On April 22, 2025, three gunmen walked into the Baisaran Valley meadow near Pahalgam and killed 26 people, most of them tourists, in the deadliest attack on civilians in Indian-administered Kashmir in nearly two decades. Within hours, the Indian security establishment had begun what would become the largest crackdown in Kashmir since the abrogation of Article 370 in August 2019, a sweeping campaign of mass detentions, property demolitions, communication shutdowns, tourism closures, and expulsions that collectively transformed the valley’s security landscape more dramatically than the attack itself ever could. The crackdown was the domestic face of the same doctrine that produced Operation Sindoor abroad, and its scale raises the defining question of India’s post-Pahalgam response: whether security necessity justified what human rights organizations have called collective punishment of a civilian population for the actions of three gunmen.

The numbers alone tell a story that resists simple interpretation. Approximately 2,800 people were detained or summoned for questioning across Jammu and Kashmir in the weeks following April 22. At least 90 individuals were booked under the Public Safety Act, a preventive detention law that permits incarceration without trial for up to two years. Over 100 were charged under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, which makes bail functionally impossible in most cases. At least ten to twelve homes belonging to families of suspected militants were demolished by security forces, some through controlled explosions, others through bulldozers. Forty-eight of the valley’s eighty-seven tourist destinations were closed. Mobile internet services were suspended across multiple districts. Over 8,000 social media accounts were blocked nationwide. Nearly 800 Pakistani nationals, including women married to Kashmiri men, were ordered to leave the territory. The Indian government described these measures as security necessities in the aftermath of the worst terrorist attack in Kashmir in a quarter century. Human rights organizations, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and multiple UN Special Rapporteurs described them as collective punishment that violated international law.

Between these two characterizations lies the analytical terrain this article maps. The crackdown was neither a spontaneous security response nor a predetermined campaign waiting for a trigger. It was a set of measures that drew on established precedents from the post-Article 370 period, accelerated by the genuine security panic that the Pahalgam massacre produced, and shaped by a political environment in which restraint carried no electoral reward. Understanding what happened in Kashmir after April 22, 2025, requires understanding each measure on its own terms, what legal authority it invoked, what security purpose it claimed to serve, and whether it targeted identified threats or fell on the population broadly.

Background and Triggers

The Pahalgam attack did not occur in a vacuum. It struck a territory that had been under intensified security management since August 5, 2019, when the Indian government revoked Article 370 of the Constitution, stripped Jammu and Kashmir of its statehood, bifurcated it into two union territories, and imposed a communications blackout that lasted in various forms for eighteen months. The 2019 crackdown had detained thousands, including three former Chief Ministers, Farooq Abdullah, Omar Abdullah, and Mehbooba Mufti. By 2025, the security infrastructure built during the post-Article 370 period had never been fully dismantled. The PSA and UAPA remained the primary legal instruments for preventive detention, and the intelligence apparatus maintained extensive surveillance networks across the valley.

The period between 2019 and 2025 had seen a gradual normalization. Assembly elections were held in October 2024, and the National Conference formed a government, raising expectations that political detainees might be released and security measures relaxed. Kashmir’s tourism industry had recovered substantially, with record visitor numbers in 2024. The Pahalgam attack shattered this trajectory. It targeted the tourism sector specifically, shooting visitors in a meadow accessible only by foot or horseback, selecting victims by religion, and filming the attack with mounted cameras. The calculated nature of the violence, its targeting of the economic sector that represented Kashmir’s post-Article 370 recovery, and the involvement of The Resistance Front, a proxy of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba, guaranteed that the response would be severe.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi cut short a visit to Saudi Arabia and returned to New Delhi, pledging to pursue the attackers “to the ends of the earth.” Home Minister Amit Shah flew to Srinagar within hours. A Cabinet Committee on Security meeting at the Prime Minister’s residence the following day set the parameters for what would become a multi-layered response that operated simultaneously on the domestic, diplomatic, and military tracks. The diplomatic track saw India revoke Pakistani visas, suspend the Indus Waters Treaty, expel defense advisers, and close the Wagah border crossing. The military track culminated in Operation Sindoor on May 7. The domestic track, the one that affected Kashmir’s population most directly, began within hours of the attack and has, in many respects, never fully ended.

An important contextual detail has been largely overlooked in the post-attack analysis. A CRPF picket had been stationed close to or within the Baisaran meadow area but was removed in January 2025. Intelligence agencies had subsequently received warnings of a possible attack in the Kashmir valley, but the picket was not reinstated. Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha would later acknowledge this as a security failure, accepting full responsibility for the lapse. The fact that the attack succeeded in part because of an identifiable security shortcoming, the removal of a guard post in an area frequented by tourists, raises a question that the subsequent crackdown implicitly sought to avoid: whether the security establishment’s own failure, rather than any deficiency in its tools of population control, was the proximate cause of the Pahalgam massacre. The crackdown directed attention outward, toward the population that might harbor future threats, rather than inward, toward the institutional decision that had left Baisaran unprotected.

Kashmiri newspapers printed their front pages in black on April 23, a powerful and unanimous expression of mourning and condemnation. Civil society organizations across the valley issued statements condemning the attack in unambiguous terms. Kashmiri taxi drivers, hotel operators, and pony ride owners who depended on the tourism industry were among the attack’s most vocal critics, understanding that the violence had destroyed their livelihoods. The population’s response to the Pahalgam massacre was, by all available evidence, one of genuine horror and solidarity with the victims. This response represented a strategic opportunity for the Indian government: a moment when the Kashmiri population and the Indian state were aligned against a common enemy. The crackdown squandered this opportunity by treating the population that had condemned the attack as a potential threat rather than as a partner in the counter-terrorism effort.

The First Seventy-Two Hours

The initial security response began on the evening of April 22, 2025, before the full scope of the attack was even established. Jammu and Kashmir Police, Central Reserve Police Force personnel, and Indian Army units launched coordinated operations across the valley’s southern districts, where intelligence suggested the attackers had originated. The speed of the response reflected both genuine urgency, the attackers were still at large, and the pre-existing infrastructure of control that allowed security forces to activate mass detention protocols almost immediately.

Within the first twenty-four hours, authorities detained approximately 1,450 people across Kashmir. Of these, more than 250 were classified as overground workers, or OGWs, the term used by Indian security forces for civilians who provide logistical or intelligence support to militant organizations. The remaining 1,200 were detained under broader suspicion of involvement in terrorism-related activities. The detentions were concentrated in the southern Kashmir districts of Anantnag, Pulwama, Shopian, and Kulgam, the traditional heartland of militancy in the valley. By April 27, the number had risen to approximately 2,800, encompassing not only suspected OGWs but also journalists, civil society activists, students, and individuals whose primary offense appears to have been social media activity that authorities deemed “anti-national.”

The Jammu and Kashmir Police issued wanted notices for three suspects: Adil Hussain Thokar, described as a suspected Kashmiri militant, and two Pakistani nationals identified as Ali Bhai and Hashim Musa. A bounty of two million rupees, approximately $23,500, was placed on each suspect’s head. The National Investigation Agency arrived at the site on April 23 and formally assumed control of the investigation from the J&K Police on April 27, registering a case under the Indian Justice Code and the UAPA.

The speed of the NIA’s takeover reflected the political stakes involved. The Pahalgam attack was not merely a security incident; it was a political earthquake that demanded a visible, aggressive response. The initial police investigation produced sketches of the suspects and identified four attackers, claiming two were Kashmiri and two Pakistani. This finding was later revised by the NIA itself, which determined after a month-long investigation that all three attackers who fired on the tourists were Pakistani nationals linked to LeT. By the time the correction was issued, the damage was already done. The initial claim of Kashmiri involvement had fueled a wave of anti-Kashmiri sentiment across India and justified the breadth of the crackdown within the valley.

During those first seventy-two hours, authorities also established of mobile vehicle checkpoints across the valley, with security forces monitoring movement on all major highways and secondary roads. In Srinagar, police conducted raids at more than 60 locations on a single day, targeting what a police spokesman described as the “terrorist ecosystem.” The raids produced few arrests connected to the Pahalgam attack itself, but they generated the visual imagery of state power that the political situation demanded: armored vehicles at intersections, heavily armed troops conducting house-to-house searches, and columns of detained individuals being loaded into police vehicles. For Kashmiris who had lived through the 2019 lockdown, the scenes were grimly familiar. For those who had hoped the 2024 elections represented a genuine political opening, the scenes were a reminder of how quickly the security establishment could reassert control over the territory’s daily life. The all-party meeting convened by the Home Ministry on April 25, which was attended by representatives from across the political spectrum, heard the Intelligence Bureau and the Home Ministry acknowledge that they had “failed to anticipate” the Pahalgam attack, an admission that would not prevent the same agencies from executing the crackdown with maximum institutional confidence.

The Detention Campaign

The scale of detentions in post-Pahalgam Kashmir exceeded anything the valley had experienced since the mass arrests following the abrogation of Article 370. Approximately 2,800 individuals were detained or summoned for questioning within the first two weeks. The legal instruments deployed fell into three categories, each with distinct implications for the rights of those detained.

