Kashmir attack escalates India-Pakistan tensions

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday reacted strongly after police identified two attackers behind a deadly militant attack on tourists in Kashmir as Pakistani nationals, vowing to track, trace, and punish the terrorists and their supporters.

Speaking in the eastern Indian state of Bihar, Modi paid tribute to the 26 people shot dead in a meadow in the Pahalgam area of Indian Kashmir.

“We will pursue them to the ends of the earth,” Modi said, without naming the attackers’ nationality or Pakistan.

But tensions between the nuclear-armed rivals appeared set to escalate after India late on Wednesday ruptured ties with Pakistan, suspending a sixteen-year-old water treaty and closing the only land border crossing between the neighbors.

Pakistan’s Energy Minister Awais Lekhari called the suspension of the Indus Waters Treaty “an act of water war; a cowardly, illegal move.”

Pakistan also closed its airspace to Indian airlines and warned against violation of the water treaty.

Indian Kashmir police on Thursday issued posters naming three militants suspected of “involvement” in the attack and announcing rewards for information leading to their capture.

The posters stated that two of the three suspected militants were Pakistani nationals.

India and Pakistan control separate parts of Kashmir and both claim the territory in full.

Indian Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri said on Wednesday that a cabinet committee on security had been briefed on the cross-border links of the attack, the worst against civilians in the country in nearly two decades.

Misri, the top diplomat in India’s foreign ministry, did not offer any evidence of the links or provide further details.

Misri said New Delhi would withdraw its defense advisers in Pakistan and reduce the number of personnel at its mission in Islamabad from 55 to 30.

Local media reports said India summoned Pakistan’s top diplomat in New Delhi to inform him that all defense advisers at the Pakistani mission had been declared persona non grata and given a week to leave.

Modi also called an all-party meeting to brief them on the government’s response to the attack.

Dozens of protesters gathered outside the Pakistani Embassy in New Delhi’s diplomatic enclave on Thursday, chanting slogans and pushing against police barricades.

Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar said in Islamabad that Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif would hold a National Security Committee meeting to discuss Pakistan’s response.

The Indus Treaty, brokered by the World Bank and signed in 1960, regulated the sharing of waters from the Indus River and its tributaries between India and Pakistan. The treaty has since survived two wars between the neighbors and serious tensions in relations at other times.

Diplomatic relations between the two countries were weak even before the latest measures were announced, after Pakistan expelled India’s envoy and India did not send its high commissioner to New Delhi after it revoked Kashmir’s semi-autonomous status in 2019.

Tuesday’s attack is seen as a setback for what Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party have projected as a major success in removing the special status held by the state of Jammu and Kashmir and bringing peace and development to the long-troubled Muslim-majority region.

While India frequently accuses Pakistan of involvement in the insurgency in Kashmir, Islamabad maintains it only provides diplomatic and moral support.

Tens of thousands of people have been killed in Kashmir since the insurgency began in 1989, but the insurgency has waned in recent years and tourism has increased in the naturally beautiful region.