Ganderbal Attack: The Security Situation is Already Spiralling for Omar Abdullah

The civilian administration headed by CM Omar Abdullah doesn’t have any de jure authority over security agencies.

Special Operation Group (SOG) of J&K police personnel during a search operation on the Srinagar-Ladakh highway in Ganderbal district, Jammu & Kashmir, on October 21, 2024. PTI.

(Photo: PTI)

After courting controversy over allegedly reneging on its promise of passing a resolution in the Assembly denouncing the abrogation of Article 370, the newly elected Jammu and Kashmir government led by Omar Abdullah is headed towards a fresh crisis — the spiralling security situation in the erstwhile state after a militant attack on 20 October gripped the Valley, triggering an outpouring of grief and anger over the weekend.

On Sunday evening, just a few days after the new government was formed, unknown gunmen struck a construction site near the Gagangir area in Kashmir’s tourist resort of Sonmarg, Ganderbal District, killing seven persons, five of which were non-local construction staff. 

Security sources described the attack as “really unexpected.”

The workers were resting at the base camp of Apco Infratech, an infrastructure firm associated with the construction of the 6.5 km long Z-Morh tunnel. Once completed, the tunnel will plough through the avalanche-prone mountains of Ganderbal, providing year-round access to Sonmarg, which otherwise remains out of bounds in winter.

Police sources told The Quint that the victims were identified as Gurmeet Singh from Punjab, Dr Shahnawaz Dar from Budgam, Shashi Abrol from the Talab Tillo area of Jammu, Anil Kumar Shukla from Madhya Pradesh, Muhammad Hanif, Faheem Nazir and Kaleem from Bihar. 

Old Actors Are Reprising Their Roles

Two militants believed to be associated with The Resistance Front (TRF), a rebranded outfit associated with the Lashkar-e-Taiba, have perpetrated the killings, according to police. The group has threatened more such attacks in a widely circulated poster which has been attributed to one Ahmed Khalid who, police sources told The Quint, is the alias of a militant leader named Sajad Gul, currently residing in Pakistan and in touch with the country’s military establishment.

Gul's name has also appeared in the investigations associated with a string of attacks against religious minorities in Kashmir in 2021 and 2022.

A second poster, purportedly issued by People’s Anti-Fascist Front (PAFF), a Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM) affiliate, also appears to have lauded the attack on the construction workers, calling such infrastructural projects in Kashmir as “against the interest of our Chinese friends.”

Road projects like Z-Morh also have a role in strengthening the country’s defences by beefing up the infrastructure required for military-related mobilisations. The comments about alleged “Chinese interests” have come at a time when New Delhi and Beijing have announced de-escalation along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in Ladakh, where both militaries had faced off in 2020, resulting in deaths on both sides, sparking a big diplomatic spat.

Terror Attacks Challenge Government's Writ

But more than anything else, Sunday’s carnage is a reminder of how militants remain capable of carrying out breakthrough attacks despite the widespread security drives in the region.

The attack outside the Z-Morh tunnel has already led the agencies to start a risk profile assessment of the sensitive infrastructural projects across the J&K.

The attack has also fuelled concerns about how the security scenario in Kashmir is likely to unfold with the elected government being in place. Although the civilian administration headed by Chief Minister Omar Abdullah doesn’t have any de jure authority over security agencies, any worrying turn that the region’s security situation takes will clearly be associated with his rule.

Omar is aware of the precarious nature of his victory, given that the mandate he got was split along regional lines. While  Jammu voted nearly unanimously for the BJP, Kashmir helped the National Conference win with a landslide. Since then, Omar has been receptive to the concerns that his administration shouldn’t be seen as Kashmir-centric. To this end, he has appointed two Hindu legislators from Jammu as ministers in his cabinet.

But Sunday’s killings show that Omar’s outreach program is only going to get tougher with the fragile situation of other vulnerable minorities living in Kashmir. 

The Targeted Killings in 2024

The 20 October attack was not the first targeted killing of the year. On 18 October, militants shot dead a 30-year-old migrant labourer identified as Ashok Chauhan. Hailing from Bihar’s Banka district, the labourer was working at the maize fields in the South Kashmir district of Shopian when he was killed.

Militants also killed Aijaz Sheikh, a village head (sarpanch) associated with BJP in the same district on 18 May. On the same day, militants shot at a tourist couple in Anantnag town.

