October 24, 2026
By Rehan Piracha
LAHORE
Seven years after New Delhi revoked the semi-autonomous status of Jammu and Kashmir, Indian-held Kashmir is quieter on the surface but increasingly bitter underneath. A new International Crisis Group (ICG) report, A Trigger in Jammu and Kashmir: Militant Violence under Indian Central Rule (Asia Report N°360), warns that the Indian government’s heavy-handed approach is breeding resentment rather than peace, and that a single militant attack could again push nuclear-armed India and Pakistan toward war.
The report draws on field research in the Kashmir valley and the Jammu region, including roughly 60 interviews with officials, politicians and ordinary Kashmiris. Its central finding is that disaffection is festering among Kashmiri Muslims and that militant groups are evolving in both their tactics and their chosen targets.
A calmer region, not a peaceful one
When Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) revoked Article 370 in August 2019 and split the former state into two centrally run union territories, officials said the move would end the insurgency raging since 1989. ICG acknowledges that, in some respects, it delivered. Militant attacks are less frequent, the number of active militants has fallen, and the stone-throwing once common in the valley has largely disappeared. One senior official described the priority as to “ensure the streets remain calm.”
But the report argues these gains hide a deeper failure. Militants have gone underground rather than vanished, and resentment of the Indian state has deepened. Officials, ICG says, appear convinced they can hold the region through “fear, force and the promise of development.” Kashmiri Muslims, by contrast, widely see the government’s decisions as driven by religious discrimination. They call its approach “collective punishment” and describe life in an “open-air prison.”
Silenced political voices and a muzzled press
In the weeks before the 5 August 2019 announcement, the government sent in an additional 40,000 troops and placed the valley under lockdown. It also detained the entire Kashmiri political class, from pro-India mainstream politicians, including three former chief ministers, to separatist leaders. ICG says the harsh treatment of mainstream figures, many of whom had worked closely with earlier central governments, shocked Kashmiris, who read it as proof that New Delhi would never trust them “no matter how much loyalty they displayed.” Most separatist leaders remain in jail. With protests banned and politicians jailed or under house arrest, channels for airing grievances were, in the report’s words, “sealed shut.”
The clampdown reached the press. In July 2019, the National Investigation Agency questioned the editors of two leading newspapers about their funding, a move other outlets took as a warning. Dozens of journalists were later detained and investigated under severe anti-terror laws, the Kashmir Press Club in Srinagar was turned into a police station, and by January 2020 new rules threatened punishment for publishing material deemed “unethical” or “anti-national.” The closure of Srinagar’s Grand Mosque and the months-long detention of its chief cleric, the Mirwaiz, deepened the sense that religion was part of the equation. A local journalist called the 5 August announcement “the biggest existential crisis” Kashmiris had ever faced under Indian rule.
The communications blackout
On 4 August 2019, New Delhi cut internet and mobile connectivity, turning Kashmir into what ICG calls an “information black hole.” Home Minister Amit Shah later said Kashmir was “integrated” without a single bullet fired or a single person killed. ICG says the repression was nonetheless intense. Citing media reports and civil society fact-finding, it describes allegations that young men from southern Kashmir were beaten and subjected to torture, including electric shocks, and that women were sexually harassed during night searches. Many such incidents, the report says, have still not come to light, partly because social stigma keeps violence against women from being reported. A senior journalist reached for the poet Agha Shahid Ali to describe New Delhi’s assertion of control: “They make a desolation and call it peace.”
Amended domicile and land laws
In March 2020, a week into India’s COVID-19 lockdown, New Delhi amended the domicile law so that Indians from elsewhere became eligible for permanent residency and public-sector jobs in the territory. That October, new rules allowed non-residents to buy land, ending protections the region had long enjoyed. The government says the changes will boost economic growth. Kashmiris see the first step in a campaign to alter the region’s demographics “to the detriment of local Muslims,” as the report puts it, in India’s only Muslim-majority region. With no elected representatives to appeal to, they grew increasingly convinced that outsiders were being brought in to turn them into a minority. The separatist leader Syed Ali Geelani, under house arrest at the time, had long warned of exactly this risk.
Redrawn constituencies
A government-appointed delimitation commission added six constituencies to the Hindu-majority Jammu division and only one to the Kashmir division, which has the larger population (6.8 million against Jammu’s 5.3 million) and is 97 per cent Muslim. Locals perceived gerrymandering meant to benefit the BJP, which is stronger in Jammu, and “yet another measure designed to deprive them of a political voice.” The commission faced accusations of acting in the BJP’s service.
Sweeping anti-terror laws and collective penalties
Authorities relied heavily on the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act and the Jammu and Kashmir Public Safety Act, which allow detention for up to six months without formal charges or trial. A senior security official told ICG the goal, beyond dismantling what the government calls the “terror ecosystem,” was to “increase the social costs for supporting or becoming a militant.” Official data show 3,662 arrests under the former law between 2019 and 2023, while Chief Minister Omar Abdullah has claimed about 400 people are held under the latter. Authorities also stopped returning slain militants’ bodies to families, demolished homes of suspected militants’ relatives, and dismissed public employees on security grounds without due process.
