Pakistan vows to act over India’s Kashmir move
Pakistan’s military will “go to any extent” to support Kashmiris, the army chief has said, while President Imran Khan predicted that there would be new suicide bombings in Indian-administered Kashmir after New Delhi revoked the region’s self-rule.
General Qamar Javed Bajwa said the military, which largely controls Pakistan’s regional security policy, “stands by the Kashmiris in their just struggle to the very end”.
Residents of Indian-administered Kashmir were yesterday still under tightened security restrictions, with phones and internet cut after the sudden decision to abolish political autonomy in the disputed territory with a Muslim majority.
As Pakistan’s Parliament met to discuss the move, Khan predicted that there would be more terrorist attacks in Kashmir like the blast that killed 40 paramilitary police in Pulwama in February.
“With an approach of this nature, incidents like Pulwama are bound to happen again,” Khan said.
There are fears that New Delhi’s move to revoke Article 370 of the constitution may send the region into a new spiral of deepening militant violence.
“Jihad is now obligatory for Muslims in Pakistan because our Kashmiri sisters are waiting for our help,” said Maulana Abdul Aziz, a former prayer leader at the notorious Red Mosque in Islamabad.
The preacher, who led an Islamist uprising in 2007 that was put down in a bloody siege, released an audio message yesterday saying that if Pakistan’s Government could not help people in Kashmir, then it should open the border for militants to fight.
Mullah Massod Azhar, chief of the Jaish-e-Mohammad militant group, which India blames for the Pulwama bombing and a string of other attacks, said New Delhi’s decision marked a new chapter for the Kashmir conflict.
Pakistan’s military has for decades been accused of supporting jihadists such as Jaish-e-Mohammad to push their agenda in Kashmir. It promised tougher action earlier in the year, but during Khan and Bajwa’s successful visit to Washington last month American officials told them that they still wanted to see “irreversible action” against terrorist and militant groups.
The Kashmir crisis now means Pakistan’s military has to decide whether to defy the United States just as relations appeared to be warming, said Farzana Shaikh, a Pakistan expert at the Chatham House thinktank.
She said: “Pakistan has fine-tuned the business of plausible deniability, so there is still the possibility that these groups, some of them will be unleashed. But it’s not clear what [the army’s] going to do now, given that it was until recently basking in the glow of a new era in US-Pakistan relations.”