“The Pahalgam Abyss”

A grim, thoughtful piece by Pratap Bhanu Mehta in the Indian Express after the Pahalgam terrorist attack. Some excerpts:

“The horrific killing of tourists that has left the meadows of Pahalgam stained with the blood of more than two dozen corpses produces a sickening sense vertigo — like the fall of the falcon, “turning and turning in the widening gyre,” to borrow W B Yeats’ metaphor. The moral issue in this attack is clear. There are no root causes, no mitigating circumstances, that can contextualise its enormity. People were targeted for their religion. . . .

But the tragedy of the moment is that the bloody frontier this act in Pahalgam has drawn will still shadow our political destiny, whichever way we act.. . .

The Pakistani army has not, for a long time, had an even minimally imaginative view of the country’s future. Its greatest strength is not honourable negotiation with adversaries. It is proxy wars, the use of chaos and terror to substitute for its strategic failures and dalliance with religious fundamentalism. The problem with such a state is that it is not clear what counts as deterrence or punishment. At best, it positions itself for tactical reprieves . . . .

ut the point of the attack seems to be to underscore Kashmir’s vulnerability: How fragile any sense of normalcy will be so long as a combination of Pakistan and some home-grown militancy remains a feature of the political landscape. Speaking in instrumental terms, the securitisation of Kashmir will again deepen, pushing the state towards the vicious circle out of which it has struggled to emerge . . . .

what it more subtly does is reinforce the idea that so long as India remains besieged by states like Pakistan, with weaponised religious identities, the 1947 modus vivendi of a secular India is no longer viable. Either the logic of 1947 must be completed, or it must be undone. This is the dominant mood in contemporary India. The consequences of either option are too dire to contemplate. The falcon of peace and secularism is in free fall, and there is no falconer to whose call it can respond”