Reflecting on the Pahalgam Terror Attack: A Year of Strategic Shifts

This week marks the one-year anniversary of the Pahalgam terrorist attack. On April 22, 2025, terrorists entered a meadow near Pahalgam in Jammu and Kashmir and carried out a deliberate assault on civilians designed as much for psychological impact as for the number of people killed. The victims, which included a young Nepali citizen Sudeep Neupane, were not caught in crossfire or struck incidentally. The attackers moved through a crowded tourist area, separated men from their families, and asked their religion before opening fire. In several cases, victims were forced to recite Islamic declarations to prove who they were, and those who could not were shot at close range. Twenty-six civilians were killed, many in front of their wives and children, in an act intended to resonate far beyond that meadow.

The attack was selective, identity-based killing aimed at shaping perception and behavior across a much wider audience. Tourism in Jammu and Kashmir had become a visible indicator that a degree of stability, opportunity, and normalcy was returning to the region. Families traveling, markets operating, and visitors moving freely signalled something important about the security environment. Attacking tourists and doing so in a way that emphasized religious identity was intended to fracture that perception and reintroduce fear into everyday life. This approach is consistent with long-running proxy conflicts, where violence is used not simply to inflict casualties but to undermine confidence and alter political conditions.

Responsibility for the attack was claimed by The Resistance Front, a name that obscures the structure behind it. TRF is widely assessed to be a proxy of Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistan-based organization designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization and Specially Designated Global Terrorist by the United States in 2001. TRF emerged in October 2019, shortly after the Indian government abrogated Article 370, ending the special autonomous status of Jammu and Kashmir and reorganizing the state into the Union Territories of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh under full application of the Indian Constitution. Lashkar-e-Taiba has a long record of operations directed at India, including the 2008 Mumbai attacks, which demonstrated its capacity to plan and execute complex, coordinated assaults against civilian targets. The group has operated for decades as a proxy force against India, with sustained backing from Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate. The use of front organizations allows networks like LeT to attempt some deniability while retaining the same operational capabilities, leadership connections, and training pipelines.

That structure has defined the conflict in Kashmir for years. Militant groups operate with enough distance from the state to provide plausible deniability while still advancing objectives that align with broader strategic aims. The continuity across different attacks, organizations, and time periods makes it difficult to treat incidents like Pahalgam as isolated events. They are better understood as part of a sustained campaign against India that uses calibrated violence to impose costs and alter political conditions while preserving just enough deniability to avoid direct war. Pahalgam was not an isolated attack. It reflected a system working as designed.

India’s response reflected a strategic shift that has been developing over time. Rather than limiting its actions to diplomatic protest, the government moved quickly across multiple domains. It suspended key elements of its political engagement with Pakistan tied to the Indus Waters Treaty, a 1960 agreement governing the division and use of the Indus river system, signaling that even long-standing arrangements are not insulated from Pakistan’s support for, or failure to act against, continued cross-border terrorism. That decision introduced a broader form of pressure, linking security behavior directly to cooperation in areas that had traditionally been treated as separate.

The military response came with Operation Sindoor, a name chosen with clear intent tied directly to the nature of the attack. Sindoor, the red mark worn by married Hindu women, carried symbolic weight given that men in Pahalgam had been singled out and killed in front of their wives. The operation linked the response to the violence in a way that made clear what was being answered. Indian forces conducted precision strikes against nine terrorist sites associated with Lashkar-e-Taiba and affiliated networks inside Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir. The choice of targets was deliberate. They were selected to degrade infrastructure tied to planning, training, and executing attacks.

Pakistan responded with its own military action, directly targeting Indian military sites and expanding the confrontation in an attempt to impose costs and shift the dynamic. India answered with a broader set of operations focused on degrading Pakistan’s military infrastructure, including multiple air bases and operational nodes that supported its ability to sustain further action. Over the course of four days, the exchange followed a pattern of escalation and counter-escalation in which India maintained the initiative and imposed increasing costs until a ceasefire was reached.

This sequence reflects an emerging approach in India’s strategic behavior. Earlier responses to attacks such as Uri in 2016, when militants killed nineteen Indian soldiers at an army base, and Pulwama in 2019, when a suicide bombing killed forty paramilitary personnel, marked a break from past restraint but remained limited and tightly controlled. Operation Sindoor went further by combining depth, precision, and the integration of military and non-military tools in a more deliberate form of signaling. The objective was not limited to retaliation. It was to reshape expectations about what follows a major terrorist attack.

Statements from India’s leadership reinforced that position. Prime Minister Narendra Modi framed the issue in direct terms, making clear that cooperation cannot exist alongside terrorism and that agreements, including those as significant as water-sharing arrangements, are conditional when violence continues. He warned that “blood and water cannot flow together,” signalling a shift in how India links security behavior to broader relations. He also made clear that India would no longer accept a situation in which proxy attacks continue under the assumption that nuclear deterrence would prevent meaningful response (“terror and talks cannot go together”).

At the same time, the persistence of cross-border attacks underscores the limits of any single response. Networks tied to Lashkar-e-Taiba and similar groups have shown the ability to adapt, regenerate, and continue operations despite sustained pressure. Even after Operation Sindoor, security forces continued to uncover improvised explosive devices along infiltration routes and disrupt planned attacks in Jammu and Kashmir. In November 2025, a car bomb exploded near the Red Fort in New Delhi, killing more than a dozen people and injuring many others in what Indian authorities classified as a terrorist attack tied to a broader network with links to Pakistan-based groups. The attack was investigated under India’s anti-terror laws and viewed by Indian authorities within the broader pattern of cross-border terrorism. This was not an isolated incident but part of a continuing pattern of attacks and disrupted plots aimed at both security forces and symbolic targets. The shift in India’s strategic doctrine is real and significant, but it will require sustained operations, continued pressure, and long-term preparation to translate tactical success into lasting change.

Remembering Pahalgam means more than recounting what happened in that meadow. It requires understanding the structure behind the attack, the strategy that enabled it, and the response that followed. Pahalgam deserves more than remembrance. It deserves an honest accounting of why proxy violence continues and what it actually takes to stop it. Nepal could do well to heed the lessons from hijack of IC 814 in 1999 from Kathmandu and then from the Pahalgam terrorist attack, and evolve its own counter-terrorism policy.