Among the legal tools deployed, the broadest was the Public Safety Act, the preventive detention law unique to Jammu and Kashmir. The PSA permits detention without formal charges, without trial, and without the procedural protections that criminal proceedings require. A district magistrate can order PSA detention on the recommendation of a police officer, and the detainee need not be produced before a court within the time frames required for ordinary arrests. Detention can last up to one year for maintaining public order and up to two years for threats to the security of the state. Since 1988, more than 16,000 individuals have been detained under the PSA, with the overwhelming majority coming from the Kashmir Valley rather than the Hindu-majority Jammu region.

At least 90 individuals were booked under PSA in the weeks following the Pahalgam attack. Among them were not only suspected militant sympathizers but also academics, journalists, and social media users whose activities bore no demonstrable connection to the attack. In Srinagar alone, 23 PSA detentions were recorded. Abdul Bari, a professor of geography and women’s studies known for activism against corruption, was detained under PSA on the basis of a police dossier alleging that he had been “influenced by radical ideas” and had used social media to “advocate separatism.” His case illustrates the breadth of the PSA’s application: none of the charges against him related to the Pahalgam attack specifically, yet his detention was justified by the post-attack security environment.

India’s primary counter-terrorism legislation, the UAPA, served as the second legal instrument, which was significantly strengthened, India’s primary counter-terrorism legislation, which was significantly strengthened through 2019 amendments that granted the government power to designate individuals as terrorists without organizational affiliation. Under the UAPA, bail is exceptionally difficult to obtain, with courts required to presume the prosecution’s case is credible unless the accused can demonstrate otherwise. Over 100 individuals were charged under UAPA in the post-Pahalgam period. The UAPA charges extended beyond Kashmir: in Assam, 94 people were arrested for social media posts, including the general secretary of a political party who was charged with sedition on April 24 and subsequently subjected to the National Security Act on May 14.

A third category encompassed individuals summoned for questioning without formal detention. These numbered in the hundreds and included former militants who had participated in government rehabilitation programs, family members of known militants, and individuals identified through surveillance of social media and telecommunications. The distinction between “questioning” and “detention” was often academic: individuals summoned to police stations were sometimes held for days before being released, and the psychological impact of a police summons in post-Pahalgam Kashmir was itself a form of coercion.

Geographically, the pattern of detentions revealed a security apparatus operating on two distinct logics simultaneously. In southern Kashmir, detentions targeted individuals with documented connections to militant organizations, a security operation with identifiable intelligence targets. Across the rest of the valley and beyond, detentions targeted a far broader category of dissent, sweeping up anyone whose expression could be classified as “anti-national” in the heightened atmosphere of post-Pahalgam fury. The second logic was not a security operation. It was a political response dressed in the language of counter-terrorism.

Consequences for those detained extended far beyond the period of incarceration. Since 2018, more than 1,100 PSA detainees from Kashmir have been transferred to prisons outside the territory, often to facilities in Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, or other Hindi-speaking states hundreds or thousands of kilometers from their families. The practice, which the government justified by citing overcrowding in local jails, imposed a secondary punishment on the families of detainees, who could not afford the travel costs required to visit relatives held far from home. Ishrat, the sister of one such detainee, described to journalists how her brother’s transfer to a prison in Uttar Pradesh, more than 1,000 kilometers away, had made family visits financially impossible.

Out-of-territory transfers deserve particular scrutiny because it transformed detention from a temporary security measure into a mechanism of prolonged family separation. Facilities in Agra, Bareilly, Varanasi, and other cities in Uttar Pradesh housed Kashmiri detainees who spoke neither Hindi nor the local dialects, who had no access to legal representation familiar with PSA procedures, and whose families faced a choice between spending their savings on a single visit or accepting that they would not see their relative for the duration of the detention. For families in rural Kashmir, where household income might amount to a few thousand rupees per month, the cost of a round trip to Uttar Pradesh, including train fare, accommodation, and time away from work, represented an insurmountable financial barrier. The transfer system thus imposed collective economic punishment on extended family networks, not merely on the individual detained.

Procedural architecture under the PSA compounded these hardships. Under the act, detention orders are issued by district magistrates based on police dossiers, and the detainee’s ability to challenge the order through habeas corpus petition is constrained by several factors. The high court in Jammu, where many petitions must be filed, is itself hundreds of kilometers from the Kashmir Valley, imposing additional travel and legal costs on families seeking judicial relief. Between 2014 and 2019, 272 habeas corpus petitions were filed challenging PSA detentions. After the abrogation of Article 370 in 2019, the number surged to over 2,080, reflecting both the increased use of the PSA and the growing desperation of families to secure the release of detained relatives. Cases in Srinagar took an average of nearly eleven months to be heard, meaning that by the time a court reviewed the legality of a PSA detention, the detainee might have served most or all of the permitted detention period.

Judicial review of PSA cases revealed a system aware of its own dysfunction. High court judges routinely quashed PSA detention orders, finding them legally deficient, poorly documented, or based on vague allegations that did not meet even the PSA’s minimal threshold. The quashing rate itself constituted an indictment: if a significant proportion of detention orders were legally unsustainable, the system was producing arbitrary detentions at scale, with judicial correction arriving too late to prevent the deprivation of liberty that the PSA enabled. The post-Pahalgam detentions accelerated this pattern, flooding the courts with cases that the judicial system lacked the capacity to process in time to function as an effective check on executive power.

One case, the detention of an eighteen-year-old in Pulwama on April 30, 2025, eight days after the Pahalgam attack, illustrated the system’s reach. The District Magistrate of Pulwama ordered his PSA detention on the basis of a dossier submitted by the Senior Superintendent of Police alleging “anti-national activities.” No specific connection to the Pahalgam attack was cited. The high court upheld the detention, a decision that reflected the judiciary’s deference to executive security assessments during the heightened post-attack period. For the young man’s family, the detention represented not a security measure but an encounter with a state apparatus that could deprive a teenager of his liberty for up to two years on allegations so vague that they would not survive scrutiny in ordinary criminal proceedings.

Property Demolitions and Forced Evictions

The demolition of homes belonging to families of suspected militants represented the most visually dramatic and legally contested element of the post-Pahalgam crackdown. Within days of the attack, Indian security forces began destroying residential properties in southern Kashmir, starting with the homes of two individuals suspected of direct involvement in the Pahalgam shootings and expanding to encompass the properties of militants who were not connected to the attack at all.

Security forces began with the family home of Adil Hussain Thokar in Bijbehara, Anantnag, one of the three individuals initially identified as a suspect in the Pahalgam attack, and the home of Asif Sheikh in Tral, Pulwama. Security forces used controlled explosions to destroy both structures, causing damage to adjacent properties occupied by uninvolved families. Thokar’s mother, who spoke to journalists after the demolition, said her son had left home in 2018 and that the family did not know whether he was alive or dead. Four neighboring homes sustained structural damage from the blast.

Over the following week, additional demolitions were carried out across the valley. The home of Adnan Shafi, described as an active Lashkar-e-Taiba militant, was demolished in Shopian’s Zainapora area. In Kupwara, the home of Farooq Ahmad, an LeT operative reportedly based in Pakistan, was destroyed along with properties linked to other militants. In Shopian, the home of Adnan Shafi Dar, another suspected militant, was razed. By the end of the first week, at least ten to twelve residential structures had been demolished across the valley.

Legally, the basis for these demolitions was, at best, ambiguous. India’s Supreme Court had ruled in November 2024 that property cannot be demolished without due legal process, that demolitions constitute violations of the right to life and human dignity, and that the practice is unconstitutional when carried out as punitive action without court orders. The post-Pahalgam demolitions were carried out under military supervision, by administrative instruction rather than judicial order, and targeted the families of individuals who had not been convicted, or in most cases even formally charged, with any crime.

At the international level, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights formally condemned the demolitions as constituting collective punishment, prohibited under the Geneva Conventions. The condemnation referenced the 2024 Supreme Court ruling and noted that the demolitions targeted not the individuals suspected of violence but their families, punishing relatives for actions they had not committed and could not control. Human Rights Watch’s Deputy Director for Asia, Meenakshi Ganguly, described the demolitions as “summary punishment” that India’s own highest court had already deemed unlawful.

Defenders of the demolitions pointed to two arguments. The security argument held that militant safe houses needed to be destroyed to prevent their future use as operational bases, and that homes belonging to families with known militant connections served as logistical nodes in the wider terrorism ecosystem. The deterrence argument held that the destruction of family property would discourage other Kashmiris from joining or supporting militant organizations. Neither argument was novel; both had been deployed to justify similar demolitions during the post-Article 370 period and during earlier phases of the Kashmir insurgency. Neither argument addressed the legal question of whether collective punishment for individual actions is permissible under either Indian constitutional law or international humanitarian law.

The demolitions also served a symbolic function that transcended their stated security purpose. Social media commentators and some political figures had called explicitly for “Israel-style” treatment of Kashmir, including the flattening of homes. A member of the Rajya Sabha, India’s upper house of parliament, stated publicly that “there is no harm in bombing civilian homes in Kashmir.” The demolitions validated and amplified this rhetoric, demonstrating that the state was willing to act on demands that would, in any other democratic context, be regarded as incitements to collective punishment. The symbolic message was directed not at militants but at Kashmir’s civilian population: that the state could reach into any home, at any time, and that the connection between individual guilt and state punishment had been severed.

