Inflicting thousand cuts

The main takeaway from the slew of terror attacks and infiltration bids along the line of Control in Kashmir and the International Border in Jammu and Punjab is this: Pakistan remains committed to its policy of bleeding India through a thousand cuts. On Sunday, two militants trying to sneak into the country through the loC in Kashmir’s Kupwara district were killed by the Indian Army. Days earlier, on August 5, terrorists attacked a convoy of the Border Security Force in Udhampur. Two security personnel lost their lives, while one of the perpetrators was killed and the other, Mohammed Naved was apprehended alive. In the preceding week, there was another terror attack in Punjab’s frontier district of Gurdaspur on July 27. Earlier in the year, there were two terror attacks in May, one in March and two in January, apart from several foiled infiltration bids and gun battles between security forces and militants. All the major attacks attacks, including the ones is Udhampur and Gurdaspur, have been traced back to laskhkar-e-Tayyeba. Clearly, the proscribed terror group, which is known to be the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agency’s handmaiden and is primarily focused on the carrying out anti-India activities, has upped the ante. That it has done so at a time when the Pakistani Army is also regularly engaging in ceasefire violations is no coincidence. In fact, the ceasefire agreement has been observed almost entirely in the breach since January 2013. Since then, the line of Control has been steadily heating up and, as the attack in Gurdaspur shows, there are efforts to expand the arc of terror beyond Kashmir. That said, it is notable here that all the attacks and hostile incidents have been relatively low in intensity — and definitely well below the 26/11 threshold, which had almost brought the two countries to the brink of another war. Pakistan can’t afford a full-scale military operation with India and is hence focused on sub-conventional warfare. This, of course, has been the situation for decades now, with violence in Jammu & Kashmir going though phases different phases. In recent years, for example, there was a definite sense of peace and stability returning to Kashmir; however, now there seems to be a possibility of a new wave of violence that might be rising.

The key question here is: How should India respondIJ Retaliating with full military force is, of course, what groups such as the leT want to provoke but thankfully, India continues to exercise restraint. The second option is political or diplomatic retaliation (calling of bilateral talks, snapping diplomatic ties). This, again, is a move that the terrorists would like very much for it will increase hostility and eliminate whatever little chance there might have been for a politically-mediated peace. This brings us to third option: Since India cannot do much to change social, political and economic factors within Pakistan that nurture the anti-India jihadi factory in that country, it needs to strengthen it fences and improve its guard. For example, the Gurdaspur attack was possibly because the IB is not as tightly protected as the loC. Similarly, the fact that Mohammed Naved, from the Udhampur attack, had spent several weeks moving all around State before attacking the BSF convoy is a matter of concern.