Baisaran meadow massacre fits a pattern; China factor squeezes India’s options

The Baisaran massacre was consistent with the tactics put to play by terrorists in JK since 2021.

The massacre of predominantly male Hindu tourists in the isolated meadow of Baisaran, Pahalgam, on April 22, 2025, is not what it has been made out to be, a bolt from the blue. It was merely a huge spike in a pattern of targeted killings of non-combatants of a particular religion.

False narrative of ‘normalcy’

The reason why the recent massacre bearing the imprint of a Hamas-style killing spree was regarded as a "big surprise" was that the previous incidents were either underplayed to immunise the narrative of "normalcy and declining terror incidents" or that these were diverted from national scrutiny by being labelled as routine civilian murders or accidental deaths in cases where terrorists cunningly enough did not use rifles for the killings of Hindus.

Apart from the killing of eight Amarnath pilgrims in a bus in 2017 in Anantnag district, there have been significant attacks since then: (i) Katra pilgrims' bus blasted with a sticky bomb attached to the fuel tank, 4 killed in 2022 (ii) massacre of seven Hindus in Dhangri village of Rajouri in 2023 (iii) Reasi pilgrims' bus attack, 9 killed in June 2024 (iv) Muslim tourist couple shot and wounded in Anantnag, 2024 (v) killings of five Hindu civilians in Kathua, including a 12-year-old boy, in March 2025.

Game plan is to exploit existing sectarian fault line

The targeted killings were in line with the massacres of minority communities and pilgrims in Jammu and Kashmir (JK) and Himachal Pradesh in the 1990s and for a few years after the turn of the millenium. The Baisaran massacre was aimed primarily at inviting reactions from communal forces in India that would target Kashmiri Muslims (such as students) and the minority community at large. The Pakistan game plan has been to exploit the growing sectarian tensions as a result of the mainstreaming of communal politics in India.

The massacre sent out a clear, demonstrative message of communal killings via the horrific eyewitness accounts of widows and children so that the impact was felt on India's social cohesion outside of JK.

Fig leaf of indigenous struggle

Though the violence waged by Pakistani terrorists seeks legitimacy in a supposed indigenous Kashmiri struggle, fact is that that the salience of slogans such as plebiscite and freedom struggle were declining by the day in JK. Terrorist planners in Pakistan faced with recruitment falls, tightening security grids and busting of terror finance modules shed the fig-leaf of indigenous struggle and appealed to jehaad and Islamic sentiments.

On April 13, 2025, after two encounters in Kathua and Kishtwar which saw the death of four policemen and five terrorists, the Kashmir Tigers (a shadowy front for the banned Jaish-e-Mohammed / Lashkar-e-Toiba) issued a statement that declared: “For 20 days, historic clashes between Kashmir Tigers & Indian forces in Kathua and Kishtwar have revived memories of early Islamic conquests”.

A related factor for the desperate attack on tourists was that ambushes of Army convoys and patrols (since October 2021) were becoming an increasingly difficult proposition. There was an urgent requirement to bring back Pakistan's relevance to the Kashmir issue. Terrorist planners, thus, launched a module of mixed Pakistanis and Kashmiri terrorists on the tourists in Baisaran. The massacre bore the Hamas stamp, with terrorists making video recordings and taking selfies with dead bodies after ascertaining religious identity in brutal fashion, including pulling down trousers of some men.

On April 16, 2025, Pakistan Army COAS Gen. Asim Munir delivered a speech in which he cited Kashmir as a jugular vein, reiterated the two-nation theory and identified Hindus and Muslims as two completely different entities, who had no point of convergence. It was interpreted as a dog whistle to the jehaadi tanzeems for communal massacres of the 1990s vintage and also a signal to retaliate for the Jaffar train massacre and attacks on Chinese interests by the Balochisthan Liberation Army.

Hamas in the background

It is evident that the Pakistani gameplan is to make Kashmir a "Palestine 2" by redirecting global jehaadi or violent pan-Islamic movements to India. That the Pakistan Army-jehaadi complex is unconcerned about Kashmiri interests is also revealed. Pakistan wants to turn the land into a graveyard, as seen by its attack on Kashmiri livelihoods at Baisaran. Devoid of employment and facing pressure from the guns on both sides, more and more Kashmiri youth may take to the path of violence and jehaad if Pakistan is allowed to persist with its proxy war that will make the people of JK its sacrificial goats. On February 5, 2025, the presence of Hamas spokespersons Dr Khalid Qaddoumi and Dr Naji Zaheer along with Hamas leaders Mufti Azam and Bilal Alsallat was noted at a rally of jehaadi tanzeem leaders in Rawalkot, Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir, on the occasion of Kashmir Solidarity Day.

Significantly, Jennifer Nathaniel, who lost her husband, Sushil, in the Baisaran massacre, said that after the terrorists got to know he was a Christian, they remarked before shooting him: “You know about Palestine, right”.

The Hamas involvement in the massacre was indicated as such by PM Narendra Modi's speech delivered in Bihar on April 24, 2025, when he stated that terrorists/ backers “will be pursued to the ends of the earth”.

