J&K: TERROR GRIPS VALLEY
The night of February 28 saw security forces unleash a barrage of gunfire to take down suspected Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) militants in Handwara’s Baba Gund village. Following a prolonged lull in the firing the next afternoon, the army, the CRPF and police personnel, believing the JeM men to be dead, began searching the encounter site. Suddenly, a militant sprang out of the debris of a house and opened fire, killing five security personnel, including a CRPF inspector. The gunfight continued for 56 hours until the two militants were neutralised on March 3.
Baba Gund is the fifth encounter since the Pulwama terror attack. With the count at 56 (12 after Pulwama) this year, the security forces have not only lost more men than the militants but it is also the biggest loss of uniformed personnel since 2002.
These incidents point to the increasing presence of Pakistan-trained JeM and Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) militants in the Valley. Four days after the Pulwama attack, on February 18, five security personnel, including 33-year-old Major Vibhuti Shankar Dhoundial, were killed in Pinglena, Pulwama, in what is being described as the “fiercest encounter since Operation All Out” in 2017. Three JeM fighters, including two highly trained Pakistani marksmen and a local, were killed. Of the 46 militants killed this year, 14 of the 18 eliminated after the Pulwama blast belonged to the JeM, including, says the army, a key conspirator in the Pulwama attack— Mudasir Khan of Kashmir’s Tral area.
Intelligence officials estimate that
50 to 60 JeM men have succeeded in infiltrating since 2018. While the security forces have mounted tighter controls along the LoC in north Kashmir, both Jaish and LeT have been slipping through the mountainous Pir Panjal region and the international border. Early evidence of this was available in the chance encounter at Nagrota in September last year, in which three Jaish men were gunned down.
It now appears that most of the infiltrators are not known to the security establishment in the Valley and the militants have possibly been lying low, awaiting instructions from their handlers. This, police officials privately admit, is why there was confusion and delay in identifying Jaish militants killed in recent encounters. An officer of the paramilitary counterinsurgency force cites the Pinglena gunfight where the security forces’ initial contention that they had killed the new Jaish commander and alleged mastermind of the Pulwama attack, Ghazi Abdul Rashid, proved false (see box). It was after the JeM released photos of the slain men on social networks that they were identified as ‘commander’ Rashid and Ubaid (both Pakistanis) and Hilal Ahmad, a local Kashmiri.
All this adds up to another disquieting reality: the Jaish has succeeded in recruiting many ‘trustworthy’ locals as its “eyes and ears” in the Valley. In the recent encounters at Pinglena, Baba Gund and Turigam (Kulgam district) and Tral, each JeM group included at least one local militant. Officials believe that local support is a key reason that the Jaish has been able to re-establish a presence in the Valley after having been relatively comatose since 2005.
It is in such a scenario that the Election Commission, acting on inputs from the Union home ministry and the state government, decided to defer assembly polls in the state. Every mainstream party in Kashmir, eager to see an elected government in the state, predictably slammed the decision. Former chief minister and National Conference vice-president Omar Abdullah tweeted his disgust: “PM Modi has surrendered to Pakistan, to the militants & to the Hurriyat…,” he said, adding in a subsequent tweet: “Balakote and Uri are not symbols of PM Modi’s handling of national security, J&K is and look at the mess he has made there...”
The decision to not hold Lok Sabha and assembly polls simultaneously is premised on the Centre’s inability to provide adequate numbers of paramilitary personnel. In J&K, the EC needs to not only secure polling stations and staff but also provide protection to each and every candidate. CRPF inspector general Zulfikar Hasan is, however, confident that his men are adequately equipped and motivated to take on the resurrected JeM threat. One of them, a 28-year-old trooper from Uttar Pradesh, says the bigger worry for the security forces is the hostile civilian crowd that unerringly swarms encounter sites to disrupt ongoing operations.
As Srinagar-based 15 Corps commander Lt. Gen. K.J.S. Dhillon says, recent casualties show that army, police and paramilitary “officers are leading from the front”. The strain is beginning to show: at both Pinglena and Baba Gund, security personnel spent days on high alert. And it is only going to get worse in the countdown to the Lok Sabha poll, which commences in the Valley on April 11.