A Fire on the Mountain

Mohammad’s three-star hotel in the pine-fringed town of Pahalgam should be fully occupied this time of year. All his rooms had been booked until the end of August by honeymooners and vacationers from different parts of India. But now, the hotel’s lobby is empty and quiet except for a guard’s footsteps on the walnut-wood floor. Last year, “the season was so good I barely had time to go home,” Mohammad says softly, recalling how tourists flooded into the Kashmir valley in record numbers. “This year was even busier. Then everything changed overnight.”

That was on April 22, when armed militants opened fire on holidaying families in a meadow in the Baisaran Valley not far from Mohammad’s hotel. When the shooting stopped, twenty-six people lay dead, and more than a dozen were injured. Survivors later recounted that the gunmen singled out Hindu tourists before shooting. Among the slain was a Kashmiri Muslim tour guide, a young pony handler who died trying to safeguard tourists from the bullets. In the week that followed, Mohammad, who asked that we use only his first name, watched his bookings evaporate. Word of the bloodshed spread like wildfire. Panicked phone calls from Delhi and Mumbai flooded his reception desk as incoming visitors pleaded for cancellations and refunds. By the following morning, Pahalgam’s main market was a ghost town.

“Trust me, I swear by Allah, it broke my heart to hear what happened to those tourists. I can’t tell you I understand their pain because it is only them who went through this, not me,” he tells me. “But I can tell you, whoever has done this is not a human being, let alone a Muslim. And doing this in the name of Islam or in the name of Kashmir is totally inaccurate and unacceptable.” Mohammad joined a candlelight vigil of Kashmiris that night who publicly condemned the violence and prayed for the victims. His own suffering is tangible. The cancellations have cost him the bulk of his yearly income. “Not just in Pahalgam, but across Kashmir’s prime tourist areas, hotels and resorts are being put up for sale. Some small hotel owners, buried in debt, can no longer hold out.” Ironically, Kashmir’s tourism boom of the past year was often touted by Indian authorities as a sign that peace had returned to the region. Now the massacre in Pahalgam has not only stolen lives but shattered that carefully crafted image of normalcy.

Kashmir, a disputed Himalayan region and part of the only Muslim-majority state in India, has been contested ever since the partition of British India in 1947. Both India and Pakistan claim the former princely state in full, and the dispute has ignited three wars between the two nuclear-armed countries. Its snow-capped glaciers feed all six of the Indus tributaries—Pakistan’s agricultural lifeline. These ridgelines are considered a strategic advantage for early warning and military intelligence in previous wars dating back to 1948. Beneath these peaks also lie coveted deposits of minerals and other natural resources. Recently, a lithium reserve estimated at 5.9 million tons—the world’s seventh largest—was discovered in Reasi, adding to the region’s geopolitical and economic significance.

A de facto boundary, the Line of Control, now splits Kashmir, but it has never been respected by both countries. A separatist insurgency against Indian rule, which erupted in the late 1980s with Pakistani support, turned Kashmir into one of the most militarized regions on earth. The rebellion was met with a brutal counterinsurgency from the Indian state; thousands of civilians were caught in the crossfire, many of whom simply “disappeared.”

A turning point came in August 2019 when India’s Hindu nationalist government revoked Kashmir’s (already hollowed out) semi-autonomous status, dissolved its legislature, and split the state into federally controlled territories overnight. The move—wildly popular in much of India—was meant to cement New Delhi’s grip and, as the ruling government claimed, to bring “development and peace.” Over the next few years, the government promoted Kashmir as a tranquil tourist destination, insisting the separatism and insurgency had been crushed. Violence fell to its lowest level in decades, even as political freedoms were curtailed. Tourists thronged the valley, and by early 2025, it seemed the gunfire had finally given way to the hustle of tour buses.

