The Indian Army and Jammu and Kashmir Police personnel on Friday combed homes and forests in Kashmir for terrorists, as India’s army chief reviewed security following the killing of 26 tourists at Baisaran meadow in Pahalgam—the deadliest terror attack on civilians in nearly twenty years.
The attack triggered outrage and grief in India, along with calls for action against neighbour Pakistan, whom New Delhi accuses of funding and encouraging terrorism in Kashmir, a region both nations claim and have fought two wars over.
Earlier on Friday, India’s army chief visited Srinagar, capital of Jammu and Kashmir, and authorities scoured Pahalgam, the scenic town where the attack took place on Tuesday.
India has said there were Pakistani elements to the attack, in which 26 men were shot in a meadow. Islamabad has denied any involvement.
Soaring Tensions
The nuclear-armed nations have unleashed a raft of measures against each other, with India putting the critical Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance and Pakistan closing its airspace to Indian airlines.
The treaty, negotiated in 1960, split the Indus River and its tributaries between the two countries and regulated water sharing.
“We will ensure that not a single drop of the Indus River’s water reaches Pakistan,” Water Resources Minister C.R. Paatil said in a post on X.
Pakistan depends heavily on the Indus system for hydropower and irrigation, and has said any attempt to stop or divert its waters will be an “act of war”.
Trump Urges Restraint
U.S. President Donald Trump appeared to play down the tensions, saying he was confident India and Pakistan would figure out relations between themselves, although the attack had been “a bad one.” He said he was very close to both India and Pakistan and knew both their leaders.
“They’ll get it figured out one way or the other, I’m sure of that,” Trump said as he travelled aboard his plane. “There’s great tension between Pakistan and India, but there always has been.”
Indian financial markets fell sharply but recovered some of their losses to close 0.7%-0.9% lower. The Indian rupee fell 0.2%, while the yield of India’s 10-year benchmark bond rose four basis points.
Military Response
Army general Upendra Dwivedi visited Kashmir to review security a day after Prime Minister Narendra Modi vowed to chase the perpetrators to the “ends of the earth”.
Those killed in the attack came from all over India, Modi said.
India’s top two airlines, IndiGo and Air India, said some of their international routes, including to the United States and Europe, would be affected by the closure of Pakistani airspace, leading to extended flight times and costs.
In 2019, India carried out Balakot airstrikes in Pakistan in retaliation for a suicide bombing in Jammu and Kashmir’s Pulwama that killed at least 40 paramilitary police.
Several leaders of Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have called for new military action against Pakistan.
The two countries both claim Muslim-majority Kashmir in full, but rule it in part. India, with its Hindu majority, has long accused Islamic Pakistan of aiding separatists who have battled security forces in Jammu and Kashmir – accusations Islamabad denies.
‘Cross-Border Linkages’
Indian officials say Tuesday’s attack had “cross-border linkages”. Kashmir’s police identified three suspects and said two were Pakistani nationals.
Authorities in Jammu and Kashmir demolished the houses of two suspected terrorists, one a suspect in Tuesday’s attack, an official said.
Governments in many states ruled by Modi’s BJP have torn down what they say are illegal houses or shops belonging to people accused of crimes, many of them Muslims, in what has come to be known popularly as “instant, bulldozer justice”.
In an unrelated incident, sporadic firing was reported along the Line of Control (LoC) that divides Jammu and Kashmir and the Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir (PoK), the Indian army said.
(With inputs from Reuters)
