On 14 February 2019, a 78-vehicle CRPF convoy of 2,500 paramilitary troops was travelling in the Kashmir Valley towards Srinagar. The convoy had made a pre-dawn start from the city of Jammu, 190 miles to the south, in order to reach Srinagar before dusk. The convoy was of unusually large size because the Jammu–Srinagar highway had been closed for a few days due to snowfall and landslides, a common occurrence in winter. Around midday, the convoy crossed the Banihal Pass into the Valley, and at 3 p.m. passed Awantipora, a town on the highway. The town of Pampore, famous for the saffron fields in its vicinity, was next, followed by Srinagar. Between Awantipora and Pampore, a village called Lethipora spreads out on both sides of the highway, which follows the trajectory of the Jhelum river. The spot is 15 miles short of Srinagar. Pampore, Lethipora and Awantipora are all in the Valley’s Pulwama district, immediately south of Srinagar.
As the convoy rumbled through Lethipora at 3.15 p.m., a small van came out of the side road off the highway and rammed into one of the buses in the convoy. The van detonated and the blast destroyed the bus, killing all the forty CRPF troopers travelling in it. Another thirty-five troopers riding in vehicles immediately front and behind were wounded. It was the single most deadly attack on Indian security forces in three decades of the Kashmir insurgency. They had not suffered such a major loss of life in any incident since 1990. The van carried a bomb weighing several hundred kilograms, made with a mix of RDX and ammonium nitrate.
The suicide bomber was Adil Ahmad Dar, in his early twenties, a native of a Pulwama village about 6 miles from Lethipora. He was a high-school dropout and worked as a labourer. The Pakistani jihadist group Jaish-e-Mohammad, active in the Kashmir insurgency since 2000, claimed responsibility and released a ‘martyrdom video’ the youth had made before the operation. In the video, he is clad in combat fatigues and cradles an assault rifle.
Adil Dar had been arrested six times between September 2016 and March 2018. The first arrest, in September 2016, was for stone-pelting. There was one further arrest for stone-pelting, and four on suspicion of being an OGW (overground worker) for militants, the term used by the security apparatus to describe persons who assist insurgents. He was released without being charged each time. Following the sixth arrest, he disappeared from his village on 19 March 2018 and was missing since then. The attack may have been planned for 9 February 2019, the sixth anniversary of the hanging of Afzal Guru in Delhi, and put off because of bad weather.
Jaish-e-Mohammad (Army of the Prophet), whose founder-leader is Maulana Masood Azhar, a radical Pakistani cleric, has a record of recruiting young Kashmiris for suicide operations. Its first suicide bombing, in May 2000, was carried out by Afaq Ahmad Shah, a 17-year-old schoolboy from Khanyar, a neighbourhood in Srinagar’s old city. Afaq Shah detonated a car at the main entrance to the operational headquarters and cantonment in Srinagar’s southern outskirts of the Indian Army’s 15th Corps, which is stationed in the Valley, killing eight soldiers. On 31 December 2017, a centre for training CRPF commandos in Lethipora was penetrated by three Jaish militants, who killed five CRPF personnel – including two Kashmiri Muslims – and wounded three others in a gun-battle before being eliminated. Two of the three-member squad were local Kashmiris and the third a Pakistani. The youngest of the trio was Fardeen Ahmad Khanday, 16, a tenth-grade student from a village in Tral, the home turf of Burhan Wani. The son of a police constable, Khanday left home and joined JeM in September 2017.
He did not have a stone-pelting background but was upset since the March 2017 death in an encounter of a fellow villager, an HM militant who had been his Koran tutor. The attack in which he participated was probably triggered by the encounter death on 25 December 2017 of Noor Mohammad Tantray, a Kashmiri JeM militant active since the early 2000s. Tantray had been in hiding because he was easily identifiable due to a physical feature: he was a dwarf, 3 feet tall. Fardeen Khanday too made an eight-minute pre-martyrdom video in which he intoned in Kashmiri-accented Urdu: ‘By the time this is released, I will be in heaven . . . My friends and I have listened to the Koran’s call and plunged into jihad. This will continue till the last occupying soldier leaves Kashmir.’
Adil Dar’s father Ghulam Hassan Dar, a farmer, said of himself and his wife Fahmeeda: ‘We are in pain as the families of the soldiers are’. He blamed political leaders, saying that the Kashmir conflict ‘should have been resolved through dialogue . . . the sons of the common man die here, whether they are Indian soldiers or ours’.
The 14 February 2019 attack sparked a furore across India, fuelled by some television channels calling for revenge. Outrage grew as funerals of the CRPF troopers started taking place in different parts of the country – the forty men hailed from sixteen different states across the length and breadth of India. On 24 February, hundreds of activists of independentist and pro- Pakistan political groups in the Valley were arrested, including JKLF leader Yasin Malik, and in March both JKLF and Jama’at-i-Islami were declared banned organisations by the Modi government under the federal Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA), enacted in 1967.
Then, on the night of 25–26 February, Mirage-2000 jets of the Indian Air Force bombed an alleged JeM training camp near Balakot, a town in Pakistan’s Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province close to the border with Pakistani ‘Azad’ Kashmir. Balakot had been very badly hit by the October 2005 earthquake which had its epicentre in the northern part of ‘Azad’ Kashmir around Muzaffarabad. The Pakistanis did not detect the air raid and all the planes returned safely to India. The Indians claimed that a large number of terrorists had been killed, and the Pakistanis denied any casualties, saying that an uninhabited wooded hill had been bombed. The aerial bombing, and that the targeted site was in Pakistan proper, albeit just beyond the ‘Azad’ Kashmir border, marked a significant escalation. On the morning of 27 February, the Pakistani air force crossed the LoC and conducted pinprick attacks in the Jammu region’s Rajouri district, which abuts the LoC. Dogfights ensued on the LoC as Indian jets were scrambled in response. An Indian MiG-21 fighter was shot down and its pilot ejected on the Pakistani side of the LoC, where he was almost set upon by local villagers before being taken into custody by a Pakistan Army unit. The Pakistanis released the pilot on 1 March and he was escorted back into India at Wagah, the main border crossing point near Lahore. There was no further escalation of hostilities, but the flare-up was a stark reminder of the dangers of escalation posed by even a limited Kashmir insurgency, especially in the form of very deliberately timed attacks by provocateur groups like JeM.
The crisis came at a politically opportune time for the Modi government to escalate its rhetoric and flex some military muscle on the eve of India’s general election in April–May 2019, which decisively returned Modi and the BJP to power with a slightly enhanced parliamentary majority.
Imran Khan, a famous Pakistani cricketer turned politician, had in August 2018 become Pakistan’s prime minister following an election widely regarded as manipulated in his party’s favour by the military elite, after Nawaz Sharif – distrusted by the army – was forced out of office on corruption charges in July 2017. As India went to the polls in April 2019, Khan mused to international journalists about the prospects of renewed talks with India on Kashmir: ‘If the next Indian government is led by the opposition, it might be too scared to seek a settlement with Pakistan on Kashmir, fearing a backlash from the right. Perhaps if the BJP – a right-wing party – wins, some kind of settlement on Kashmir could be reached’.
It is possible that this was also the cautious expectation of Imran Khan’s patrons in the high echelons of the Pakistan Army.
He, and they, could not have been more wrong.
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