Details are still emerging about the daylong attack on Monday by three-four terrorists in the Gurdaspur district of Punjab, which borders both Pakistan and Jammu & Kashmir (J&K).
Intelligence agencies are searching for linkages to Pakistani groups such as the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) or Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM). Simultaneously, they are trying to establish whether Pakistan-based Khalistani militants also played a role, direct or indirect.
Most intelligence insiders suspect the same Sialkot-based Islamist militant groups that have made a modus operandi in recent years of infiltrating and staging fidayeen (fight-to-the-death) attacks in the Samba-Kathua belt that borders Punjab. Having progressively discovered, including during a recent attack on March 21, that targets in Samba-Kathua are now heavily defended, the jihadis may have switched their attention 20-30 km further south to Dinanagar, inside Punjab, where they struck on Monday, killing nine Indians.
Even so, experts like Ajai Sahni of the Institute of Conflict Management are not ruling out a role by Khalistani militants who have conducted a low-intensity Sikh-separatist campaign from Pakistan since the end of the Punjab insurgency in the early 1990s.
Just a fortnight ago, a photograph appeared on social media showing Pakistan Sikh Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee (PSGPC) General Secretary Gopal Singh Chawla and PSGPC office-bearers meeting Jamaat-ud-Daawa (JuD) chief Hafix Saeed. The JuD is widely known to be a front of the LeT. "While Khalistani and Kashmir-focused groups have not so far cooperated in staging attacks, we know Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) has been pressuring the Khalistanis to earn their keep in Pakistan. The ISI has been propagating the concept of K-2 - Kashmir and Khalistan - to keep India under pressure on two fronts," says Sahni.
Noted Pakistan expert C Christine Fair from Georgetown University, Washington DC, adds that there is credible information that Khalistani separatists in Canada, which has long been a hothouse of separatist activity, recently met ISI representatives there. There is little clarity about what this might mean for the K-2 project, or whether this could portend the revival of urban militancy in Punjab.
Either way, Punjab Police needs to prepare itself, both for a revival of Khalistani activism and for the spill-over of terrorism from the Kathua-Samba belt in J&K. Certainly, in the current operation, Punjab Police has not acquitted itself with credit. It is worrying that they allowed three-four terrorists to have killed nine Indians, including a superintendent of police, and to have taken over a police station well inside Indian territory, from where they fought off much larger numbers for over 12 hours.
While this is the first cross-border terror attack in Gurdaspur, that district has historical and emotional resonance for Pakistan, which has linked it with the J&K dispute since the time of partition. Pakistan had expected that Gurdaspur, where Muslims made up 51 per cent of the population, would be allocated to Pakistan by the Radcliffe Commission. However, the Radcliffe boundary awards transferred only Shakargarh tehsil to Pakistan, leaving the rest of Gurdaspur with India.
Pakistani historians still fume that this was done at the instance of Lord Louis Mountbatten, who allegedly conspired with Jawaharlal Nehru to ensure that the crucial highway to J&K, which passes through Gurdaspur district, remains with India.
It is this highway, running along the India-Pakistan border from Pathankot to Jammu, via Kathua and Samba, which has been frequently attacked by infiltrated fidayeen groups. Monday's attack was only the latest.