Communication Blackouts and Media Restrictions

Kashmir holds the unenviable distinction of being the most internet-disrupted region on earth. Since 2019, when an eighteen-month communications blackout accompanied the abrogation of Article 370, the territory has experienced hundreds of internet shutdowns, ranging from district-level mobile data suspensions lasting hours to valley-wide blackouts lasting weeks. The post-Pahalgam period added another chapter to this history, one that extended the logic of information control beyond Kashmir to the rest of India.

Mobile internet services were suspended across multiple districts of Jammu and Kashmir beginning on the evening of April 22. In Kishtwar, the largest and least populous district of the union territory, internet was shut down from 2:00 AM on April 23 through 11:59 PM the same day. Similar orders were issued in Doda and other districts. The shutdowns were justified under the Temporary Suspension of Telecom Services Rules of 2017, which permit suspension orders to be issued by the Home Secretary on grounds of “public emergency or public safety.” In multiple instances, the shutdown orders were posted publicly only days after the suspensions had already been imposed.

The information control extended far beyond local internet shutdowns. On or around May 9, more than 8,000 accounts on X (formerly Twitter) were blocked nationwide, targeting Pakistani, Kashmiri, and some Indian users, as well as Chinese state media outlets including Xinhua News Agency and Global Times, the Turkish public broadcaster TRT World, and six Bangladeshi YouTube channels. BBC Urdu was banned or restricted around May 9 to 10 for what the government described as “repeated misinformation and biased reporting.” The government had already sent a formal letter to BBC India in late April criticizing its use of the term “militant attack” rather than “terrorist attack” for the Pahalgam incident. At least sixteen Pakistani YouTube channels were blocked.

Journalists faced direct targeting. Hilal Mir, a senior Kashmiri freelance journalist, was detained on May 6 or 7 in a police raid at his residence in Srinagar’s Bemina neighborhood. He was accused of being a “radical social media user” who spread “anti-national content” and “secessionist ideology portraying Kashmiris as victims.” He was held in preventive detention at Central Jail, Srinagar, until May 13. In Maharashtra, Rejaz M. Sheeba Sydeek, a 26-year-old Kerala-based freelance journalist and writer for independent media outlets, was arrested by Nagpur police at a hotel on May 7 over a social media post criticizing Operation Sindoor. He was charged under UAPA with alleged links to a banned Maoist organization. As of early 2026, he remained entangled in legal proceedings.

The media restrictions drew formal condemnation from international press freedom organizations. Reporters Without Borders and the Committee to Protect Journalists both characterized the crackdown as a deliberate chilling of critical commentary. From late April through July 2025, at least 125 individuals were detained nationwide for social media posts deemed “anti-national,” “pro-Pakistan,” or critical of Operation Sindoor’s execution. The India Supreme Court’s 2020 ruling that internet access is a fundamental right protected by the Constitution appeared to carry no operative force during the crisis period. The pattern was clear: the state treated the information environment as a theater of operations, and control over that environment was pursued with the same urgency as control over the physical territory.

Tourism Shutdown and Economic Devastation

The Pahalgam attack targeted Kashmir’s tourism industry with surgical precision. Baisaran Valley, the site of the massacre, was a popular tourist meadow accessible only by foot or horseback, a location whose vulnerability was inseparable from its appeal. By choosing to attack tourists specifically, and by selecting victims based on religion, the perpetrators ensured that the economic consequences of the attack would extend far beyond the immediate casualties. The Indian government’s response amplified those consequences dramatically.

Within days of the attack, the Jammu and Kashmir tourism department ordered the temporary closure of 48 of the territory’s 87 listed tourist destinations. The closed destinations included not only conflict-sensitive areas in southern Kashmir but also famous nature retreats, resorts, and popular eateries in downtown Srinagar. All trekking activities were suspended across the valley. Forest department permits were revoked. High-altitude routes were closed. Security forces imposed mandatory escort requirements for tourist convoys on routes that remained open.

The economic impact was immediate and severe. Approximately 90 percent of tourism bookings were cancelled in the days following the attack. Flight cancellations surged. Hotels and guesthouses across the valley reported near-zero occupancy. Local guides, porters, pony operators, and service staff who depended entirely on seasonal tourism income were dismissed. The tourism value chain, which had employed hundreds of thousands of Kashmiris directly and indirectly, contracted overnight. For a territory where tourism had been the primary engine of post-2019 economic recovery, and where the government had invested heavily in branding Kashmir as a safe adventure destination, the shutdown represented a catastrophic setback.

Reopening proceeded slowly, driven by security assessments rather than economic need. The Lieutenant Governor’s administration required security audits of each destination before permitting tourists to return. As late as February 2026, ten months after the attack, authorities were still ordering phased reopenings. Fourteen destinations were officially reopened on February 16 to 17, 2026, following fresh security reviews involving police, intelligence agencies, and civil administration. Some high-altitude trekking routes remained under restriction well into 2026.

The economic data from previous shutdowns provided a baseline for estimating the damage. The 2019 to 2020 communications blackout alone was estimated to have cost Kashmir over one billion US dollars in economic losses. Students from the region identified internet access disruption as a greater barrier to educational progress than the disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The 2025 shutdown, which combined tourism closures, internet restrictions, curfew-like security measures, and the general atmosphere of fear, likely exceeded these earlier costs, though comprehensive economic assessments had not been published as of early 2026. For individual families dependent on tourism income, the shutdown was not an abstraction but a direct threat to subsistence.

The Expulsion of Pakistani Nationals

Among the least-discussed but most consequential measures of the post-Pahalgam period was the expulsion of Pakistani nationals from India, including from Jammu and Kashmir. On April 24, India’s Ministry of External Affairs declared that all Pakistani nationals’ visas were being revoked, with existing visas set to expire by April 27 and medical visas by April 29. All Pakistani nationals in India were instructed to leave before their newly abbreviated visa deadlines.

In Kashmir, the measure carried particular weight because of the territory’s unique demographic history. Nearly 800 Pakistani nationals, many of them women who had married Kashmiri men, were ordered to leave the territory within days. Some of these women had lived in Kashmir for decades. They had raised Kashmiri children, built Kashmiri lives, and integrated into Kashmiri communities. The original context of their presence in Kashmir was complex: some had crossed the Line of Control during earlier periods of the insurgency, and some had been part of rehabilitation programs in which the Indian government itself had facilitated the return of former militants and their families. Now, those same individuals were being expelled by administrative decree, without due process, without appeal mechanisms, and without regard for the family separations the expulsions would produce.

The expulsion of Pakistani spouses from Kashmir intersected with broader diplomatic measures. India closed its main land border crossing with Pakistan at Wagah, suspended the Indus Waters Treaty, declared Pakistani defense advisers persona non grata, and reduced its own high commission staff in Islamabad. Pakistan reciprocated by closing its airspace to Indian aircraft, suspending its own visa regime for Indian nationals, and expelling Indian military liaisons. The diplomatic escalation created a context in which the expulsion of Pakistani nationals from Kashmir was framed as a routine element of state-to-state confrontation rather than what it was for the individuals affected: the sudden, involuntary destruction of family structures that had existed for years or decades.

The legal framework for the expulsions was the Foreigners Act, which grants the Indian government broad authority to restrict or revoke the presence of foreign nationals. Human rights organizations noted that the mass expulsion of individuals without individual assessment of their circumstances, and without regard for family ties or the principle of non-refoulement, violated India’s obligations under international law. The UN experts who issued a formal condemnation in November 2025 specifically cited the expulsions of nearly 1,900 Muslims and Rohingya refugees to Bangladesh and Myanmar, noting that “such expulsions violate the international obligation of non-refoulement, which prohibits returning individuals to countries where they risk persecution.”

Individual cases captured the human dimension of the expulsions, in individual cases that illustrated the measure’s arbitrary character. Women who had crossed the Line of Control in the 1990s as teenagers, who had married Kashmiri men, raised children who spoke Kashmiri and attended Kashmiri schools, and who had never returned to Pakistan, were given days to leave a territory they had inhabited for three decades. Their children, many of whom held Indian identity documents, faced a choice between accompanying their mothers to a country they had never known and remaining in Kashmir without their primary caregiver. No government mechanism existed to process these family-separation decisions, because no mechanism had been designed for a mass expulsion conducted under diplomatic rather than judicial authority.

Pakistani nationals who had come to India for medical treatment, a long-standing humanitarian provision in which patients from Pakistan, particularly those requiring cardiac surgery, transplants, or cancer treatment not available in Pakistani hospitals, traveled to Indian medical facilities on medical visas. These patients were given until April 29 to leave India, regardless of their medical condition or treatment status. The abruptness of the measure raised questions that the government did not publicly address: whether medical patients who were mid-treatment would be able to resume their care in Pakistan, whether interrupting treatment would produce adverse health outcomes, and whether the humanitarian cost of the expulsion was commensurate with any security objective it served.

As a precedent, the expulsions extended beyond the immediate crisis. They demonstrated that India’s border and visa policies could be weaponized overnight, converting what had been routine diplomatic accommodations into instruments of collective pressure. For the 800 Pakistani nationals expelled from Kashmir, and for the broader category of Pakistani nationals expelled from India as a whole, the expulsions represented not merely a policy change but a rupture in the assumptions on which they had built their lives. The message was unambiguous: presence in India was revocable, family ties were not a shield against state action, and diplomatic crises could reach into private lives with no warning and no recourse.

