Cross-LoC infiltration and drone pistol deliveries scale up violence in Valley

The Pakistan based Takfiri terrorist groups and their local cadre in the Valley are targeting Kashmiriyat by killing innocent non-Kashmiris and have no qualms killing fellow Muslims.

Published on: Oct 17, 2021, 08:27:19 IST

By Shishir Gupta, New Delhi

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Targeting of two non-Kashmiris, including a Muslim, by Takfiri terrorists in the Kashmir Valley on Saturday is part of Pakistani plan to raise the violence levels so that normalcy is disturbed, and the tourist economy is hit in the Union territory. Takfiri is a term used for those Islamic terrorist groups, Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed in this context, who have no qualms targeting their Muslim brothers for political objectives. They are termed apostates.

Arvind Kumar Sah from Bihar was killed in Srinagar’s Eidgah area and Sageer Ahmad, a carpenter from Uttar Pradesh, in the Pulwama district.  (ANI Photo)

According to national security planners and security officials, the recent spate of violence against non-Kashmiris is a result of infiltration from across the Line of Control (LoC) of LeT terrorists in the Poonch-Rajouri sector. The second reason is increased drone delivery of Chinese Star pistols to overground workers (OGW) of LeT in the Valley because of which targeted killing is taking place in Srinagar.

In the UT of Jammu and Kashmir, the scene of terror action is in the Krishnaghati sector, where the Indian Army has lost seven personnel while engaging already infiltrated LeT terrorists in the forests on Rajouri-Poonch district borders. This infiltration is said to have taken place towards the end of August 2021. The second theatre is the Valley where the OGWs with recently acquired pistols are targeting non-Kashmiris to spread terror in the region and hit the booming tourist sector economy. According to J-K police officials, many pistol consignments have reached the Valley due to drone flights from across the border with the Indian security forces hampered due to lack of functioning anti-drone systems.

Despite Indian security forces deployed in large numbers both on the LoC and the hinterland with sensors and fencing, there is still no foolproof mechanism to prevent Pakistan based terrorist groups from infiltrating the Valley. The weapon and ammunition supplies through drones have added to the concern of security forces as there is no human cost to the terrorist groups based in Pakistan.

While the J-K police have neutralised 11 terrorists in the past week after the first round of targeting earlier this month, Union home minister Amit Shah spoke to top security officials on Saturday night from Port Blair with implicit instructions of bringing the guilty to book. The state DGP Dilbagh Singh also held discussions with security agencies for actionable intelligence against the perpetrators of attacks on innocent non-Kashmiris.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.Read More

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