‘New wave’: Why suspected rebel attacks are rising in Kashmir’s Jammu area

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi told parliament last month that the armed rebellion in Indian-administered Kashmir was in its final stages due to his government’s “multipronged” strategy, implemented since his government scrapped the region’s special status five years ago.

Three days later, on July 6, two Indian Army personnel and four suspected rebels were killed in two separate gunfights in the disputed region’s Kulgam district, raising questions about Modi’s claim.

Then, on July 8, suspected rebels ambushed an army vehicle and killed five soldiers in Kathua, a district located in the region’s Jammu division towards the south.

A week later, four more Indian soldiers, including an army officer, were killed in another gunfight with suspected rebels in the forests of Jammu’s Doda district.

Last week, the army said it thwarted a major attack in Jammu’s Rajouri district when a soldier was injured in the predawn attack by suspected rebels at an army camp. Following the attack, a search operation was launched in which one suspected rebel was killed.

And on Saturday, one Indian soldier was killed and another wounded after the army said it foiled an infiltration bid in Kupwara in the north, a district along the Line of Control (LoC), the de facto border dividing India and Pakistan, who rule over parts of Kashmir but claim it in full.

The Indian Army in a statement said a “Pakistani intruder” was also killed in Saturday’s gunfight and two Indian soldiers were wounded.

While there has been an uptick in attacks by suspected rebels in Indian-administered Kashmir in recent months, the theatre of violence appears to be shifting southwards to Jammu, a Hindu-majority area that has experienced relative peace in the three decades of armed rebellion against New Delhi’s rule.

In 2022 and 2023, there were just three suspected rebel attacks on Indian security forces in the Jammu area. This year, at least seven have already been recorded so far.

Of at least 16 Indian soldiers and policemen killed in different attacks in the Indian-administered Kashmir this year, at least 10 of the fatalities were in Jammu.

Since 2021, the disputed region witnessed the killing of 124 security forces personnel, at least 51 of them in Jammu. And it is not just the security forces.

On June 9, the day Modi was sworn in as prime minister for his third term, nine civilians were killed and dozens wounded when suspected rebels attacked a bus carrying Hindu pilgrims, forcing it to fall down a Himalayan gorge in the Reasi district of Jammu area.

“This place had been mostly safe,” Muhammad Sultan, 55, a farmer in Jammu’s Doda district told Al Jazeera. “But all these attacks have created tension and unease in the entire area.”

Another Jammu resident, Shamsheer Singh, said residents are unable to sleep due to the repeated tensions and gunfights in the area.

“The attacks are making everyone feel unsafe. This is not a normal situation,” the 65-year-old said. “We lock ourselves in homes before the sunset. We have never felt so fearful.”

‘New wave of militancy’

In August 2019, when Modi stripped Indian-administered Kashmir of its limited autonomy and brought it under New Delhi’s direct rule, his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) defended the move, claiming it would eliminate armed rebellion and bring economic prosperity.

However, five years down the line, security in the region continues to be a headache for Modi’s government, which now has a reduced mandate in parliament.

According to experts, the violence in the region now shifting to Jammu marks a “new wave of militancy”, showing patterns not witnessed in the 35-year-long rebellion.

“Guerrilla-trained militants are striking with a high element of surprise in the region’s forested mountains at short intervals,” Zafar Choudhary, a political analyst based in Jammu, told Al Jazeera. “Their targets are mainly the members of security forces.”

Choudhary said that the resurgence of violence following the withdrawal of Kashmir’s special status in 2019 appears to be a well thought-out strategy of the rebel groups to convey that the conflict has not ended by the constitutional changes, as claimed by Indian authorities.

“Since security forces have been able to achieve a remarkable degree of success in Kashmir Valley over the past five years, the militants have brought battle to the mountains of Jammu. These attacks are clear evidence that terrorism in Kashmir is far from over as claimed by the Modi government.”

Experts say the operational space for armed rebel groups has been reduced in the Kashmir Valley due to the government’s counterinsurgency campaign that has seen a high concentration of security forces and reasonably good intelligence, thereby disrupting the rebels’ organisation and local logistical networks.

They say India’s strategy forced the armed groups to seek refuge in the treacherous mountains and dense forests in the Jammu area, where carrying out attacks was relatively easy. Moreover, the rebels were also aided by a loosened security grid in Jammu because it had been violence-free for decades.

Pravin Sawhney, an expert on defence matters and editor of Force magazine, told Al Jazeera the situation was grim. He said “the militants, not the Indian Army” are initiating attacks in the Jammu area.

“They [rebels] get to choose the time, location, and scale or quantum of the attack. The Indian Army is merely reacting to whatever intelligence it receives,” he said.

A senior security official in Jammu, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to speak to the media, told Al Jazeera that the level of alertness and adherence to the army’s standard operating procedure (SOP) during troop movement was comparatively slack as compared with the valley area of Kashmir, making it easier for the rebels to ambush convoys of soldiers.