Key Figures in the Crackdown

The crackdown’s execution involved a chain of command that connected the highest levels of the Indian government to district-level administrators in the valley. Understanding who made decisions, and what constraints they operated under, is essential to assessing the crackdown’s character.

Home Minister Amit Shah functioned as the crackdown’s operational commander from the political side. He arrived in Srinagar within hours of the attack and personally oversaw the initial security response. His statements to Parliament framed the crackdown in terms of zero tolerance, asserting that those who planned the attack were punished through Operation Sindoor and those who carried it out were eliminated through Operation Mahadev, the military operation in Dachigam that killed the three Pahalgam attackers on July 28, 2025, after a two-month manhunt. Shah’s framing left no space for proportionality concerns, and his rhetoric, particularly the assertion that “today’s India sends missiles after terrorist attacks, not dossiers,” established a political ceiling below which no subordinate official could afford to operate.

Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha, the centrally appointed administrator of Jammu and Kashmir, bore direct administrative responsibility for the crackdown’s execution. In July 2025, Sinha took what was widely regarded as an unusual step by accepting “full responsibility” for the Pahalgam attack and describing it as a “security failure.” His admission that a CRPF picket near Baisaran had been removed in January 2025 and not reinstated despite intelligence warnings of a possible attack in the valley raised questions about whether the post-attack crackdown was, in part, an attempt to demonstrate competence after a visible security lapse.

National Security Adviser Ajit Doval played a central coordinating role, particularly in the intelligence dimensions of the response. The CCS meeting he attended on April 23 shaped the multi-track strategy that linked domestic crackdown, diplomatic escalation, and military planning. His influence was visible in the intelligence-driven aspects of the response: the rapid deployment of human intelligence assets in the Dachigam area that eventually led to the identification and elimination of the three attackers, and the broader surveillance expansion that accompanied the crackdown.

On the other side of the analytical ledger stood the figures who challenged the crackdown’s proportionality. Radha Kumar, the scholar and former interlocutor for Kashmir, wrote on April 25 in The Wire about what the government could and should do in the aftermath of Pahalgam, emphasizing that security measures must be calibrated to avoid alienating the Kashmiri population that had unanimously condemned the attack. Kumar’s analysis was particularly significant because of her institutional position: as a former member of the three-person Group of Interlocutors appointed by the Indian government itself to recommend policies for Jammu and Kashmir, she spoke not as an external critic but as someone who understood the security establishment’s internal logic. Her central argument, that the Kashmiri population’s unanimous condemnation of the Pahalgam attack represented a strategic opportunity that the crackdown was squandering, went unheeded.

The Kashmir Times, edited by Anuradha Bhasin, who had previously challenged the 2019 communications blackout before the Supreme Court in a landmark case that established internet access as a constitutional right, documented media restrictions during the crackdown with particular authority. Bhasin’s 2020 Supreme Court victory had established the legal principle that indefinite internet shutdowns violate fundamental rights. The post-Pahalgam communications restrictions effectively nullified that victory, demonstrating that legal precedent in Kashmir operates within a political environment where executive action routinely overrides judicial pronouncements.

Ben Saul, the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights while countering terrorism, led the formal condemnation issued in November 2025, which unequivocally condemned the terrorist attack while stating that counter-terrorism measures must comply with international human rights law. Saul’s statement was notable for its analytical discipline: it did not deny India’s right to respond to terrorism, nor did it minimize the severity of the Pahalgam attack. Instead, it applied established international legal standards to specific measures and found them wanting. This approach was more difficult to dismiss than generalized criticism, because it grounded each objection in a specific legal obligation that India had accepted.

The Kashmiri civil society figures who might have mediated between the security establishment and the population were, in many cases, already in prison. Khurram Parvez, the most prominent human rights defender in Kashmir, had been detained under UAPA since November 2021, well before the Pahalgam attack. His continued incarceration meant that the individual best positioned to document the crackdown and articulate its impact on civilian life was unable to do so. Similarly, Irfan Mehraj, who had worked on documenting human rights violations in the territory, remained in detention. The absence of these voices from the public discourse was not incidental to the crackdown; it was a precondition for it. By detaining civil society leaders years before the crisis, the security establishment had ensured that no authoritative Kashmiri voice could challenge the crackdown’s framing in real time.

At the administrative level, the district-level officials who executed the crackdown, the district magistrates who signed PSA orders and the superintendents of police who compiled dossiers, operated within a system where discretion flowed in only one direction. No district magistrate was rewarded for declining to sign a detention order; every district magistrate understood that failing to demonstrate sufficient security zeal in the post-Pahalgam environment carried career consequences. The structural incentives of the administrative system pushed uniformly toward over-detention, over-enforcement, and over-reaction. The crackdown’s scale was not the product of a single decision by a single official. It was the cumulative result of hundreds of individual decisions made by officials at every level of the administrative hierarchy, each of whom faced the same incentive structure: excess was safe, restraint was risky.

The NIA Investigation and Operation Mahadev

The investigation into the Pahalgam attack proceeded on a parallel track to the broader crackdown, and its findings both justified and complicated the government’s narrative. The NIA, which assumed control on April 27, conducted an investigation that Home Minister Shah later described as an example of “watertight investigation,” claiming a conviction rate exceeding 96 percent for the agency.

Critically, the investigation’s first significant finding undermined one of the crackdown’s implicit justifications. Initial police reports had identified four attackers, claiming two were Kashmiri and two were Pakistani. This finding was used to justify the breadth of detentions across the valley: if Kashmiris had participated in the attack, then the wider Kashmiri population was a legitimate target for intelligence sweeps. When the NIA determined in late May to June 2025 that the earlier police identification of Kashmiri attackers was incorrect and that all three shooters were Pakistani nationals linked to LeT, the factual basis for the mass detentions evaporated, but the detentions themselves had already occurred.

In scope, the NIA’s investigation was remarkably thorough. Investigators questioned 1,055 individuals, including tourists, mule owners, pony operators, photographers, employees, and shop workers, conducting over 3,000 hours of recorded interrogation. On June 22, two local Kashmiris, Parvaiz Ahmad Jothar and Bashir Ahmad Jothar, were arrested for allegedly harboring the terrorists at a hut approximately two kilometers from Baisaran on April 21, the day before the attack. DNA samples were collected and matched against articles recovered from the killed attackers.

Operation Mahadev, launched on May 22, represented the kinetic dimension of the investigation. Intelligence Bureau assets received information through human intelligence about the presence of the three attackers in the Dachigam area, a national park outside Srinagar. For two months, IB, Army, and CRPF personnel tracked the terrorists through forested, high-altitude terrain, using sensors and signal detection equipment to confirm their location. On July 22, the presence of the terrorists was confirmed through electronic surveillance. On July 28, personnel from 4 Para of the Indian Army, supported by CRPF and J&K Police, surrounded and killed all three attackers: Suleman alias Faizal Jatt, Hamza Afghani, and Zibran. Forensic matching confirmed that the three rifles recovered from the killed terrorists had fired the 44 M4 carbine cartridges and 25 AK-47 cartridges recovered at the Baisaran Valley attack site.

In December 2025, the NIA filed a 1,597-page chargesheet before a special court in Jammu, formally charging Lashkar-e-Taiba and The Resistance Front along with six named individuals. Among those charged were Hafiz Saeed, the LeT chief; his deputy Saifullah Khalid Kasuri; Sajad Ahmad Sheikh alias Sajad Gul, the head of TRF; and the three killed attackers, charged posthumously. Sajid Saifullah Jatt, identified as LeT’s South Kashmir chief of operations based in Lahore, was named as the primary handler. The investigation traced funding flows through Malaysian resident Yasir Hayat, who was connected to Sajid Mir’s network, and identified 463 phone calls connected to financing from Pakistan, Malaysia, and Gulf states.

The investigation’s thoroughness contrasted sharply with the indiscriminate character of the wider crackdown. Operation Mahadev demonstrated that targeted, intelligence-driven operations could identify and eliminate the specific individuals responsible for the attack. The mass detentions, by contrast, swept up thousands of individuals who bore no connection to the Pahalgam attack. The NIA’s own correction of the initial police claim of Kashmiri involvement underscored that the broader crackdown had been premised, at least in part, on faulty intelligence.

The Proportionality Debate

The central analytical question of the post-Pahalgam crackdown is whether the measures were proportionate to the threat they claimed to address. This question is not merely academic; it determines whether the crackdown is classified as a legitimate security response or as collective punishment, a distinction with profound implications under both Indian constitutional law and international humanitarian law.

India’s case for proportionality rested on several pillars. The Pahalgam attack was the deadliest assault on civilians in Kashmir in nearly two decades, and the attackers were at large in the immediate aftermath, creating a genuine security emergency. The detention of overground workers and individuals with known connections to militant organizations served an intelligence purpose: identifying the support network that had enabled the attackers to infiltrate, operate, and potentially escape. The demolition of homes used by militants served a kinetic purpose: destroying infrastructure that could be reused. The communications restrictions served an information-control purpose: preventing the spread of inflammatory content that could trigger communal violence or compromise ongoing operations.

