Two months after the brutal Pahalgam attack, the launch of ‘Operation Sindoor’ resulting in a three-day limited war between India and Pakistan and the narrative of a ‘successful operation’, the National Investigation Agency (NIA) probing the gruesome killings in the Pahalgam incident finally got a faint scent of the probable suspects involved – the food trail of the attackers.
After two months of circulating sketches of three suspected terrorists and listing some names of the suspects, with some variations, the NIA has rejected the theory behind the sketches. The men named earlier may not be involved, it says. All the attackers were from Pakistan and none from Kashmir. According to what is available in the public domain, the NIA has based its presumptions on the revelations by two locals in Pahalgam who are alleged to have provided food and shelter to the attackers.
Whether the NIA is reaching closer to the truth or further adding a layer of opacity, these findings raise several questions. The most important is that if the main culprits are still at large and their identity still not clear, what compels the Indian government to frame its response to the Pahalgam attack as ‘successful’?
Were these actions based on the identity of the suspects whose photographs were flashed and names kept altering. Based on police versions, the first set of media reports suggested that the suspects had been identified as Asif Fuji (Pakistani), Suleman Shah (Pakistani) and Abu Talha (Pakistani).
As the days progressed, the identities underwent a significant change: Ali Bhai alias Talha (Pakistani), Asif Fauji (Pakistani), Adil Hussain Thoker (from Anantnag) and Ahsan (from Pulwama). The new list accommodated both the Pakistan based militants and locals. The response in the aftermath of Pahalgam was multi-pronged – both external and internal.
It included bombarding the suspected hideouts of the terror networks operating from Pakistan, at the risk of bringing two nuclear neighbours close to a full-fledged war and the tragic reality of loss of many civilian lives.
On the internal front, it involved sweeping arrests and detentions of at least 2800 people in Kashmir, over a hundred of whom are detained under PSA, and an unspecified number of people are released or still detained. In a glaring case of collective punishment, it also included the blasting of at least nine houses belonging to families of alleged terrorists, an operation that led to severe damages to the entire neighbourhood, as two in-depth investigations (here and here) by the Kashmir Times reveal.
Adil Thoker was one of the militants whose house was demolished in South Kashmir. Now the NIA says, he wasn’t involved. Among the eight other demolished houses was that of Farooq Teedwa in Narikoot village in Kupwara district. An expose by the Caravan reveals that Farooq had disappeared 35 years ago in 1990 and was retroactively linked to the Pahalgam attack.
Coinciding with this massive crackdown were allegations of custodial killings which are now difficult to see as simple aberrations. Within days of the Pahalgam killings, Police killed Altaf Lalli, and described him as a militant. However, according to his family, Altaf Lali was a simple shepherd and father who was regularly detained by police as a suspected "overground worker" and was killed in what they believe was a staged encounter after being forced to pose with weapons.
On May 4, Imtiaz Magray, another person picked up by the security forces for questioning was killed allegedly in a staged encounter. While his family claimed he had no militancy background, the Police, however, maintain that he was an Over Ground Worker who tried to attack them when they took him for recovery.
These actions were based on the preliminary theory which was spun within less than a day of the attack, even as there was no trail of investigations or knowledge of the perpetrators other than a statement of The Resistance Front, a shadowy terror group that was floated after 2019 and that is believed to have close ties to Pakistan based Jaish-e-Mohammad and Lashkar-e-Toiba.
Four days after the attack, the TRF mysteriously distanced itself from the statement, explaining that the previous statement was a ‘cyber attack’. The explanation seems implausible. Why should it take them four days to backtrack if it was a simple case of digital intrusion? Within Kashmir, a common perception is that the TRF was caught on the backfoot by the massive outpouring of local outrage over the attack.
While it is difficult to place much reliance on the TRF claims, a faceless group that operates via Telegram App, the more crucial question is what the basis of the initial suspect identification by the Police was.
India launched Operation Sindoor claiming it had clinching evidence against Pakistan based terror groups. What was this clinching evidence when the NIA has rejected the preliminary and subsequent suspect identity theories? If the attackers are still unknown and freely roaming around, how were the masterminds identified?
Was it merely based on the assumption of involvement of Pakistan in several terror incidents in Kashmir and rest of India in the past? It is quite plausible that the militants involved in Pahalgam attack were getting their orders from the terror outfits freely operating in Pakistan, often with the support and patronage of the ISI. That’s no secret. Yet, the claims of ‘clinching evidence’ theory now fall flatter with the NIA’s latest theory.
The truth, thus far, is that none of those who were directly involved in the attack have been nailed. They have vanished in thin air and the investigations are simply caught in the web of inconsistencies of narrowing down their identities.
Then, far from the theory of ‘successful response’, was the response of the government either pragmatic or justified both externally and internally? Not only has it brought down the threshold of the war, but it has also further alienated an already suffocated population through a continuum of crackdown, detentions and demolitions which cannot be legally or morally justified. The convergence of both can yield consequences that could be extremely disastrous.
After the NIA’s latest prize catch of two suspects who allegedly fed and sheltered the Pahalgam terrorists, Chief Minister Omar Abdullah raised the question about whether the two suspects had willingly done so or whether they had done it at gunpoint. Certainly, a valid question given the many layers of the shadowy and dirty war in which people are caught.
But certainly, it’s a digression. The real questions still need to be asked two months on.
Have you liked the news article?