Why India must shift to strategic offence to secure Kashmir

On April 22, 2025, Baisaran, a higher valley above Pahalgam, echoed not with the laughter of visiting tourists but with gunfire. Armed terrorists emerged from the pine forest, forcing tourists to line up and demanding they recite Islamic verses. Those who faltered were executed on the spot. Twenty-six civilians, including a Nepali national and several newlyweds, were murdered in what was no random killing but a calculated Hindu massacre. Among the dead was Manjunath, visiting Kashmir with his wife, Pallavi, and son, who survived only because a terrorist chillingly told Pallavi, “I won’t kill you. Go and tell Modi.”

Intelligence inputs revealed that the perpetrators were foreign terrorists, affiliated with Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), a UN-proscribed terror outfit headquartered in Muridke, Pakistan. Forensic teams later confirmed that terrorists used Chinese AK-47s and American M4 carbine assault rifles. The men were trained killers, infiltrated via Pakistan-Occupied Jammu & Kashmir (PoJK), supported by Pakistan’s military, and facilitated by its intelligence agency, the ISI.

As grief engulfed the nation, action followed. Within hours, Union Home Minister Amit Shah was on the ground in Srinagar. Prime Minister Narendra Modi cut short his Saudi state visit and convened the Cabinet Committee on Security meeting just off the tarmac at Delhi Airport the next day.

By then Intelligence had identified the terrorists: Suleiman, Jibran, and Hamza “Afghani”, all Pakistani nationals trained in Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir (PoJK).

Armed with solid evidence directly implicating Pakistan, PM Modi swiftly ordered immediate diplomatic and economic countermeasures against Islamabad. Citing material breach, India suspended the Indus Waters Treaty, with Modi asserting that “blood and water cannot flow together”.

Pakistan’s diplomats were expelled, and all visas were cancelled. Simultaneously, India’s security establishment swiftly mobilised to deliver its own decisive response. The reply came on May 7 when a deep-penetration multi-strike into PoJK and Pakistan’s Punjab province codenamed ‘Operation Sindoor’ obliterated nurseries of terror across the Line of Control (LoC) and the International Border.

PM Modi named the operation “Sindoor”, a word that connotes both sanctity and bereavement: many of the Baisaran victims were newly married Hindu couples, their crimson vermilion barely set before widowhood descended.

Guided by satellite reconnaissance and advanced targeting technologies, Indian Armed Forces executed a series of exquisitely calibrated strikes against nine terrorist redoubts: Lashkar-e-Taiba’s Sawai Nala and Bilal camps in Muzaffarabad; Jaish-e-Mohammed’s Gulpur and Abbas facilities in Kotli; and, most infamously, the sprawling Markaz Taiba at Muridke, the very academy that trained the gunmen who ravaged Mumbai in 2008. The barrage then shifted southwest to Bahawalpur, where Markaz Subhanallah, the headquarters of Jaish-e-Mohammed and its founder, Masood Azhar, was reduced to rubble.

These were no indiscriminate strikes but the surgical excision of Pakistan’s radical jihadist terror infrastructure: more than one hundred terrorists, including senior trainers and recruiters, were eliminated. Islamabad’s protestations of civilian casualties and religious infrastructure swiftly unravelled when leaked images revealed state funerals for UN-proscribed, now-dead terrorists, coffins draped in the Pakistani national flag, borne by officers of the ISI, local police, and the Pakistan Army.

Pakistan’s riposte to the Indian strikes on terror was a blunt show of asymmetric force; swarms of Turkish-made Songar and STM Kargu and Chinese-supplied drones targeted Indian civilians in cities such as Amritsar, Jammu, Srinagar, and Surat, while heavy artillery raked the LoC along Samba, Poonch, Rajouri, and more, indiscriminately hitting Gurdwaras, churches, and temples along the LoC. India’s layered, largely indigenous air defence web, fronted by made-in-India S-400 batteries at Adampur and backed by Akash and Barak-8 interceptors, shot down almost all of those unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and loitering ammo, an effectiveness the world witnessed in awe and defence equipment companies scrambled to comprehend.

Recognising that Pakistan had decided to hit its civilians, New Delhi swiftly switched from defence to punishment: in a 22-minute blitz, cued by space-based Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) and AI-fused targeting, India crippled Pakistan’s air infrastructure, flattening drone hubs at Murid, gutting fighter pens at Rafiqui and Chunian, shattering Sukkur’s runway, and knocking Nur Khan’s AWACS shelters offline.