Against this, the case for disproportionality was stronger and more specific. It began with numbers: the detention of 2,800 individuals in response to an attack carried out by three people represents a ratio of nearly 1,000 to 1. Even if every one of the 250 OGWs detained in southern Kashmir had genuine connections to militant organizations, the remaining 2,550 individuals were detained on suspicion so broad that it encompassed journalism, academic activity, and social media expression. The PSA and UAPA provided the legal architecture for these detentions, but the laws’ own structure, permitting prolonged detention without charge, shifting the burden of proof to the accused, and making bail practically impossible, meant that detention functioned as punishment regardless of whether formal charges were ever filed.

On their own terms, the demolitions failed the proportionality test on their own terms. They targeted the families of individuals, not the individuals themselves. The Supreme Court had already ruled in 2024 that such demolitions were unconstitutional. The demolitions served no security purpose that could not have been achieved through less destructive means, such as sealing or securing the properties. Their primary function was symbolic and deterrent, punishing communities to discourage future militancy, which is the textbook definition of collective punishment.

Communications restrictions presented a more complex proportionality question. Internet shutdowns have a documented history of failing to improve security outcomes in Kashmir: the incidence of terrorist attacks did not decline during the eighteen-month blackout of 2019 to 2021, and shutdowns have themselves been identified as factors in radicalization and recruitment. The blocking of 8,000 social media accounts, including those of journalists and international media outlets, served an information-management purpose that had nothing to do with security: it prevented critical coverage of the crackdown itself.

Christine Fair, the Georgetown University scholar who has written extensively on South Asian security, has argued that India’s response to terrorist provocations must be calibrated to avoid strategic overreach. The Pahalgam crackdown illustrated the risk she identifies: by responding to a targeted terrorist attack with an untargeted security campaign, India transformed a moment of national solidarity, Kashmiris had overwhelmingly condemned the Pahalgam attack, into a moment of collective alienation, as Kashmiris experienced the crackdown’s consequences regardless of their individual stance on the attack.

Human Rights Concerns and International Response

The international response to the post-Pahalgam crackdown developed over months, with the most significant intervention coming in November 2025, when a group of UN Special Rapporteurs issued a formal statement expressing alarm about “serious human rights violations committed by Indian authorities” in the aftermath of the attack. The statement, led by Ben Saul, the Special Rapporteur on human rights while countering terrorism, was notable for its structure: it began by unequivocally condemning the Pahalgam terrorist attack and extending condolences to the victims before cataloging the violations that followed.

The UN experts identified several categories of concern. They condemned reports of arbitrary arrests and detentions, noting that the 2,800 individuals detained included journalists and human rights defenders. They highlighted punitive house demolitions carried out without court orders, describing them as collective punishment that violated the 2024 Supreme Court ruling. They documented communication blackouts and the blocking of social media accounts as disproportionate restrictions on freedom of expression. They noted the targeting of Kashmiri students through government directives requiring universities to collect personal data. They condemned the increase in hate speech and incitement to violence against Muslims, which they described as having been “inflamed by political figures in the ruling party.”

Notably, the statement’s reference to the demolitions as “collective punishment” carried particular legal weight. Collective punishment is prohibited under Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention and under customary international humanitarian law. While India disputes the applicability of the Geneva Conventions to Jammu and Kashmir, characterizing the territory as an integral part of India rather than an occupied territory, the UN experts’ invocation of the term reflected a legal assessment that the measures were punitive in nature, directed at populations rather than individuals, and unconnected to any individual determination of guilt.

Human Rights Watch, in its 2026 assessment, cited the post-Pahalgam period as evidence of a broader pattern: demolitions, expulsions, prosecutions, and restrictions on dissent and media freedoms that collectively constituted a systematic approach to controlling Kashmir’s civilian population. Amnesty International, which had been forced to close its India operations in 2020 after its bank accounts were frozen, issued statements from its London headquarters condemning the detentions and demolitions.

Several prominent human rights defenders remained in detention long after the immediate security justification for their arrest had passed. Khurram Parvez, the veteran Kashmiri human rights activist whose arbitrary detention had been formally condemned by the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention in 2023, remained in his cell as of the first anniversary of the Pahalgam attack. Irfan Mehraj, another human rights defender, also remained detained under UAPA. Their continued incarceration suggested that the crackdown’s targeting of civil society was not an emergency response but a structural feature of governance in post-Article 370 Kashmir.

India’s official response to international criticism was consistent with its established approach: it rejected the characterizations as interference in internal affairs, described the measures as necessary and proportionate responses to terrorism, and pointed to the successful investigation and elimination of the Pahalgam attackers as evidence that its security approach was effective. Home Minister Shah’s statement that “today’s India sends missiles after terrorist attacks, not dossiers” functioned as both a domestic political message and a signal to international critics that India would not calibrate its response to external expectations.

Comparison with Post-Article 370 Measures

The post-Pahalgam crackdown invites direct comparison with the security measures imposed following the abrogation of Article 370 on August 5, 2019, the only precedent of comparable scale in recent Kashmir history. The comparison reveals both continuities and escalations that illuminate the trajectory of Indian governance in the territory.

In 2019, the measures were preventive: they were imposed in anticipation of unrest that the government expected the Article 370 abrogation to trigger. Security forces were deployed before the announcement. Communications were cut before the news became public. The three Chief Ministers were detained before protests could be organized. The logic was preemptive control, preventing a reaction before it materialized.

The 2025 measures were reactive: they followed an actual attack rather than anticipating a theoretical one. This distinction should, in principle, have produced a more targeted response, one focused on the specific individuals and networks responsible for the Pahalgam massacre. Instead, the response was broader in several dimensions than the 2019 precedent. The 2019 communications blackout, while longer in duration, was concentrated in Kashmir. The 2025 information-control measures extended nationwide, with social media account blocks and journalist arrests occurring across multiple Indian states. The 2019 demolitions were relatively limited; the 2025 demolitions, carried out with controlled explosions and heavy equipment, were more dramatic and more publicly documented.

Both periods relied on identical legal instruments: the PSA and UAPA provided the statutory architecture for detentions, and administrative orders provided the authority for telecommunications suspensions. The 2025 crackdown benefited from the institutional infrastructure that the 2019 measures had created: the surveillance networks, the detention protocols, the administrative pathways for executing mass operations. The speed with which the 2025 crackdown was implemented, with 1,450 individuals detained within the first 24 hours, reflected an apparatus that had been tested in 2019 and remained operational in the intervening years.

Politically, the context differed significantly. The 2019 measures were imposed under direct central rule, with no elected government in Jammu and Kashmir. The 2025 crackdown occurred with an elected government in place, one led by the National Conference, a party that had historically opposed the PSA and UAPA and had raised expectations of political liberalization. The elected government’s inability, or unwillingness, to moderate the central government’s security response revealed the limits of democratic governance in a union territory where security policy remained the exclusive domain of the Lieutenant Governor and the Home Ministry.

The comparison also reveals a ratchet effect: each security crisis in Kashmir produces measures that become the baseline for the next crisis. The 2019 measures normalized mass detention, communications blackouts, and administrative demolitions as tools of governance. The 2025 measures built on this normalization, extending the geographic scope to the rest of India and adding new elements, such as the mass expulsion of foreign nationals and the nationwide targeting of social media users. If the pattern holds, the next crisis in Kashmir will produce a response that treats the 2025 measures as its starting point.

A deeper examination of this ratchet effect reveals its institutional mechanics. The security apparatus built during the 2019 crackdown was never decommissioned because it was never designed to be temporary. The surveillance networks, the administrative pathways for PSA detention, the protocols for internet shutdown, the inter-agency coordination mechanisms linking the Army, CRPF, IB, and J&K Police, all remained active during the relatively calm period between 2020 and 2025. They required minimal reactivation when the Pahalgam attack occurred. In institutional terms, the cost of deploying the crackdown apparatus decreased with each use, while the scope of its application increased. The first deployment in 2019 required political justification, legal maneuvering, and months of preparation. The second deployment in 2025 was activated within hours and required no political debate, no legal preparation, and no institutional resistance.

Economically, the comparison also merits examination. The 2019 communications blackout devastated Kashmir’s IT sector, its cottage industries that depended on online sales, and its tourism revenue. Estimates placed the economic cost at over one billion dollars. The economy recovered slowly, with tourism reaching record numbers by 2024. The 2025 crackdown demolished this recovery in a matter of days. The cycle of economic destruction and partial recovery, followed by renewed destruction, has produced a structural fragility in Kashmir’s economy that no amount of government investment in infrastructure can address. Businesses that have experienced two major shutdowns in six years are not the same as businesses that have experienced none. Entrepreneurs who have lost their investments twice are not the same as entrepreneurs starting fresh. The accumulated economic damage of serial crackdowns is not additive; it is compounding, because each crisis destroys not only current economic activity but also the confidence and capital formation necessary for future growth.

One final, and perhaps most significant, continuity emerges from the comparison, and perhaps most significant, continuity: the centrality of communication control to both crackdowns. In 2019, the communications blackout was the crackdown’s defining feature, drawing international attention and Supreme Court scrutiny. In 2025, the communications restrictions were broader in scope but shorter in formal duration, reflecting a refinement of the technique. The 2025 approach focused on targeted blocking rather than blanket shutdown, removing specific voices from the information environment while maintaining the appearance of general connectivity. The shift from blanket shutdown to targeted suppression represents an evolution in the state’s information-control methodology, one that is harder to challenge legally because it affects identifiable individuals rather than the entire population, yet equally effective in shaping the narrative environment.