Why the strong-arm approach is not working
ICG’s core argument is that India’s strategy has suppressed the symptoms of unrest while aggravating its causes.
New Delhi sought a political landscape that would be “absolutely pliable,” as one Kashmiri journalist put it, and backed new parties that most Kashmiris dismissed as BJP proxies. When voters finally got a say, they used it as protest. In the June 2024 parliamentary elections, the BJP did not contest the region’s three seats, and voters elected an imprisoned independent, Sheikh Abdul Rashid, who called his win “a referendum against all sorts of oppression.” In the September 2024 regional polls, turnout reached 63 per cent, with some separatists backing the vote after years of boycott calls. The National Conference won 42 of 90 seats and Abdullah became chief minister. The BJP finished second with 29, all in Jammu. As one Kashmiri member of parliament put it, “People responded to an undemocratic decision through democratic means.”
Yet the elected government has little authority. A lieutenant governor appointed by New Delhi controls security and law enforcement and has the final say on most legislative and administrative matters. Abdullah has said that “two power centres” is “a recipe for disaster,” and he cannot even appoint civil servants. ICG says many voters cast ballots to vent frustration and keep the BJP at bay, not because they believed the outcome would bring material change. With the new government rendered largely toothless, public discontent has not abated.
Security tools that backfire
The report says the use of draconian laws against anyone suspected of militant links has fuelled resentment, even spurring some of those marked for arrest to join or support militants. Kashmiri observers worry that young men jailed under these laws, often in prisons outside the region where most inmates are Hindu, are exposed to hard-core militants and turn to religion to cope. The permanent fear of state surveillance has also frayed social bonds. “I no longer know how my son thinks,” a former Kashmiri bureaucrat told ICG. Privately, security officials voice regret that New Delhi is solely focused on eliminating militants while doing little to weaken their cause. One official warned that collective punishment “will backfire.”
A weakened intelligence base
Informer networks collapsed after 2019, with old informers found to be double agents, and by 2020 the security apparatus stopped relying on them. Relations also soured with the Gujjar and Bakkarwal nomadic communities, long the state’s eyes and ears on remote border stretches, after officers suspected them of aiding militants and allegedly meted out punishments including extrajudicial killings.
The result, ICG says, is a quiet shift in sympathies. Though most Kashmiris abhor the killing of civilians, its research since 2021 suggests that tacit support for militants who resort to such violence is rising in some quarters. Even in August 2019, in the one Srinagar neighbourhood that saw protests, demonstrators chanted “One solution, gun solution.” The report calls it “a sign of things to come.”
How militants are evolving
The report’s central security finding is that the insurgency has adapted rather than died. Soon after August 2019, outfits with secular-sounding names emerged, among them The Resistance Front, the Kashmir Tigers, the People’s Anti-Fascist Front and the United Liberation Front of Kashmir. They emphasised opposition to efforts to alter the region’s socio-religious identity rather than classic separatist themes, a message designed to resonate with fears of demographic change. Indian authorities say these are Pakistan-based groups such as Lashkar-e-Tayyaba and Jaish-e-Mohammad under new labels, which Islamabad denies.
From October 2019, militants killed non-local fruit traders, truck drivers and migrant labourers, most of them Hindu but some non-Kashmiri Muslims. They also targeted the few Kashmiri Hindus who remained, and Kashmiri police officers. Separatist leaders, who held sway over militants, had previously discouraged attacks on largely local police. With those leaders jailed, that safeguard vanished, and one police officer said the force is “playing a game without a referee.”
New Delhi has portrayed the choice of soft targets as a sign of weakness. ICG says the reality is more complex. One security official told researchers the aim of harming civilians was to trigger a disproportionate state response, in the belief that mass arrests would deepen disaffection and boost support for insurgents. Other officials suggested the attacks were a cheap way to discredit the government’s narrative of peace, since they made national and international headlines.
Before 2019, militants were mostly locals who used social media openly and relied on overground networks. Since then they have become “lone wolves” leaving few physical or digital traces. Indian officials describe a “hybrid militant” profile: young people with no prior links to militancy who carry out a single attack, allegedly at the behest of Pakistani handlers, then return to normal life.
As India concentrated its campaign on the valley, militants increasingly struck in the Jammu region, which had been declared free of militancy in 2020. Attacks there accounted for 40 per cent of security personnel killed in Jammu and Kashmir between 2021 and 2024. In June 2024, militants attacked a bus of Hindu pilgrims in Reasi district, killing nine, just hours after Modi was sworn in for a third term. By 2025, a senior police officer said, authorities were conducting an average of 120 anti-militancy operations per day. Indian officials also say “foreign militants” now outnumber locals and use sophisticated weapons and encrypted satellite phones. “Some of the old tactics are back,” a retired police chief observed, referring to the militancy of the 1990s and early 2000s.
