The Slow Pulwama

TWO DAYS AFTER the Balakot strike, on March 1, 2019, the operational commander of the Pakistan-based terrorist organisation, Jaish-e-Mohammed, Rouf Asgar Alvi, sent a message to his nephew, Umar Farooq. Hiding in Kashmir, Farooq had, in February that year, planned and executed the Pulwama suicide attack on the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) convoy, leading to 40 casualties of its personnel. Farooq expressed his displeasure that the Indian Air Force (IAF) pilot, Abhinandan Varthaman, who had been taken prisoner by Pakistan, had been returned to India that day.

“This is all politics, my dear,” Asgar told his nephew. And then he asked him to prepare for one more attack in the coming weeks.

But later that month Asgar called Farooq again, instructing him to abort all plans of the second attack. “Nuksaan utna hi hona chahiye jitna dush­man ko bardasht karne ki taaqat ho (The loss should only be as much as the enemy can bear),” he said. The number of casualties had been too high in the Pulwama attack, and domestic pressure had forced the Modi government to retaliate against Pakistan in Balakot. In the coming months, the Pakistani establishment was so wary of the possible big casualty toll in Jaish actions in Kashmir that at least once it is believed to have leaked Jaish’s plans to Indian intelligence agencies. But since then it has de­vised a new plan to keep India bleeding, but keep it at a level that it knows will not invite Indian action.

It is this model the Pakistani establishment has asked Jaish to follow as it has pushed highly trained terrorists into the Jammu region with a clear aim of reviving insurgency. On July 15, in yet another incident, four soldiers of the Army, including an officer, were killed in an encounter in Jammu’s Doda region with terrorists of Kashmir Tigers, a Jaish front. According to sources, a joint team of Army and police had entered the Dessa for­est area, about 50km from Doda town. They were acting on a specific intelligence input about the presence of terrorists but got caught in the ambush in an open area, leading to four casualties. In the last three years, 51 soldiers and 19 civilians have lost their lives in terrorist attacks in Jammu. This month alone, nine soldiers have been killed in two attacks, including the one in Doda. There have been multiple contacts in Doda with terrorists, but mostly the terrorists have escaped unscathed.

“This is the most worrying aspect,” said Brigadier (retired) Hardeep Singh Sohi, a war veteran, who served in Kashmir at the peak of militancy in the early 1990s. “In Jammu the qual­ity of terrorists indicates that they are highly trained and could include former Pakistani army personnel,” he said. It is difficult to conduct operations given the terrain. This area is mountainous; on one side it goes to Kashmir Valley and from the other, it touches other regions in Jammu and also Himachal Pradesh.

The terrorist attacks that began in Jammu’s Poonch belt have now spread over a rather long arc, from Kathua along the International Border (IB) with Pakistan, to the Doda-Kishtwar region. Jaish terrorists have now spread as smaller groups and are carrying out these attacks. The latest attacks are also believed to be a result of fresh infiltration through the IB in Jammu. A se­nior police officer in Jammu, who had earlier talked to Open, had identified one of the infiltration points as Bamiyal, close to the Ujh river, along the border between Jammu and Punjab.

The biggest problem Indian security forces are facing is the lack of human intelligence. The area has not seen much terror­ist activity since the early 2000s after a massive operation by the Army in 2003 called Operation Sarp Vinash. In it, 64 hardcore ter­rorists, most of them foreign, who had made the upper reaches of the Pir Panjal their hideout, were killed. A huge cache of weap­ons was recovered, along with more than seven tones of ration, indicating that the terrorists, whose original number is believed to have been around 350, were planning to stay put there for a longer haul. Sarp Vinash pushed them back and until recently, barring an incident here or there, this part of the Jammu division had stayed free of terrorist activities.

But now, with terrorism at an all-time low in Kashmir Valley and with security forces enabling a robust intelligence grid, terrorists are finding it difficult to operate there. It is in these changed circumstances that terrorists are now being pushed into Jammu. These terrorists are finding it easier to infiltrate through the IB in Jammu. For years, the Border Security Force (BSF), responsible for guarding the IB, had been keeping an eye on the ground for possible attempts at infiltration. Sometimes, infiltrators broke the fence somewhere and entered. Sometimes, they would just walk along riverines to enter. The first tunnel in Jammu’s Samba border was detected in 2012. It was about 500m long, with 150m inside Indian territory. But in the recent past, smaller or shorter tunnels, in the range of 150m, have been detected. From 2021 to 2022, according to data made available by BSF, drone sightings along the IB tripled. The new threat was acknowledged by the Indian government in Parliament last year. In response to a question, Nisith Pramanik, minister of state for home, acknowl­edged that drones were being used in smuggling arms and narcotics and said that the government was pushing for “strengthening of intelligence network and coordination with other security agencies.”

But it is clear that even if these steps have been taken it has not been adequate. Last week, as five soldiers were killed in an ambush in Kathua, security forces intensified their search operations in the area. Around 60 people suspected of helping terrorists have been rounded up. A high-level meeting held in Kathua after the ambush was attended by police chiefs of both Jammu and Kashmir and Punjab, the special director general of BSF, and intelligence officers.

“The challenge now is to create an effective security grid in the south of Pir Panjal,” said an Army officer based in the Northern Command. Part of it would be to establish human intelligence without which it would be difficult to carry out pin-point operations, he said. It is also through this intelligence that security agencies will be able to identify overground workers who have been helping these terrorists. “Look at Reasi, for example,” says an officer of Military Intelligence, referring to an earlier attack in which terrorists targeted a bus carrying Hindu pilgrims, resulting in nine casualties. “It would not have been possible to identify that exact spot where to target the bus,” he says.

The casualties suffered by security forces in Jammu are already higher than the ones in the Pulwama attack. “It is time to look at the counterinsurgency doctrine in Jammu and Kashmir with fresh eyes,” said the Army officer. Jammu has several communally sensitive areas and attacks such as the one in Reasi always carry the danger of flaring up into something else.

The aim of such attacks also seems to be tying down more Army (and other security) personnel in the Jammu region. “It is likely that we will have to put in more troops here who will have to get involved in activities such as road opening, etc,” said Sohi. Which also means a new theatre of insurgency has emerged where India can no longer afford to take chances.

counterinsurgencyDoda-KishtwarJaishJammu and KashmirKathuaPoonchTerror attacks