The Domestic Face of the Sindoor Doctrine

The post-Pahalgam crackdown cannot be understood in isolation from Operation Sindoor, the missile strikes on JeM and LeT infrastructure in Pakistan on May 7, 2025. The two responses, domestic and external, were products of the same doctrine and the same decision-making structure. Home Minister Shah made the connection explicit in his parliamentary addresses, describing the response to Pahalgam as operating on two tracks: Operation Sindoor punished those who planned the attack, and the domestic crackdown dismantled the support infrastructure that enabled it.

This framing, while politically effective, obscured a critical analytical distinction. Operation Sindoor, whatever its strategic merits or risks, targeted specific military and militant infrastructure across the border. The domestic crackdown, in its mass-detention and mass-demolition dimensions, did not target specific infrastructure. It targeted a population. The operational precision that characterized the missile strikes, and that characterized the intelligence-driven Operation Mahadev that killed the three Pahalgam attackers, was absent from the crackdown’s treatment of Kashmiri civilians.

The contrast illuminates the doctrine’s internal contradiction. India’s security establishment demonstrated, through Operation Mahadev, that it possessed the intelligence capability to identify and eliminate the specific individuals responsible for the Pahalgam attack. The NIA investigation demonstrated that it possessed the investigative capability to trace funding networks, identify handlers, and file comprehensive chargesheets. These targeted capabilities coexisted with, and were politically subordinated to, a mass-punishment approach that bore no relationship to the precision of the kinetic and investigative operations.

This coexistence was not accidental. The targeted operations served a security purpose: identifying and neutralizing threats. The mass crackdown served a political purpose: demonstrating the state’s willingness to impose collective consequences, satisfying domestic demands for a visible response, and deterring future militancy through fear rather than through the precise application of force. The two purposes required different instruments and different metrics of success. The targeted operations succeeded by their own criteria: the attackers were identified, tracked, and killed, and the support network was partially dismantled. The mass crackdown’s success was measured not in security outcomes but in political perceptions, and by that measure, it achieved precisely what it was designed to achieve.

The Crackdown’s Impact on Kashmir’s Political Landscape

The political consequences of the post-Pahalgam crackdown extended far beyond the immediate security situation. The crackdown intersected with, and in many ways undermined, the tentative political normalization that had followed the 2024 assembly elections.

October 2024’s elections had produced a significant political development: the formation of a National Conference-led government under Chief Minister Omar Abdullah, the first elected government in Jammu and Kashmir since the abrogation of Article 370. The election results had been interpreted, both domestically and internationally, as evidence that democratic politics could coexist with central security management. Kashmiri families of political detainees had hoped that the new government would secure the release of their relatives.

The Pahalgam attack and the crackdown that followed destroyed these expectations. The elected government proved unable to moderate the central government’s security response, expose the limits of its authority, or protect its own constituents from mass detention. Chief Minister Abdullah’s position was structurally constrained: in a union territory, security policy is controlled by the centrally appointed Lieutenant Governor, and the elected government has no authority over the Army, CRPF, or intelligence agencies that executed the crackdown. The crackdown demonstrated, in practical terms, that the 2024 elections had not transferred meaningful power over security policy to an elected government.

For Kashmiri political parties, the crackdown created an impossible dynamic. Condemning the Pahalgam attack was politically necessary and morally unambiguous; condemning the crackdown was politically dangerous in the post-attack environment. The result was a silence from mainstream Kashmiri politics that reinforced the perception that the crackdown was proceeding without domestic political opposition. Only Mehbooba Mufti, the PDP leader who had herself been detained under the PSA after Article 370’s abrogation, spoke publicly, stating on May 6 that security forces had adopted a strategy of “collective punishment,” detaining around 3,000 Kashmiris and destroying over 3,600 homes in the aftermath of the attack. Her numbers, while disputed, reflected a political reality that other mainstream leaders were unwilling to articulate.

The crackdown’s impact on civil society was more durably damaging. Journalists who had continued to report on Kashmir’s security situation operated under the knowledge that critical coverage could result in detention under PSA or prosecution under UAPA. Human rights defenders who had documented previous crackdowns were either already in prison or understood that documenting this one carried the same risk. The Kashmiri press, which had printed front pages in black on April 23 in mourning for the Pahalgam victims, found itself unable to report freely on the state’s response to the attack those black pages commemorated.

Kashmir’s legal profession experienced equally significant impact was equally significant, though less widely discussed. Lawyers who represented PSA and UAPA detainees faced professional and personal risks. Filing habeas corpus petitions challenging state detention orders was itself treated as a suspect activity in the post-Pahalgam environment. Vertika Mani, a human rights lawyer and Secretary of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), who visited Kashmir during the crackdown, observed that the misuse of the PSA had become “a critical inflection point in this ongoing pattern of repression.” Defense lawyers reported difficulty accessing detained clients, securing copies of detention orders, and meeting the procedural requirements for challenging detentions in courts operating under their own constraints.

The crackdown’s effect on Kashmir’s education sector compounded the existing damage from the 2019 shutdown. Schools and colleges across the valley were disrupted by curfew conditions, internet shutdowns, and the generalized atmosphere of fear. Students preparing for competitive examinations, the primary pathway to professional careers in India, lost critical preparation time. University students who had relocated to campuses outside Kashmir for their education found themselves unable to return home during the crisis, unable to communicate with their families when internet was shut down, and subjected to harassment on their campuses. For a generation of Kashmiri youth who had already lost eighteen months of educational time during the 2019 shutdown and additional time during the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2025 crackdown represented a third major disruption in six years. The cumulative educational impact of serial crackdowns constitutes a form of structural harm that will manifest in reduced economic opportunities, deferred careers, and diminished prospects for an entire cohort.

Religious dimensions of the crackdown also warrant examination. Kashmir’s syncretic Sufi-influenced Muslim culture, which has historically resisted hardline Islamist ideology, was treated as a security concern rather than as a resource against radicalization. Shrines and mosques were subjected to enhanced surveillance. Congregational prayers were restricted in some areas. The government’s approach treated Muslim religious practice as inherently suspect, a posture that contradicted the stated objective of winning the allegiance of Kashmir’s population. The paradox was visible to any observer who cared to look: a security campaign ostensibly designed to protect India’s sovereignty over Kashmir was being conducted in ways that alienated the Kashmiri population whose acceptance of that sovereignty was the ultimate measure of success.

Hate Crimes and Anti-Muslim Violence Outside Kashmir

The crackdown’s effects were not confined to Jammu and Kashmir. Across India, the Pahalgam attack triggered a wave of anti-Muslim and specifically anti-Kashmiri harassment, violence, and expulsion that the government was slow to condemn and that, in some instances, was exacerbated by rhetoric from political figures.

Kashmiri students in universities across northern India reported harassment, physical assault, and threats to leave their campuses. In Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, and other states, Kashmiri students faced demands to “go back to Kashmir,” denial of services by landlords and shopkeepers, and physical violence from organized groups. Reports documented instances of Muslim students on campuses being attacked by mobs armed with sticks and sharp objects.

The targeting extended beyond Kashmiris to the broader Muslim community. The Association for Protection of Civil Rights documented at least 316 victims of hate-driven violence in the period following the attack, including a brutal assault with an axe in Uttar Pradesh. In Hyderabad, BJP activists vandalized a decades-old bakery called “Karachi Bakery,” demanding a name change. Demolitions were reported in Gujarat and Assam, where thousands of Muslim homes, mosques, and businesses were destroyed in operations that authorities presented as addressing “illegal encroachment” but that human rights organizations characterized as anti-Muslim targeting.

The hate-crime wave served a political function parallel to the Kashmir crackdown itself. It demonstrated that the post-Pahalgam environment was being used not only to pursue security objectives in Kashmir but to advance a broader political agenda regarding India’s Muslim minority. The UN experts’ November 2025 statement specifically noted the increase in hate speech and incitement to violence “inflamed by political figures in the ruling party,” establishing a direct link between official rhetoric and mob violence.

Cambridge-educated academic Ali Khan Mahmudabad was arrested on May 18 for a Facebook post in which he praised Colonel Sophia Qureishi, a Muslim officer involved in military operations, while asking that “victims of mob lynching, arbitrary bulldozing and others who are victims of the BJP’s hate mongering be protected as Indian citizens.” His arrest illustrated the paradox of the post-Pahalgam environment: expressing support for the military while criticizing mob violence was treated as a criminal offense.

The pattern of anti-Kashmiri and anti-Muslim violence outside the valley deserves sustained analysis because it reveals the crackdown’s second-order effects, consequences that no security objective required but that the political environment produced. The New York Times, in a report published on April 30, documented how BJP leaders and right-wing Hindu groups intensified harassment campaigns against Muslims in the aftermath of Pahalgam. The harassment was not spontaneous; it was organized, coordinated through social media networks, and in some cases explicitly endorsed by political figures. Hate-filled songs targeting Indian Muslims circulated widely on social media platforms, amplified by accounts that faced no restrictions from authorities who were simultaneously blocking thousands of accounts critical of the government.

