008 and killed more than 160 people. Indian surveys then alleged that the attackers had been trained in Pakistan.
The Indian media is now alleging the Pakistani origins of Pahalgam attackers, and analysts underlined a chief discourse of the army of Pakistan, General Asim Munir, last week, reiterating the support of the Cashmiris fight against what he called “Indian occupation”.
Analysts say that thousands of Indian civilians and soldiers have been killed in cashmere since armed activism took root in the early 1990s. In 2019, the Indian Parliament adopted a law that revoked the administrative autonomy of the region, which many in the Bharatiya Janata ruling party had blamed for the violence that shaken the Himalaya valley. For months later, mobile communications and the Internet have been blocked, the Kashmiris movement was limited and local politicians were detained in prison or their own residences.
The years following repression have seen a spectacular drop in the number of violent attacks. But in recent years, attacks have increased, often targeting Indian migrant workers from outside the cashmere. As in Pahalgam’s attack, most of the victims were Hindus.
During Tuesday’s attack, a little -known militant group called Cachemir Resistance claimed responsibility. In an article on Telegram, he said that the attack was in retaliation for the “demographic changes” observed in the valley since 2019.
Following the attack, leaders such as President Trump expressed their support for India, the American president publishing on Truth Social that India had his “total support”. On India’s right -wing news channels, there are calls for reprisal attacks against Pakistan.
Sushazing Singh, lecturer in South Asian studies at the University of Yale and former Indian military officer, said that the jingism surrounding attacks eclipses security and political failures.
“The fact that cashmere is a disputed territory between India and Pakistan is well known. Pakistan has provided a lot of support, including training for armed militants who operate in cashmere. But the emphasis on Pakistan cannot hide the questions of responsibility of the Indian establishment, including the political leadership of India, he says.
Singh says that the Cashmemre policy of the Hindu nationalist government of India has alienated the residents of the cashmere and cost the Indian army its vital network of local informants.
“It is essentially more like domination and oppression than commitment and support. So, with this type of policy, which is exclusion, oppression and targeting, the emotional distance between cashmere and Delhi has increased even more than it was historically,” he said.
Aakash Hassan contributed to this story of New Delhi.
