The recent terror attack in Pahalgam, Kashmir, in which 26 innocent civilians, including Indian tourists and foreign nationals, were brutally gunned down, is not merely another tragic episode in the long and bloody saga of violence that has plagued the region. It is the latest chapter in a sustained and deliberate campaign of proxy warfare waged against India by Pakistan’s deep state—specifically its military intelligence complex, which continues to use Islamic radical groups as deniable instruments of state policy. To understand the scale and depth of this attack, one must view it not as an isolated incident but as part of a decades-long pattern—a cowardly strategy designed to destabilise India from within while allowing Pakistan to maintain a façade of plausible deniability.
The ideology that fuels such attacks did not germinate overnight. Its roots lie in the policy decisions made in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Pakistan, having tasted limited success in Afghanistan by supporting mujahideen against Soviet forces, redirected its focus toward Kashmir. The military establishment in Pakistan, particularly its notorious Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), saw the insurgency in Kashmir as fertile ground for replicating the Afghan template—arming and training jihadist fighters under the guise of a ‘freedom struggle.’ This wasn’t about Kashmiri self-determination; it was about ‘bleeding India by a thousand cuts.’ The chaos and militancy that followed changed the landscape of the Valley and bled into mainland India with disturbing consequences.
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