With radar screens dark and sortie rates collapsed, Pakistan’s Director-General of Military Operations rang his Indian counterpart to plead for an immediate “stoppage of firing”. PM Modi informed Parliament that India accepted, without a hint of external mediation, its objective achieved and its message unmistakably clear.

While Islamabad scrambled to tender repairs for its obliterated airbases, New Delhi redoubled the hunt on home soil. Operation Mahadev, an integrated sweep by the Army, Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), and Jammu and Kashmir Police, shadowed the Baisaran terrorists through dense woodland for fourteen weeks until, on July 28, 2025, the Baisaran terrorist trio was surrounded and neutralised in a Dachigam forest block outside Srinagar, under the brooding silhouette of Mount Mahadev.

Among the items recovered were the very AK-47s used in the Baisaran Hindu massacre, Pakistani voter-identity cards, and chocolate bars stamped “Made in Lahore”. When India’s Home Minister, Amit Shah, rose in Parliament to confirm the terrorists deaths, his statement was met with thunderous applause. More than 1,000 local residents had been interviewed, those who harboured them were arrested, and the bodies were identified by courageous citizens.

Building on the precedent set by the 2016 surgical strikes and the 2019 Balakot airstrike, Operation Sindoor established an entirely new threshold. Henceforth, any terrorist assault upon Indian soil will be treated as an act of war; New Delhi will draw no distinction between the terrorists and the state that shelters them; and Pakistan’s habitual nuclear blackmail will no longer afford it protection. Above all, Operation Sindoor remains unfinished business. The era of ‘strategic restraint’ was laid to rest and replaced by ‘offensive defence’, the doctrine championed by National Security Adviser Ajit Doval. The policy shift is historical.

However, for several decades Islamabad’s proxy war has been personified by a succession of Pakistani nationals who slipped across the LoC, wrought carnage, and, in most cases, died on Indian soil. Mast Gul set the grim template in 1995 when, leading Harkat-ul-Ansar terrorists, he torched the revered Charar-e-Sharief and escaped to a hero’s welcome in PoJK. A generation later Lashkar-e-Taiba’s Abu Qasim masterminded the August 5, 2015, Udhampur highway ambush that killed Border Security Force troopers, only to fall in a Kulgam encounter that October.

His mantle passed to Abu Dujana, whose video-broadcast bravado masked a record of hit-and-run assaults on Pampore and other army posts until he was gunned down in Pulwama in August 2017. That same year, LeT gunman Abu Ismail planned the Amarnath Yatra bus attack, murdering eight Hindu pilgrims; he lasted barely two months before being cornered on Srinagar’s outskirts.

The most notorious of the lot, Naveed Jatt, escaped police custody from Srinagar’s SMHS Hospital in 2018, assassinated senior Kashmiri journalist Shujaat Bukhari, and was himself neutralised by the Indian Security forces that November in Budgam.

Each terrorist enjoyed ISI facilitation, specialised in high-profile ambushes designed for maximum communal shock, and left behind a trail of civilian and security-force deaths that highlight how PoJK’s occupation has resulted in its curation as a factory for cross-border terror.

While the amendment of Article 370 of the Indian constitution in 2019 changed the ground reality. With local terrorist recruitment drying up, Pakistan turned increasingly to foreign fighters. The target killing of Hindus, labourers in Kashmir under the false pretext of domicile recipients, the Reasi terror attack in 2024, and the Baisaran Hindu massacre in 2025 are proof of Pakistani desperation, and India’s reply is proof of capability.

Ultimately, enduring security in the Himalayas hinges on reclaiming Pakistan-occupied Jammu & Kashmir and the Pakistan-occupied Territories of Ladakh (PoTL), illegally occupied in 1947 and methodically fashioned into a crucible of jihad.

Muzaffarabad’s training grids and the Neelum Valley’s shadowed ravines continue to disgorge terrorists and hateful indoctrination across the Line of Control; so long as these launchpads and extremist ideologues persist, peace will remain elusive.

Now, grief has hardened into resolve: from Srinagar’s streets to Rameshwaram’s shores, Indians of every shade stand united behind decisive action. The strategic verdict is clear: deterrence alone is no longer enough. Hence, India’s strategy must now include not just ‘offensive defence’ but reclamation.

Rahul Pawa is an international criminal lawyer and director of research at New Delhi based think tank Centre for Integrated and Holistic Studies. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.