In Jharkhand, a man was arrested for posting inflammatory content celebrating the Pahalgam attack and praising Pakistan and LeT. His arrest was legally uncontroversial: incitement to violence is a recognized criminal offense. What was controversial was the asymmetry in enforcement. Posts celebrating the attack were prosecuted; posts calling for violence against Muslims were not. This selective enforcement sent a signal that the law would punish support for terrorism against India but would tolerate, or at least not actively suppress, calls for violence against India’s own Muslim citizens.

Across India, the Kashmiri diaspora, students, professionals, and small business owners who had relocated to cities across the country, found themselves in an impossible position. They were expected to perform condemnation of the Pahalgam attack, and most did so readily and sincerely. But condemnation did not protect them from the backlash. Kashmiri shawl sellers in tourist towns reported being assaulted and forced to chant religious slogans. Kashmiri restaurant workers in Delhi were harassed by customers demanding to know their “loyalty.” The message from the wider Indian public, amplified by media coverage that associated the attack with Kashmiri identity rather than with the specific Pakistani nationals who carried it out, was that Kashmiris as a category bore collective responsibility for the Pahalgam massacre. This message was the societal equivalent of the state’s collective punishment, and the two reinforced each other: the state’s crackdown on Kashmir legitimized the public’s hostility toward Kashmiris, and the public’s hostility toward Kashmiris provided political support for the state’s crackdown.

Why It Still Matters

The post-Pahalgam crackdown matters beyond its immediate impact because it established precedents that will shape India’s approach to future crises in Kashmir and beyond. Four precedents deserve particular attention.

First among these is the nationalization of the Kashmir security paradigm. Previous crackdowns in Kashmir had been geographically contained. The 2025 crackdown extended information control, social media policing, and journalist targeting to the rest of India, establishing that Kashmir-style security measures could be deployed nationwide in response to a Kashmir-specific event. This nationalization transforms the Kashmir question from a regional security issue to a template for domestic governance during crisis.

Second is the subordination of judicial constraints to executive action. The Supreme Court’s 2024 ruling against demolitions without due process, its 2020 ruling on internet access as a fundamental right, and the constitutional protections against arbitrary detention were all effectively overridden by executive action during the crackdown. No court intervened in real time to halt the demolitions or the mass detentions. The judicial system, which had positioned itself as a check on executive overreach in Kashmir, failed to function as that check when the political pressure was at its most intense.

Third is the use of a terrorist attack as a political catalyst for measures unrelated to the attack. The expulsion of Pakistani nationals, many of whom had lived in Kashmir for decades, addressed no security vulnerability created by the Pahalgam attack. The demolitions of homes belonging to militants who played no role in the attack addressed no intelligence gap. The detention of academics, journalists, and social media users addressed no threat. These measures served political rather than security purposes, and the Pahalgam attack provided the political cover necessary for their implementation.

Fourth is the ratchet effect described earlier. Each crisis produces measures that become the baseline for the next response. If the pattern holds, the next terrorist attack in Kashmir, whenever it occurs, will produce a response that treats the 2025 measures not as an extraordinary escalation but as a starting point from which further escalation proceeds.

For India’s broader counter-terrorism doctrine, the Kashmir crackdown reveals a tension that has not been resolved. India demonstrated, through Operation Sindoor and Operation Mahadev, that it possesses sophisticated, intelligence-driven capabilities for targeted counter-terrorism operations. The crackdown demonstrated that these capabilities coexist with, and are politically subordinated to, a mass-punishment approach that undermines the very solidarity, including Kashmiri solidarity against the Pahalgam attackers, that effective counter-terrorism requires. Until this tension is resolved, India’s domestic response to terrorism will continue to inflict costs on the populations it claims to protect, costs that are measured not in security metrics but in the erosion of trust, the alienation of communities, and the normalization of collective punishment as a tool of governance.

The crackdown’s legacy will ultimately be judged by a question that neither the Indian government nor its critics have adequately answered: did the measures make Kashmir safer? The evidence from previous crackdowns suggests they did not. The 2019 communications blackout did not prevent the emergence of new militant networks. The mass detentions did not prevent the Pahalgam attack itself. The demolitions did not deter the TRF from claiming, and then retracting, responsibility for the massacre. If the 2025 crackdown produces the same pattern, a temporary suppression of visible resistance followed by the emergence of deeper, less visible alienation, then the measures will have succeeded politically while failing strategically. The domestic face of the Sindoor doctrine will have been, in the most consequential sense, counterproductive.

Counterproductivity deserves specific examination. Academic research on counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism has consistently shown that mass-punishment approaches increase recruitment into insurgent and terrorist organizations rather than decreasing it. The mechanism is straightforward: individuals who experience state violence or whose families experience state violence are more likely to support or join organizations that resist the state. In Kashmir, this dynamic has operated for decades. The mass detentions of the 1990s did not end the insurgency; they fueled it. The abrogation of Article 370 and the 2019 crackdown did not end militancy; they produced new organizations, including the TRF itself, which was created as a Kashmiri-fronted proxy to circumvent the surveillance and infiltration that had compromised older militant structures.

The Pahalgam attack was carried out by Pakistani nationals, not by individuals radicalized through Kashmir’s internal dynamics. This fact undermines the stated rationale for a crackdown directed at Kashmir’s civilian population: the attack was an external operation that exploited vulnerabilities in border security and intelligence, not a product of local support networks that mass detentions could dismantle. The crackdown treated the problem as endogenous to Kashmir’s population when the evidence suggested it was exogenous, originating in Pakistan’s militant infrastructure and routed through LeT’s command structure in Lahore.

Perhaps the most lasting damage of the crackdown is to the legitimacy of India’s democratic claims over Kashmir. India’s position on Kashmir rests on the assertion that the territory is an integral part of India, governed through democratic institutions and protected by constitutional rights. Every element of the post-Pahalgam crackdown, from mass detention without trial to demolitions without court orders to communications blackouts without judicial oversight, contradicted this assertion. The crackdown demonstrated that the constitutional rights available to Indian citizens in Mumbai or Delhi or Bangalore were not available to Indian citizens in Srinagar or Anantnag or Pulwama. This differential application of constitutional protections, more than any specific measure within the crackdown, poses the most fundamental challenge to the narrative that Kashmir is governed as part of a functioning democracy.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What was the Kashmir crackdown after Pahalgam?

The Kashmir crackdown after Pahalgam refers to the comprehensive security operation launched by Indian authorities following the April 22, 2025, terrorist attack in which 26 people were killed in the Baisaran Valley meadow near Pahalgam. The crackdown involved the detention of approximately 2,800 individuals across Jammu and Kashmir, the demolition of at least ten to twelve homes of suspected militants and their families, the closure of 48 tourist destinations, internet and mobile service shutdowns across multiple districts, the blocking of over 8,000 social media accounts, and the expulsion of nearly 800 Pakistani nationals from the territory. Indian authorities described the measures as security necessities; human rights organizations and UN experts characterized them as collective punishment.

Q: How many people were detained in Kashmir after Pahalgam?

Approximately 2,800 individuals were detained or summoned for questioning in the weeks following the April 22 attack. Of these, more than 250 were classified as overground workers (OGWs) with suspected links to militant organizations, while the remainder included journalists, academics, students, civil society activists, and individuals flagged for social media posts. At least 90 individuals were formally booked under the Public Safety Act, which permits detention without trial for up to two years, and over 100 were charged under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, which makes bail functionally impossible in most cases.

Q: Were homes demolished in Kashmir after the Pahalgam attack?

Indian security forces demolished at least ten to twelve homes in the days and weeks following the attack. The first demolitions targeted the family homes of two suspects in the Pahalgam attack: Adil Hussain Thokar in Bijbehara, Anantnag, and Asif Sheikh in Tral, Pulwama. Additional demolitions targeted homes of active militants and their associates in Shopian, Kupwara, and other districts, including individuals who were not connected to the Pahalgam attack specifically. The demolitions were carried out through controlled explosions and heavy equipment, causing damage to neighboring properties. India’s Supreme Court had ruled in November 2024 that such demolitions without court orders are unconstitutional.

Q: Was the crackdown proportionate or collective punishment?

This is the central contested question. The Indian government argued the measures were proportionate security responses to the deadliest terrorist attack in Kashmir in two decades, necessary to dismantle the support infrastructure for militancy. Human rights organizations, UN Special Rapporteurs, and many independent analysts argued the measures constituted collective punishment, punishing an entire population for the actions of three individuals. The ratio of approximately 2,800 detentions to three attackers, the demolition of homes belonging to families rather than the attackers themselves, and the targeting of individuals with no connection to the attack all support the collective punishment characterization.

Q: What legal authority did the government use for the detentions?

The two primary legal instruments were the Jammu and Kashmir Public Safety Act (PSA) of 1978 and the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA). The PSA is a preventive detention law permitting detention without trial for up to two years, requiring only a district magistrate’s order based on a police recommendation. The UAPA is India’s primary counter-terrorism legislation, which was amended in 2019 to permit the designation of individuals as terrorists and which makes bail exceptionally difficult. Both laws have been widely criticized by human rights organizations for permitting prolonged detention without charge and for shifting the burden of proof to the accused.

Q: Did human rights organizations criticize the crackdown?