In another instance, militants killed Raju Shah, a migrant worker from Bihar in Jablipora village of Anantnag on 17 April this year, just ten days after militants had fired at a non-local taxi driver in Shopian.

And on 7 February earlier this year, militants shot dead two non-local workers Amritpal Singh and Rohit Masih at the Shalla Kadal area of downtown Srinagar. 

Was Security Blanket Downgraded in Kashmir?

The brief interlude in the killings was due to the heightened security deployment in Kashmir in the wake of multiple events.

Around 63,500 personnel of Central Armed Police Forces (CAPFs) were flown into J&K ahead of the Lok Sabha elections in May. This was followed by the further deployment of 500 battalions of CAPFs to ensure a violence-free yatra (pilgrimage) to the sacred cave in Amarnath in South Kashmir.

Amidst this war-like mobilisation, around 300 paramilitary companies of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), the Border Security Force (BSF), the Sahastra Seema Bal (SSB) and the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) were stationed in the Valley for the safe conduct of the Assembly elections.

And as the election season in J&K comes to an end, the security deployment appears to have returned to its default mode. But critics insist that the downgrading of the security arrangements amounts to the lowering of our guard against militancy.

“It is a complete intelligence failure. In the past 35 years, I have never heard of an attack taking place in this remote area of Ganderbal,” said Sanjay Tickoo, who heads the Kashmiri Pandit Sangharsh Samiti (KPSS), responsible for the welfare of the 808 remaining Pandit families that continue to live in Kashmir. “The area has the Sindh River on one side, mountains on the other and the highway in the middle, and, just 300 metres from the spot of the attack, there’s a CRPF camp. How were the terrorists able to plot an attack and then escape without a trace?”

Tickoo added that a sense of panic has gripped the Pandit community at the moment as it fears that the militants might target them next in a redux of the 2021 October attacks that left at least 13 members of the minority community in Kashmir dead.

The Tradition of pre-Winter Escalation

The onset of autumn in Kashmir is already associated with the rise of militant attacks.

Last year in October, the TRF claimed the responsibility for killing Ghulam Muhammad Dar (a J&K Police head constable in the Kralpora area of Tangmarg) Masroor Wani (an inspector at the Eidgah area of Srinagar), and Mukesh Kumar (a migrant labourer from Bihar working at a brick kiln in Pulwama district). All these three killings took place within a span of 24 hours.

Similarly, in the autumn of 2022 (between 23 September and 3 October), five attacks took place in J&K in which migrant workers and security personnel were targeted by militants associated with the TRF. The attacks included two bus explosions in the Udhampur district of Jammu.

Tickoo told The Quint that given the history of escalation in the autumn season, the security forces should have been on high alert. “I also alerted the government to such a possibility. The responsibility for security continues to be with the Central government in the current arrangement. So, essentially, it is them who are responsible for what has happened in Ganderbal,” said Tickoo, who continues to live with the Personal Security Officers (PSOs) deployed at his residence since 2021.

He concluded by saying that he had earlier been thinking about requesting the government to withdraw his security. “But I don’t think I can afford that now,” he said.

Will J&K Get Its Statehood Back?

Anger and worries are mounting elsewhere too as fears abound that the attacks will give the BJP-led Centre a pretext to delay the restoration of statehood, something Union Home Minister Amit Shah had promised would take place after elections.

On 22 October, the Deccan Chronicle newspaper, quoting a senior government official in Delhi, reported that the Centre is likely to drag its feet over the statehood issue. It will, the report said, “do it only after closely monitoring the situation on the ground for the next three to six months.”

In Kashmir, however, the latest killings have reinforced a sense of insecurity, with people asking whether the recent voting served any purpose at all as the government has not been able to offer protection.

Outside the house of Dr Shahnawaz in Naidgam village in the Central Kashmir district of Budgam, villagers sit in a row under a windbreak of Poplar trees. They appear both angry and clueless over the killing.

“Somehow, we have not been able to find these unidentified gunmen who have been terrorising the innocent people here,” Javid Iqbal, Shahnawaz’s 48-year-old neighbour told The Quint. “Not even a week has passed since the new government was put in place and now we are facing these attacks. People are so fearful that when we leave our homes in the morning, we already tell our kids that there’s no guarantee that we might return alive.”

(Shakir Mir is an independent journalist. He has also written for The Wire, Article 14, Caravan Magazine, Firstpost, The Times of India and more. He tweets at @shakirmir. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)