This image was punctured by the Pahalgam massacre. Within hours of the assault, India’s government pointed fingers at Pakistan. Police circulated the names of three suspects, alleging two were Pakistani nationals. New Delhi claimed the attack had “cross-border linkages” in it and vowed to punish Pakistan for its purported role. Pakistan’s leadership, for its part, publicly denied any involvement, even offering to support a neutral investigation. A little-known militant group, The Resistance Front—which India claims is an offshoot of Pakistan-based Islamist terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba—emerged on social media to claim responsibility for the attack, only to apparently walk it back several days later. What followed was a familiar cycle for anyone in Kashmir: outrage, calls for revenge, and a sweeping security crackdown that made daily life difficult and frightening for ordinary Kashmiris.

Within hours of the attack, a vast security dragnet was thrown over Kashmir. Paramilitary troops and police combed across towns and villages. In the southern districts near Pahalgam, security forces carried out raids night after night, hauling men from their beds. “They came in the middle of the night, while we were asleep, and banged on our neighbor’s door,” says one young man from Anantnag, who asked not to be named. “They dragged the eldest son of the family and took him in a police truck. It was such a difficult moment to watch . . . you know, when events like these happen, everyone knows there is no distinction between the guilty and the innocent”

Over the following nights, hundreds of Kashmiris were taken from their homes by security forces. Local journalists reported that the police detained nearly two thousand people across the region in the first week alone—activists, former rebels, youth with old police records, and sometimes just young men who happened to live near the attack site. Many of those taken had no clear connection to the Pahalgam incident.

The crackdown extended even to those who had very scant connections to Pakistan. A night after the incident, Muzaffar was awakened past midnight by police at his home in Srinagar. Five decades earlier, Muzaffar’s father had briefly lived in Pakistan as a young man. It was during that time that Muzaffar, who also asked that we only use his first name, was born; he spent his childhood there before the family resettled in India. He is an Indian citizen, and his entire family holds Indian passports. However, that did not stop Indian authorities from ordering their deportation to Pakistan.

Muzaffar recalls how the officers who arrived at his home gave his family just two hours to pack whatever they could. His ailing mother, dependent on medical oxygen, could not believe the reality, sitting in stunned silence while she prepared for forced exile. By the next day, four members of the family were aboard a guarded convoy heading to the Wagah border crossing. But then, Muzaffar’s son, Jibran, recounts, “something close to a miracle happened. They told us we would not be sent to Pakistan.” He believes it was likely due to the intervention of India’s Supreme Court, which halted the expulsion of Indian passport holders and those who had been living in India since before 2010.

For now, the family has been allowed to return home. But the ordeal has sent a chill through Kashmiris with any ties across the border. “After what happened to us, everyone is scared,” says Jibran. “It was the most horrible night I’ve ever experienced—and I hope I never have to go through anything like it again. We’re being punished for crimes we didn’t commit. They should go after the real militants—I’m not against that. But by punishing innocent people, they’re alienating locals. I want to leave and live somewhere else. But then again, Kashmiris aren’t safe anywhere in India.”

Jibran’s last words proved prescient. In the wake of the attack, Kashmiris living outside their homeland found themselves under a cloud of suspicion. Across Indian cities, a wave of angry protests erupted, with some demonstrators and TV pundits calling for revenge. One right-wing Hindu group went so far as to urge the government to see that Kashmir is “flattened like Gaza” in retaliation, invoking Israel’s genocide in Palestine.

Syed Wahid, a twenty-year-old Kashmiri student in Punjab, was hundreds of miles away from where the violence took place. But on the morning of April 23, as news of the Pahalgam massacre dominated headlines, he felt its heat. Walking onto his college campus in Mohali, he was met almost immediately by cold, hostile stares from fellow students. Rumors had spread in the campus that Kashmiris were somehow celebrating the attack. “They called me a terrorist and even abused my sister and mother,” he later recounted. Campus security intervened, but the damage was done. The next day, the college administration suspended Kashmiri students’ classes and exams, advising them to “return home for their own safety.” According to media reports, at least seventeen assaults against Kashmiri students were recorded across India in the week after the attack. “Our only fault is that we are from Kashmir,” another student from Mohali says. “We are treated as suspects no matter where we go.”