Multiple human rights organizations and international bodies criticized the crackdown. In November 2025, a group of UN Special Rapporteurs issued a formal statement condemning “serious human rights violations” including arbitrary arrests, punitive demolitions, communication blackouts, and the targeting of journalists and human rights defenders. Human Rights Watch’s Deputy Director for Asia described the demolitions as “summary punishment” already ruled unlawful by India’s Supreme Court. Reporters Without Borders and the Committee to Protect Journalists condemned the targeting of journalists. The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights specifically cited the demolitions as collective punishment prohibited under the Geneva Conventions.

Q: Were media restrictions imposed in Kashmir during the crackdown?

Extensive media restrictions were imposed both within Kashmir and across India. Mobile internet services were suspended in multiple districts of Jammu and Kashmir. Over 8,000 social media accounts were blocked nationally, including those of journalists, international media outlets, and Chinese state media. BBC Urdu was banned or restricted. At least two journalists, Hilal Mir in Srinagar and Rejaz M. Sheeba Sydeek in Maharashtra, were arrested for their reporting or social media commentary. From late April through July 2025, at least 125 individuals across India were detained for social media posts deemed critical of the government’s response.

Q: How long did the crackdown last?

The most intensive phase of the crackdown lasted from late April through July 2025, encompassing the period from the Pahalgam attack through Operation Sindoor and the elimination of the three attackers in Operation Mahadev on July 28. However, many of its measures persisted far longer. Tourist destinations remained closed for months, with some reopening only in February 2026. Many detainees, including journalists and human rights defenders, remained in custody well into 2026. The expulsions of Pakistani nationals were not reversed. Human rights defender Khurram Parvez remained in detention as of the attack’s first anniversary in April 2026. The crackdown’s institutional effects, including expanded surveillance, normalized PSA usage, and media self-censorship, have continued indefinitely.

Q: How did the crackdown compare to post-Article 370 measures?

The 2025 crackdown was comparable in scale to the 2019 post-Article 370 measures and exceeded them in several dimensions. While the 2019 communications blackout was longer in duration (eighteen months), the 2025 information control extended nationwide rather than being confined to Kashmir. The 2025 demolitions were more dramatic and publicly documented than the 2019 precedent. Both crackdowns used the same legal instruments (PSA, UAPA) and the same institutional infrastructure. The 2025 crackdown was reactive (following an actual attack) rather than preemptive (anticipating unrest), which should in principle have produced a more targeted response but did not.

Q: What happened to the three attackers from Pahalgam?

All three attackers, Suleman alias Faizal Jatt, Hamza Afghani, and Zibran, were identified as Pakistani nationals linked to Lashkar-e-Taiba. They were tracked through a two-month intelligence operation called Operation Mahadev, launched on May 22, 2025, after the Intelligence Bureau received human intelligence about their presence in the Dachigam area near Srinagar. On July 28, 2025, they were killed in an operation led by 4 Para of the Indian Army with support from CRPF and J&K Police. Forensic analysis confirmed that the weapons recovered from them matched the cartridges found at the Baisaran Valley attack site.

Q: Were Pakistani nationals expelled from Kashmir?

On April 24, India’s Ministry of External Affairs revoked all Pakistani nationals’ visas, with existing visas set to expire by April 27 and medical visas by April 29. In Kashmir specifically, nearly 800 Pakistani nationals, many of whom were women married to Kashmiri men who had lived in the territory for years or decades, were ordered to leave. Some had been part of rehabilitation programs in which the Indian government had facilitated their presence. The expulsions were carried out without individual assessment of circumstances, without appeal mechanisms, and without regard for the family separations they produced. UN experts specifically cited these expulsions as violations of the principle of non-refoulement.

Q: What was the impact on Kashmir’s tourism industry?

The impact was devastating. The government closed 48 of 87 listed tourist destinations. All trekking activities were suspended. Approximately 90 percent of tourism bookings were cancelled. Hotels reported near-zero occupancy. Guides, porters, pony operators, and service workers were dismissed. The tourism value chain, which had been the primary engine of Kashmir’s post-2019 economic recovery, contracted overnight. Phased reopenings did not begin until months later, and 14 destinations were still being officially reopened as late as February 2026, ten months after the attack.

Q: Did the NIA investigation find evidence of local Kashmiri involvement?

The NIA investigation corrected initial police claims that had identified two of the four attackers as Kashmiris. The NIA determined that all three shooters were Pakistani nationals linked to LeT. Two local Kashmiris, Parvaiz Ahmad Jothar and Bashir Ahmad Jothar, were arrested for allegedly harboring the terrorists at a hut near Baisaran on April 21, the day before the attack. A third individual, Shafat Maqbool Wani, was arrested under UAPA. The NIA traced the attack’s planning, funding, and command structure to Pakistan, identifying Sajid Saifullah Jatt as the primary handler and LeT chief Hafiz Saeed and TRF head Sajad Gul as masterminds.

Q: What role did Amit Shah play in the crackdown?

Home Minister Amit Shah was the crackdown’s primary political architect. He arrived in Srinagar within hours of the Pahalgam attack and oversaw the initial security response. He chaired the first CCS meeting at the Prime Minister’s residence on April 23. His subsequent parliamentary addresses framed the response as a zero-tolerance doctrine, asserting that Operation Sindoor punished those who planned the attack while Operation Mahadev eliminated those who executed it. His statement that “today’s India sends missiles after terrorist attacks, not dossiers” established the political framework within which the crackdown operated.

Q: What did the UN Special Rapporteurs say about the crackdown?

In November 2025, a group of UN experts led by Ben Saul, the Special Rapporteur on human rights while countering terrorism, issued a formal statement condemning “serious human rights violations” in the aftermath of the Pahalgam attack. The statement began by condemning the terrorist attack itself before cataloging the violations: arbitrary arrests of around 2,800 people including journalists and human rights defenders, punitive demolitions without court orders that constituted collective punishment, communication blackouts restricting freedom of expression, surveillance and harassment of Kashmiri students, and hate speech inflamed by political figures. The experts urged India to bring its counter-terrorism laws in line with international obligations and to independently investigate all alleged violations.

Q: How did the crackdown affect Kashmiri students outside Kashmir?

Kashmiri students at universities across India reported harassment, physical assault, and threats following the Pahalgam attack. Government directives requiring universities to collect personal data on Kashmiri students added a surveillance dimension to the intimidation. Students in Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, and other states faced demands to leave their campuses. In some instances, organized groups attacked Muslim students with weapons. The UN Special Rapporteurs specifically cited the surveillance and harassment of students as a concern, noting that it was exacerbated by government data-collection directives.

Q: What is the Public Safety Act and how was it used?

The Jammu and Kashmir Public Safety Act of 1978 is a preventive detention law that permits the arrest and detention of individuals without trial, without warrant, and without specific charges for up to two years. Originally introduced to combat timber smuggling, it has been primarily used as a political detention tool since the Kashmir insurgency began. A district magistrate can order PSA detention on a police officer’s recommendation. Since 1988, more than 16,000 individuals have been detained under the PSA, overwhelmingly from the Kashmir Valley. After the Pahalgam attack, at least 90 individuals were booked under PSA, including academics, journalists, and social media users.

Q: Were there any legal challenges to the crackdown?

Legal challenges were mounted but had limited impact in real time. High courts in Jammu and Kashmir routinely quash PSA detention orders, and the rate of habeas corpus petitions increased significantly after 2019. Between 2014 and 2019, 272 habeas corpus petitions were filed; after 2019, the figure rose to 2,080. However, the judicial process was too slow to function as an effective check during the crisis period: cases in Srinagar averaged nearly eleven months to be heard. The Supreme Court’s existing rulings against unconstitutional demolitions and in favor of internet access as a fundamental right were effectively overridden by executive action. No court issued an injunction halting the crackdown’s most contested measures during their execution.

Q: What happened to human rights defenders detained during the crackdown?

Several prominent human rights defenders remained in detention long after the immediate security justification had passed. Khurram Parvez, a veteran activist whose detention had been formally condemned by the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention in 2023, remained in prison as of the Pahalgam attack’s first anniversary in April 2026. Irfan Mehraj, another human rights defender, also remained detained. Their continued incarceration suggested that the crackdown’s targeting of civil society was not an emergency response but a structural feature of governance in post-Article 370 Kashmir.

Q: Did the elected J&K government have any role in moderating the crackdown?

The National Conference-led government formed after the October 2024 elections had virtually no role in the security response. In the union territory structure created by the 2019 reorganization, security policy is controlled by the centrally appointed Lieutenant Governor, not the elected Chief Minister. The Army, CRPF, and intelligence agencies that executed the crackdown report to the central government through the Lieutenant Governor, not to the elected state government. The crackdown demonstrated the structural limits of the democratic restoration that the 2024 elections were supposed to represent.

Q: How did the crackdown affect press freedom in Kashmir?

Press freedom was severely curtailed during the crackdown. At least two journalists were arrested: Hilal Mir in Srinagar for “anti-national content” and Rejaz M. Sheeba Sydeek in Maharashtra for criticizing Operation Sindoor. The blocking of over 8,000 social media accounts included accounts of journalists and independent media outlets. BBC Urdu was banned or restricted. The government sent formal letters to media organizations criticizing terminology choices. Reporters Without Borders and the Committee to Protect Journalists condemned the targeting of journalists. The Kashmiri press, which had initially printed front pages in black to mourn the Pahalgam victims, found itself unable to report freely on the government’s response.