Why Pahalgam investigation remains important

Joining the dots between TRF and LeT, and from there showing the involvement of the Pakistani State, not just by assertion but with evidence also, is key to preventing further attacks.

At a briefing on May 8, after India hit the headquarters of the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) and the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT), both designated terror organisations based in Pakistan, in retaliation for the April 22 Baisaran massacre, foreign secretary Vikram Misri said New Delhi had not taken any escalatory steps.

Pakistan, he said, was responsible for the first escalation, which he said was the killing of the tourists in Kashmir. India's response was proportionate, in that it targeted only the terror infrastructure in Pakistan, and did not target the military or civilians.

A ceasefire is in place after three nights of hostilities in the air, and intense shelling across the Line of Control that killed five soldiers and  several civilians on the Indian side, destroyed homes and displaced people.

On the morning of May 10, India and Pakistan claimed to have hit each other's air bases, something that has not happened since 1971. The world woke up slowly to the dangers of further escalation. Despite indicating a hands-off policy, United States President Donald Trump, Vice-President J D Vance, and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio worked actively behind the scenes to enable the ceasefire. 

This episode may have ended, if the ceasefire holds. The government has warned Pakistan that every future terrorist attack will be treated as an act of war. Against this backdrop, how the conflict escalated rapidly over three nights and four days is a reminder that New Delhi still must do the hard work to establish Misri's declaration that the first shot of this near-war between India and Pakistan was fired at Baisaran.

While the LeT is widely known as a group nurtured by the Pakistan Army to wage a proxy war in the Kashmir valley, the so-called The Resistance Front (TRF) is said to have come up in 2019 in the aftermath of the August 2019 constitutional changes that removed Jammu & Kashmir's special status. The lines between the two organisations are not clearly drawn.  The TRF's attacks indicate high levels of weapons training, as well as endurance and survival skills in J&K's forested mountains. Their dependence on local helpers is minimal. Their use of sophisticated communication apps on high-frequency phones enables them to remain under the surveillance radar. All this suggests powerful backing. 

Kashmiri militants, especially those recruited in recent years, have never been as well trained or well equipped. From investigations in the villages in Jammu's border districts after several ambushes on military personnel and civilians in that region, security forces concluded that these men come from across the LoC or the International Boundary. But none have been caught alive, though some have been reported killed in encounters. 

After the initial leads in the Baisaran case, which investigators said also had the active involvement of two local Kashmiri men, and assistance from a network of over 20 local ‘overground workers’, the trail to the terrorists has run cold. They have vanished as quietly as they appeared on that grassy meadow and brutally cut down 25 tourists and a Kashmiri pony guide. Two weeks later, the chances of capturing the men alive have all but evaporated.

Ajmal Kasab's capture on day one of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai in 2008, thanks to Mumbai Police’s Tukaram Omble, who gave his life in the process, was India's trump card against Pakistan. The kind of evidence that investigators dream about came with phone transcripts between the terrorists and their handlers. All this helped India name and shame Pakistan in the international community, and forced Pakistan to co-operate in the investigation, at least for a while.

According to newspaper reports, the NIA, which took over the Baisaran case on April 27, has found that the attack was planned by the LeT with active support from the Pakistani ISI and army. 

The NIA must gather all the evidence it can to establish this charge. The record shows that there will be no co-operation from Pakistan. The 2019 Pulwama suicide bombing, brought to the chargesheet stage, is at a dead end because the main accused, Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar and his brother Rauf Asghar, and their cousin Ammar Alvi, are based in Pakistan. The NIA said it cracked the Pulwama case after finding a cell phone belonging to a Pakistani militant, Mohammed Umar Farooq, killed a month after the attack. Eventually, 15 of the 19 persons involved in the case were declared killed in various encounters in J&K. A letter rogatory sent by India to the Pakistan government has got no response. 

In the 2008 Mumbai case, under international pressure, Pakistan's initial co-operation, including a solid investigation by its Federal Investigation Agency, arrests and trial of some of the accused, petered out. Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif's offer to participate in a “neutral and transparent” investigation into the Pahalgam attack does not pass the smell test because such so-called joint efforts in the past have led nowhere.

His brother Nawaz Sharif had made a similar offer when he was prime minister during the 2016 attack on Pathankot airbase. India took up that offer, as the JeM attack came soon after a month of hectic India-Pakistan moves towards a peace dialogue, culminating in Prime Minister Narendra Modi's unscheduled stopover on his way back from Kabul at Lahore to meet with Sharif at his Raiwind home. A Pakistani team, comprising senior security officials from the Pakistan Army and the ISI, even visited Pathankot airbase and other parts of the district. But Pakistan did not act upon the evidence provided by India.

The challenge for India is to join the dots between TRF, which initially claimed the attack, and the LeT, and from there to show the involvement of the Pakistani State, not just by assertion but with investigation-based evidence. Such evidence must stand up to international scrutiny.   As importantly, only an honest investigation can help address India's own security failures to prevent such incidents from taking place. 

That the perpetrators of the massacre managed to cultivate a large network of overground helpers right under the noses of security agencies, at a time that the government was declaring local recruitment into militant outfits had dwindled to the low two digits, shows that something is badly broken about intelligence gathering, just as much as the failure to anticipate that Baisaran was a sitting duck, and that the adversary is not above targeting tourists. 

Unless these internal failures and fault lines are addressed, India's declaration that any terrorist attacks could be considered an act of war could end up as an invitation to elements that want to destabilise the region at a time and place of their choosing.

(Nirupama Subramanian is an independent journalist)

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