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Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi vows to "pay a high price" to those responsible for the suicide attack that killed at least 41 paramilitaries on Thursday in Indian Kashmir. The attack, claimed by Islamist group Jaish-e-Mohammed, based in Pakistan, occurred a few weeks before legislative elections in India. Interview with Christophe Jaffrelot, research director at CERI-Sciences Po.
RFI: The attack in Indian Kashmir has been claimed by the Islamist group Jaish-e-Mohammed, based in Pakistan. What do we know about this group?
Christophe Jaffrelot: It is an organization now old, created in 2000 by Masood Azhar. The Indians captured the jihadist in Kashmir, and had to release him during the hijacking plane hijacking that landed in Kandahar in 1999.
Barely out of prison, he created this organization, Jaish-e-Mohammed, based in Pakistan's Punjab. That's where they operate. Quite freely, it seems. The Pakistani authorities have never put Masood Azhar in trouble to the point that he must stop these activities. And the Indians have never managed to get him on the list of UN terrorists because of the Chinese veto. Repeatedly, Beijing has somehow saved Private Masood Azhar to please his Pakistani allies.
Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba are the two most active groups in Indian Kashmir, especially in the Srinagar Valley. Lashkar-e-Taiba has long sought to establish a chapter of his organization in Indian Kashmir, and he has been active beyond that region since he was responsible for the Bombay bombing in 2008.
India says Pakistan is behind Thursday's attack, an assertion Islamabad rejects.
Of course. Pakistan still denies this sort of thing. In fact, we can think that it is a little more complicated than what the Indians say. There is certainly some logistics coming from Pakistan - you probably can not so easily acquire the 350 kilos of explosives stored in the vehicle that hit the Indian military convoy.
But at the same time, there are certainly local complicities of a greater magnitude than in the past. The perpetrator of the suicide bombing is Indian. He joined Jaish-e-Mohammed only last year, and lived in the Srinagar Valley.
There is another logic: if Pakistani groups can now find relays among the local population to the point of carrying out large-scale operations, it is not only the Pakistani problem that the Indians have to deal with, but also that of the Pakistani people. the alienation of a Kashmiri youth, which Narendra Modi's policy in Jammu and Kashmir has only complicated.
What has been Narendra Modi's policy in Indian Kashmir since he came to power five years ago?
There is a degradation, there is no doubt. The number of people killed has been increasing steadily for five years. They are mostly activists, civilians and of course soldiers. On the one hand, there is a political reason: Narendra Modi's BJP wanted to run the state of Jammu and Kashmir in coalition with a local political force, the PDP. After a while, the PDP realized that the Hindu nationalists had absolutely no desire to normalize the situation in the region and withdrew from the coalition.
This allowed the government of Narendra Modi to take power directly, by imposing the "president's rule", the presidential authority. Jammu and Kashmir has therefore been headed from Delhi for months now. This is a first cause of alienation for the Kashmiris: not to let them govern themselves, it is one of the oldest defects of Indian politics in the region.
And then there is a second cause of alienation: the all-out crackdown that continues to grow in the area. Military development is considerable. The convoy attacked on Thursday had 78 vehicles. There were thousands of soldiers coming back from leave. In Jammu and Kashmir there are about 500,000 permanently deployed troops, with a ratio that is probably now 1 to 5 or 1 to 10 soldiers per inhabitant depending on the area.
And this repression took the form of assassinations, in any case of extraconstitutional murders. In 2016, for example, young activists were targeted, which provoked widespread popular mobilisations that were also repressed. The cycle of repression has accelerated and intensified. Just like its shape. The Indian army uses cartridges filled with lead pellets that have terrible effects when one targets the head. Many demonstrators were blinded, and sometimes very young.
We now see teenagers among the activists. The armed opposition has changed and now involves children. To the point that the military has sounded the alarm and called on politicians to resume forms of negotiation. Because the military does not want to have to repress children.
It is soon the elections in India. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is seeking a second term. Is the objective of this attack to put him in difficulty?
It is certain that for the Islamist militants of Indian Kashmir, this attack can be a political message: to demonstrate that he did not find the solution in the zone, but on the contrary, he took the risk of climb to extremes and that, suddenly, he has a backlash. But at the same time, attacks like this, there are all the time - a dozen in recent months. We talk very little because obviously the human toll is never as heavy. There, when you have 40 Indian army dead, that's the headline. But it is difficult to know if the attack is linked to the electoral calendar or if it is a fairly comparable operation to those conducted regularly, but this time of a much greater magnitude because of the human toll .
We can also, possibly, make the assumption that this attack aims to prevent Narendra Modi and Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan and talk to each other. Because Imran Khan makes concessions, openings ... And we know very well that for the Pakistani Islamists (including Jaish-e-Mohammed), as for the Pakistani army besides, any negotiation with India is to be banned and that we must continue the fight to liberate Indian Kashmir from the guardianship of New Delhi.
Was Kashmir already a campaign theme, and if it is not, will it become so ?
When we talk about Kashmir, we will talk about Pakistan. And when we talk about Kashmir we're going to talk about Muslims, and when we talk about Muslims we'll talk about Pakistan ... This is all part of the backdrop against which the BJP's strategy of polarizing the electorate a line of religious cleavage.
One can think that if the BJP led the worst policy in Kashmir, it is precisely to show the population that decidedly there is nothing to do with these Muslims, we can not manage the country with them. a natural and natural way. We can think that, yes, it will return in the election campaign, but it is very difficult to say today if this strategy can still bear fruit. Because there is a real lassitude vis-à-vis these issues. The BJP is no longer credible in terms of protector of the Hindu since its policy is translated by the death of ten Indian soldiers - Hindus in this case. Don, it can be part of an electoral strategy. The effectiveness of it remains to be verified ...
What are Narendra Modi's options for responding to this attack ?
He has little room for maneuver. A fortiori because we entered the electoral campaign and that if it takes the risk of a spectacular operation, if this one fails the return of stick will be even more damaging for its projects and its electoral prospects.
Diplomatic retaliation has begun: India has just canceled the "most favored nation" clause that Pakistan had never accepted. So, at the commercial level it will not make any difference, we are purely in the symbol.
On the other hand, they announced a military operation. Is this a simple escalation of the ceasefire violation on the line of control in Jammu and Kashmir? Which would be the low assumption - more gunfire, shells that go over the border (which is a de facto border, no right, in Kashmir). We have already seen this intensification in recent years, with shooting that can result in mostly civilian casualties: it is Pakistani peasants and Indian peasants in return who are killed by attacks from the other side.
The high hypothesis is a reissue of what was done in 2016, what was called at the time a " surgical strike " aimed at training camps for jihadists on the Pakistani side of Kashmir. But it is also likely that they are a little folded, and are a little further from the line of control. A "surgical" operation of this kind would therefore involve a greater penetration of Pakistani territory. And the Pakistanis, if they were surprised by the first surgical strike in 2016, are now on their guard ... So, here we are on a hypothesis that is still less likely, because the risk of escalation and a failure in such an operation, in the midst of an election campaign, still seems very dissuasive.
So, in the coming weeks, we will probably have an operation, but not of a magnitude that would imply for the government to take such a considerable risk. Or it's just the military adventure, and there we are in a register that could lead to the postponement of the elections themselves - finally we are in another logic.