Reduced troops due to China tensions

Ajai Sahni, founder and executive director of the New Delhi-based Institute for Conflict Management and South Asia Terrorism Portal, said there had been a “thinning of security forces” in the Jammu area after a large number of soldiers were moved to the frontiers along India’s border with China.

The deployment along the Line of Actual Control (LAC), as the 3,500km-long (2,174 miles) de facto border between the two Asian giants is known, has made it easier for the Kashmiri rebels to operate, he said.

But Sahni thinks adding forces along the China border is “necessary” given the escalating threats and movements by the Chinese army along the disputed frontier.

In the summer of 2020, at least 20 Indian and four Chinese soldiers were killed along the LAC in rare hand-to-hand combat, bringing the two nations to the verge of war. Repeated talks between the two armies – and their governments – to defuse the tensions have not made much headway.

Sahni said one of the key challenges that Indian forces face in Jammu is the “need for manpower-intensive counterinsurgency operations”.

“The region is fairly large. It is mountainous and densely forested. And when you take that manpower away, the armed forces are immediately at a considerable disadvantage,” he told Al Jazeera.

Hindu-majority area

According to the 2011 census, Hindus form nearly 29 percent of Indian-administered Kashmir’s 12.5 million population. In Jammu, however, they are a majority, with 66 percent of the region being Hindu, who do not essentially identify themselves with the Kashmir cause.

Then there are Muslim tribal groups in Jammu, such as the Gujjars and the Paharis, who have historically been unsympathetic to the armed rebellion, with army officials themselves acknowledging that support from these communities has been crucial in fighting the rebels in Jammu area.

It is for these reasons that Jammu has been nearly free of separatist violence for decades. But as anger among the rebels over the Indian rule worsened after New Delhi’s 2019 move, Jammu also saw a spike in attacks, forcing the government to revive the Village Defence Guards (VDGs), a decades-old civilian militia.

Originally set up in 1995 in the districts of the Jammu area, the VDGs (then known as Village Defence Committees) were tasked with combatting the armed rebellion. The VDGs then had 4,000 members and 27,000 volunteers – the numbers are lesser now and not officially known.

In the early 2000s, as the rebellion began to dwindle and rebel groups began to lose their influence, the militia was disbanded, only to be revived in January last year.

Moreover, the communities in Jammu opposed to the rebellion also had a history of cooperating and collaborating with the Indian security forces, mostly through intelligence networks.

“Militant movements used to be spotted and eliminated before they could carry out an operation,” Sahni told Al Jazeera, explaining how the networks worked. But he fears those networks have largely broken down and “become unreliable” due to the government’s “unpopular policies in recent years”.

This was made clear by the custodial death of three tribal Muslim men in Jammu’s Topa Pir village in Poonch district in December last year.

Following a suspected rebel attack that killed four soldiers, the three men were picked up by the army and allegedly tortured to death in custody, causing widespread anger and deepening distrust between the military and the local population, and disrupting the intelligence network on the ground.

‘Pakistan’s attempt to regain Kashmir narrative’

The picturesque northern districts of Jammu, including Poonch, Rajouri and Doda, have a Muslim majority. Their hilly terrain and dense forests as well as proximity to the Pakistan border make cross-border infiltration easier for the rebels and “Pakistan-sponsored” fighters, as alleged by India.

“Since Hindus are a minority in northern Jammu, the militants are attacking Hindus there,” Ashok Koul, the BJP general secretary in Indian-administered Kashmir, told Al Jazeera.

Some experts view the recent rebel attacks as Pakistan’s alleged attempt to regain control of the Kashmir narrative, which, according to them, has been largely rendered inconsequential in recent years, particularly since the removal of Kashmir’s special status in 2019.

Koul alleged that Pakistan is helping the rebels carry out attacks to destabilise Jammu. “There was peace in Jammu, which is why the militants moved from Kashmir to Jammu,” he said.

But Maleeha Lodhi, former Pakistani ambassador to the United Nations, the United States and the United Kingdom, told Al Jazeera the BJP is “only trying to externalise the problem and their failure which is rooted in India’s occupation” of the region.

“India’s illegal annexation of Jammu and Kashmir in defiance of UN Security Council resolutions in 2019 doesn’t change the reality that it is an internationally recognised dispute. Since then, New Delhi has used force and fraud in Jammu and Kashmir but has been unable to weaken the will of the Kashmiri people for freedom from Indian occupation,” she said.

Last week, the Pakistani foreign ministry said “bravado and jingoism undermine regional peace, and are totally counterproductive for resolution of longstanding disputes” between the two countries, especially on the core issue of Kashmir.

“Instead of maligning others for terrorism, India should reflect on its own campaign of orchestrating targeted assassinations, subversion and terrorism in foreign territories,” it said.

But defence analyst Sawhney believes Kashmir is not a military conflict, and that it should be resolved through politics and diplomacy.

“They [government] need to find a political and international solution to this. It is not a military problem. It is not the military’s job to solve your political or diplomatic problems,” he told Al Jazeera.