Kashmiri traders in Mussoorie, Uttrakhand, told of landlords suddenly evicting them. In one case, a Kashmiri handicrafts salesman and his family were forced out of their rented flat overnight after neighbors accused them of being “sympathizers” of the Pahalgam attackers. Elsewhere, a group of Kashmiri apple merchants traveling to a market were harassed by a mob chanting patriotic slogans.

Meanwhile, India and Pakistan traded provocations, raising the possibility of a wider conflict. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government unveiled a list of drastic measures ostensibly aimed at punishing Pakistan. New Delhi suspended the Indus Waters Treaty, a six-decades-old water-sharing agreement that has survived multiple wars between the two countries and sustains 80 percent of Pakistan’s irrigated agriculture. In another punitive move, India expelled several Pakistani diplomats and restricted trade and travel. Pakistan’s government, denying any involvement in the Pahalgam attack, responded in kind—cutting its own trade ties, kicking out Indian envoys, and even closing its airspace to Indian planes. In the following days, multiple international airlines rerouted their flights to avoid Pakistani airspace, anxious that the simmering tensions between the nuclear-armed neighbors might erupt into a direct confrontation.

Back in Kashmir, these high-level escalations only deepened the anxiety. Every announcement from New Delhi seemed to foreshadow war. On national television, the Indian government declared it would conduct nationwide “wartime” drills—the first countrywide civil defense exercise since the 1971 Indo-Pakistan war. Across Indian cities, air-raid sirens are scheduled to blare, and emergency crews will rehearse for bombings. The authorities bill it as a preparedness exercise, but to many Kashmiris, it feels like rehearsing for Armageddon. “Kashmir’s highways are clogged with military convoys, and there are whispers that hospitals have been told to stock extra supplies, just in case,” says Dr. Khan, who asked to go by a pseudonym, a PhD scholar based at the University of Kashmir in Srinagar. “War is a drum that keeps beating in the distance for us. We know if there’s a war, we will be the first ones to suffer.”

Before the drills could sound, the retaliation everyone feared came to pass. On Wednesday of last week, India launched Operation Sindoor, unleashing a series of coordinated strikes on nine targets within Pakistan. Indian warplanes and long-range missiles hit what New Delhi described as “terrorist infrastructure”—training camps and logistics nodes tied to the Pahalgam massacre. Pakistani military officials said that more than twenty people were killed and dozens more injured in the attack. Indian officials, meanwhile, framed the action as a “measured, non-escalatory, proportionate, and responsible” reprisal for the April 22 bloodbath. Pakistan vowed to respond to what it called an “act of war.” They launched Operation Bunyan Marsoos, an Arabic phrase meaning “a structure forged of lead,” targeting at least six Indian military bases, according to Al Jazeera, and sending drones to prowl the skies above Poonch, Jammu, and Amritsar. India, on its part, claimed that their advanced Russian-made S-400 defense system had intercepted many of the incoming threats, yet the damage was still done: dozens soon lay dead.

Then, in a surprise turn on Saturday, President Trump announced on his Truth Social feed that a “full and immediate” U.S.-brokered ceasefire would take place. Soon after, both the warring countries confirmed the deal. However, while people in both countries felt relief, a ceasefire is no guarantee of peace; it is a Band-Aid pressed over a wound that can easily be peeled away.

The truce’s fragility revealed itself very quickly. Just hours after the agreement went into effect, both parties accused the other of violating its terms, and drones were spotted hovering over Srinagar’s skies. What followed felt almost surreal: bursts of explosions lit up the night as Indian armed forces deployed air defense systems to shoot down the drones, triggering a series of blasts in the air—something the city hadn’t witnessed even during the previous three days of no-holds-barred air warfare.

Earlier, as I was preparing to leave Mohammad at his hotel. I thanked him for his time. He let his words fall like a sigh: “This massacre shattered a season of hope in Kashmir.” The missiles deepened the rupture; the ceasefire, hastily stitched, could not heal it. In Kashmir, the air may momentarily smell less of cordite, but the old question still lingers: How long until the blood flows again?