MT Desk: The relations between India and Pakistan have taken a severe hit since the Pahalgam attack on April 22, 2025. The Modi Government’s hyper-knee-jerk reaction to the attack exposed the Bharatiya Janata Party’s ulterior motives to divert the public’s outrage over its misgovern onto Pakistan having ingredients to alter ugly stability in the region into a hot war between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan.
The attack at the Baisaran meadow—a tourist hotspot—near Pahalgam in the Anantnag district of the Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJK) resulted in the killing of 26 people and 17 people injured. The disturbing factor is that without proper investigation and substantial evidence, the Indian Government concluded that Pakistan was behind the tragic shootings of tourists.
Notably, the Resistance Front’, a hitherto unknown entity, claimed responsibility for the attack by stating that those targeted were not ordinary tourists but were affiliated with Indian security agencies. Modi Government is habitual in scapegoating Pakistan for concealing its misgovernance’s repercussions and sustaining its popularity in the Hindutva constituency domestically.
Its frequently repeated favourite narrative is that Pakistan has been pushing fighters across the heavily militarized Line of Control (LoC) between the two countries to launch attacks on Indian forces. Conversely, Islamabad denied the allegations and always offered New Delhi a neutral international probe into its acquisitions, including the recent allegations about Pahalgam.
Notably, even sane voices in India are questioning the Modi Government’s false narrative that ‘all is well’ in IIOJK.India’s opposition leader in the Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi, opined that the rulers should move beyond “hollow claims” of peace in IIOJK. Instead of admitting its intelligence failure and security forces’ incompetency in protecting the tourists in Pahalgam, the Indian ruling elite has been accusing and threatening Pakistan.
Indian Defence Minister, Rajnath Singh, warned, “Those responsible and behind such an act will very soon hear our response, loud and clear.” He added, “We won’t just reach those people who carried out the attack. We will also reach out to those who planned this from behind the scenes on our land.
” He failed to realize that any kinetic action by India against Pakistan would invite quid pro quo plus a response by Pakistani defence forces.
On 23 April2025, the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS), India’s highest decision-making body on national security, chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, decided to sanction a series of punitive actions against Pakistan to deflect the world’s attention from India’s brutality in IIOJ, repression of minorities internally and transnational terrorism by raising false-flags.