The India-Pakistan fault line
The wider danger, ICG says, is that one attack could set off an interstate crisis. On 22 April 2025, militants shot dead 26 people, most of them Hindu tourists, at Pahalgam in southern Kashmir, the deadliest attack on civilians in over two decades. New Delhi immediately blamed Pakistan, saying it wanted to “undermine normalcy returning to Jammu and Kashmir.” India downgraded diplomatic ties, closed its airspace to Pakistani aircraft, shut the only border crossing and suspended the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty. Pakistan denied involvement, said it was open to a neutral and credible investigation, and responded in kind. Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha later called the attack a security failure and said, “I take full responsibility.”
On 7 May, India launched Operation Sindoor, striking what it called “terrorist infrastructure” in Pakistan. Four days of drone and missile exchanges followed before a ceasefire on 10 May, announced by U.S. President Donald Trump and confirmed by both sides. The truce froze the conflict, with both claiming victory. Modi has since said Operation Sindoor is only “paused,” a stance ICG says puts India on a “perpetual war footing.”
India’s National Investigation Agency named seven accused, including the Pakistan-based heads of Lashkar-e-Tayyaba and The Resistance Front, and concluded that three Pakistanis carried out the attack with help from two local Kashmiris. ICG notes, however, that New Delhi has yet to present concrete public evidence of Pakistani responsibility. On Pakistan’s broader role, the report is cautious. The repeated re-emergence of banned groups under new names undermines Islamabad’s claim to have dismantled them, but this is not “definitive proof” of a renewed proxy war. Pakistani analysts argue such a policy would damage national security, given insurgencies in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan and Islamabad’s new role as a mediator in the U.S.-Iran conflict. Another prominent Pakistani analyst warned that even the “creeping presence” of anti-India jihadist groups should worry Islamabad, since lax enforcement of bans lends credibility to Indian claims.
The fighting also appears to have shifted Kashmiri opinion. Seeing Pakistani drones overhead and its military capabilities on display seems to have made an impression. “The May conflict countered post-2019 hopelessness that Pakistan is not interested in Kashmir,” one Srinagar resident said. Many locals now believe Pakistan has stepped up its backing for militants, though they offer no conclusive evidence.
A second shock came on 10 November 2025, when a car bomb at a busy New Delhi intersection killed fifteen people. The driver, who died, was a Kashmiri doctor. Investigators allege a “white-collar terror” network of thirteen accused, including several physicians, inspired by an al-Qaeda offshoot. New Delhi, notably, did not blame Pakistan or retaliate. ICG calls the attack a one-off for now but says it has raised alarm about more suicide cells of educated young people. For some observers, the report notes, the next India-Pakistan conflict is “a question of when, not if.”
Restore statehood, says ICG
The report argues that India’s efforts to stamp out resistance and impose central control have failed, and it urges a change of course on three fronts.
New Delhi should restore Jammu and Kashmir’s statehood, a step Modi himself has promised on several occasions. ICG says this would not settle every grievance but would remove one source of resentment, since subordinating the chief minister to a New Delhi-appointed lieutenant governor has been widely perceived as a humiliation. It would also help win back disillusioned pro-India factions and weaken sympathy for militancy. The report notes the BJP has tied statehood to improved security. If immediate restoration is not feasible, ICG urges returning powers in stages, starting with authority to appoint civil servants and restoring command of the police incrementally. It recalls that disillusionment with Indian democracy after the rigged 1987 regional polls triggered the first major surge of militant violence in 1989.
Protection of civil liberties
New Delhi should stop applying its anti-terror laws so broadly. ICG singles out as counterproductive the use of such laws for minor transgressions like social media posts, the demolition of suspects’ family homes, dismissals on mere suspicion, and the blacklisting of young people from government jobs.
Restarting dialogue with Pakistan
The only functioning official line between the two countries is a military hotline. New Delhi has rebuffed Pakistani offers of talks, including back-channel proposals, though a few unofficial Track 1.5 and Track 2 exchanges have occurred. ICG urges a discreet back channel, ideally between national security advisers, so both sides can communicate red lines and avoid miscalculation. It points to an early sign of movement: a senior leader of the RSS, the BJP’s parent organisation, has said India should leave the door to dialogue open. Pakistan, the report says, must “aggressively enforce” its ban on anti-India jihadist groups, while India should address Islamabad’s concerns about alleged Indian backing for Baloch militants and the Pakistani Taliban. Friendly governments, including the U.S., UK, EU states and Gulf countries, should encourage this quietly, given India’s sensitivity to outside mediation.
ICG concludes that durable peace after close to four decades of conflict will require “bold moves that look beyond counter-insurgency and central government diktat.” With the vision of a “New Kashmir” proving overly optimistic, it argues, India must ensure this unresolved dispute does not become the trigger for far greater harm.