Tactical shifts and opportunistic strikes by terrorists

The Baisaran massacre was consistent with the tactics put to play by terrorists in JK since 2021. As infiltration has come down drastically from upwards of a 1,000 annually to less than a 100, terrorist planners have shifted from the fidayeen mode to conservation of lean and mean resources. Highly-trained, agile and fit terrorist modules armed with sophisticated weapons and communication / navigation equipment strike at target locations from where they know a safe exit is virtually guaranteed.

There has been only one fidayeen attack in Jammu division in the last four years, and that was on a camp of the 11 Rajputana Rifles in Rajouri in August 2022 during which two terrorists were shot and five soldiers laid down their lives after the camp's perimeter defences were stormed at night. The terrorist modules are few in number and strike sparingly at a time of their choosing and location so as to cut casualties to a minimum.

In the majority of the cases where terrorists have been nailed by the security forces, it has been when the former have been trapped or intercepted but not during actions initiated by terrorists. At the latest massacre, the terrorists were armed with formidable ground knowledge and information on the laxity of the security grid as provided by OGWs. They were able to fire unhindered for about 20 minutes, expend a 100 cartridges and then exit safely into the dense coniferous forests that ringed the small 200 m x 800 m Baisaran meadow. The 16 ambushes carried out on the Army / Para (SF) / Police in JK since October 2021 exhibit a similar pattern of minimal terrorist casualties.

What the terrorists exploited fully at Baisaran meadow was the lack of a security deployment at an isolated spot that is reachable on foot / pony after an arduous, muddy, uphill trek of more than an hour. While it has been blamed on an "intelligence failure", it is not fair to expect that intelligence will be able to provide pinpoint tip-offs on location of attack and timing as terrorists are highly unpredictable and tourists in record numbers are very dispersed. A sound command leadership could have pre-empted such attacks by placing deployments in glaringly-vulnerable tourist areas such as Baisaran, marketed as a "mini-Switzerland" by canny tour operators.

Terrorists are guided by opportunity, not geography

Many have fallen for the simplistic assumptions that terrorists had shifted activity to south of the Pir Panjals and that they were not expected to target tourists as it affected Kashmiri livelihoods. But a rigorous examination of terror in JK since 1990 reveals that terrorists exploit vacuums and strike opportunistically. Selection of area of operations is very dynamic and flexible for terrorist planners.

In 1999, the Pakistan Army exploited the yawning gaps in the Kargil defences as the Army was preoccupied with Kashmir and Siachen. After the Army moved 8 Mountain Division from North Kashmir to evict the intrusions in Drass-Mashkoh in May-June 1999, the vacuum was exploited by a wave of fidayeen attacks in North Kashmir.

In 2021, terrorists moved to Jammu after CIF (Uniform) for Udhampur-Reasi was packed off to Ladakh. And so, it is not that the terrorists had completely shut down shop north of the Pir Panjals in the current phase. There were ambushes that were lethal such as at Kokernag in September 2023 that claimed the lives of three officers and the Buta Pathri Gulmarg ambush of October 2024 that claimed four soldiers of 18 Rashtriya Rifles or for that matter, the intermittent killings of pandits, migrant labourers and construction workers.

China factor constrains military options
Baisaran massacre will require a larger military action against Pakistan so as to assuage public anger and establish a deterrent against such wanton killings. The government will decide the time, place and scale of such a military action but its options on Pakistan have been limited ever since the military intervention of China’s People’s Liberation Army in Eastern Ladakh and the Galwan clash.

The April-May 2020 PLA manouevre was aimed at taking Indian military pressure off POJK (Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir) and retaliating to what was perceived as Indian targeting of CPEC interests via the Balochisthan Liberation Army. Resultantly, the Indian Army had to divert substantive forces to Ladakh that included the reorientation of a Strike Corps and the move of CIF (Uniform) from Reasi-Udhampur to Eastern Ladakh leaving a vacuum in the Rashtriya Rifles grid in Jammu division. But a LoC ceasefire understanding arrived at in February 2021 allowed the Indian Army a breather on force diversions to the PLA front.

After the Ladakh crisis, the Indian leadership scaled down its statements on a military takeover of POJK and there have been no surgical strikes / Balakot air hits after February 2019. The critical factor in the regional strategic calculus is the extent to which China will militarily come to the aid of Pakistan in the event of an outbreak of armed hostilities on the Indo-Pakistan front.

China is also building the world's biggest dam on the Brahmputra River, which it can use to weaponise water and retaliate to India's actions on the Indus Water Treaty with Pakistan. India and China do not have a treaty on water sharing and even the sharing of basic hydrological data by the upper riparian state of China is prone to severe disruptions.

The Pakistan and Chinese militaries are exercising jointly, sharing common weapon platforms and the Chinese are sharing their formidable Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities with Pakistan. Officers are embedded in the military commands of each other’s nation, such as Pakistani officers placed in China’s Central Military Commission and Western Theatre Command at Chengdu which oversees the operational frontier with India.

However, given that the Chinese are embroiled in a bloody tariff war with the US and are at the same time eyeing the huge Indian market for trade and investment, Beijing may not want to easily squander goodwill with India. But Pakistan remains a strategic ally in whom China has substantive geo-economic interests via the CPEC and a geo-strategic partial remedy to the 'Malacca dilemma'.