After 26 people, most of them tourists, were killed last week in the Indian-administered part of Kashmir, India’s government called the massacre a terrorist attack and cited “cross-border linkages” to Pakistan.
A group calling itself the Resistance Front emerged on social media to say it was behind the slaughter. Indian officials privately say the group is a proxy for Lashkar-e-Taiba, a terrorist organization based in Pakistan.
But India, citing national security concerns, has publicly provided little evidence linking the attack to Pakistan, which denies involvement and says that Lashkar-e-Taiba is largely inoperative. Pakistan has also called for an international investigation into the episode.
As India has appeared to make a case for conducting a military strike on Pakistan in retaliation for the Kashmir attack, it has pointed to what it calls Pakistan’s past pattern of support for militant groups targeting India.
What are the origins of the dispute?
The roots of the Kashmir conflict trace back to the 1947 partition of British India, which led to the creation of a predominantly Hindu India and a predominantly Muslim Pakistan.
In October of that year, the Hindu monarch of the Muslim-majority princely state of Kashmir acceded to India, but Pakistan laid claim to the territory and sought to take it by military force. A U.N.-brokered agreement in 1949 established a cease-fire line, dividing Kashmir.
After wars in 1965 and 1971, the cease-fire line became the Line of Control, with India possessing about two-thirds of Kashmir and Pakistan the rest. But the dispute remains unresolved.
How has Pakistan supported militancy?
An insurgency in the Indian-administered part of Kashmir began in the 1980s, primarily driven by local grievances, with Pakistan eventually supporting some groups, experts say.
Local elections in 1987 were widely perceived as rigged, disadvantaging a coalition of Muslim parties. “That led Kashmiri political activists to conclude they could never achieve their political demands at the ballot box,” said Christopher Clary, associate professor of political science at the University at Albany.
“A mostly indigenous insurgency emerged,” he said, “but over the next few years it was co-opted by Pakistan-based groups.”
Among the Kashmir-focused insurgent groups that emerged, some supported independence for the region, while others wanted the Indian side of Kashmir to be taken over by Pakistan.
In the 1990s, Pakistan provided training and other support to several militant groups operating in Kashmir and within Pakistan. This involvement was later acknowledged by several senior Pakistani officials, including the former military ruler Pervez Musharraf.
The insurgency began to ease around 2002, as Pakistan banned Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad, another major militant group, although Lashkar-e-Taiba continued to operate under aliases. A cease-fire was declared and a peace process with India was initiated, a shift that some observers linked to pressure by the United States after its post-9/11 intervention in Afghanistan.
The peace process collapsed after attacks in Mumbai, India, in 2008, which killed 166 people and were attributed to Lashkar-e-Taiba.
What evidence has India presented?
After the Mumbai attacks, India provided detailed dossiers that included intercepted communications between the attackers and their handlers in Pakistan.
Tariq Khosa, who led Pakistan’s investigation in the case, publicly confirmed that the inquiry had revealed the Pakistani nationality of the sole surviving attacker and that militants from Lashkar-e-Taiba had been trained in Pakistan.
After a deadly 2016 attack on the Pathankot air base in India, the country accused Jaish-e-Muhammad of orchestrating the assault, citing intercepted phone calls and statements from captured individuals.
Pakistan formed an investigative team that visited the air base, and it detained several Jaish-e-Muhammad members.
However, Pakistan did not grant India’s request to interrogate the militant group’s chief. The investigation produced inconclusive results, and no major convictions were achieved.
So far, India has not provided similar evidence to support its claims of Pakistani involvement in last week’s attack in Kashmir.
What is happening today?
Pakistan denies that it provides state support for militancy in Kashmir, though its leaders often express solidarity with Kashmiris who want independence from India. And Pakistan acknowledges that it provided funding and training for militant groups in the 1990s.
After last week’s attack in Kashmir, Pakistan’s defense minister, Khawaja Muhammad Asif, asserted that groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba were defunct.
Majid Nizami, an expert on jihadist groups who is based in Lahore, Pakistan, said that heightened scrutiny from the Financial Action Task Force, a Paris-based global financial watchdog, had pressured Pakistan to impose restrictions on Lashkar-e-Taiba’s leaders and confiscate the group’s financial assets.
Tightened border controls by India have also made infiltration across the Line of Control “almost impossible,” Mr. Nizami said.
The grievance that fuels militancy deepened after India’s decision in 2019 to revoke the special autonomy long granted to its part of Kashmir.
Despite Pakistan’s denials, Western observers say that it continues to provide some support to anti-India militants, including safe havens.
“There are homegrown Kashmiri militants,” Mr. Clary, the Albany professor, said. “But most observers assess that Pakistani-supported groups are more important than any homegrown militants.”
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