Editorial: The response to Ganderbal

The meaning of the massacre by Kashmiri separatist militants of seven workers at a construction worksite in Ganderbal district of Jammu & Kashmir on Sunday night is obvious. It came less than a week after the new chief minister of the Union Territory, Omar Abdullah, was sworn into office, after five years of direct rule by Delhi. And just one day prior to that, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar went to Islamabad for the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit, making it the first visit by a senior Indian minister to Pakistan in nine years.

The prospect of a return to civic normalcy and the olive branches offered to Jaishankar by the Pakistani leadership triggered a bloody response by the orchestrators of terror in Kashmir. The ruthless attack on unarmed non-combatants—a doctor, an electrician, a guard, a storekeeper and a mason among them—at a workers’ campsite was a wanton act aimed at disrupting infrastructure building in the Kashmir valley as well as vitiating public opinion in India against any reciprocation of Pakistani overtures.

Responsibility for the attack was claimed by a new organisation calling itself The Resistance Front (TRF), a militant group linked to Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba. It emerged to wider notice in October 2019, shortly after the abrogation of Article 370. Infrastructure projects and non-local workers have been its main targets. The target of Sunday night’s attack was a camp of workers building the Z-Morh tunnel along the highway connecting the Kashmir Valley and Ladakh. The strategic tunnel will bring the Srinagar-Leh highway, which remains closed in winter for two to four months, a step closer towards becoming an all-weather road, thereby facilitating easier troop movement to the disputed frontier with China.

Infrastructure building in Kashmir is both a crucial security objective for New Delhi and a dire necessity for the new administration in Srinagar to revive the territory’s economy and rekindle in the local population the faint embers of faith in the Indian Union. Given these twin priorities, India’s response to the massacre in Ganderbal needs to be measured. While Lt Gov. Manoj Sinha has vowed muscular retaliation by security agencies, he needs also to depart from the BJP playbook of being a thorn in the side of the state government and establish a good working relationship with the administration of Omar Abdullah. New Delhi must instruct its representative in Srinagar to treat the National Conference regime as a partner rather than as a scapegoat for security failures. Unlike in the past, when the state government used to have control of the police, law and order functions are now the preserve of the lieutenant governor. All powerful he might be, but Sinha needs the cooperation of the civil administration.

In a wider perspective, it is necessary also for New Delhi to come good on its promise of restoring statehood to Jammu & Kashmir. It’s a promise made by the Prime Minister on the floor of Parliament and any steps towards fulfilling it will be a signal of good faith, following up on the elections held to the Assembly last month. One has no expectation that the Narendra Modi government will own up to the failure of its Kashmir policy, evidence of which lies in the occurrence of 690 terror-related incidents leading to the death of 262 soldiers and 171 civilians since it assumed direct charge of the state. The least it can do to restore peace in the valley now is to switch tactics and work in concert with a government elected by the people.