Danish Bhat
In conflict societies, peace is rarely valued as a first principle. It is often dismissed as fragile, transactional, or imposed, until its tangible benefits become visible and its sudden disruption exposes what is truly at stake. Kashmir’s contemporary trajectory illustrates this dynamic with unusual clarity. The terror attack at Baisaran, Pahalgam on 22 April 2025, which claimed 26 civilian lives, did not merely interrupt a period of calm. It punctured a deeper illusion that violence could coexist with social mobility, economic revival, and generational aspiration.
To understand why this moment resonated so profoundly, one must begin with 5 August 2019, a date that marked a constitutional and psychological rupture. For a large section of Kashmiri youth, the abrogation of Article 370 was experienced less as an administrative reform and more as a unilateral reordering of political belonging. Fear, uncertainty, and alienation shaped public sentiment. When the Indian Home Minister argued in Parliament that Article 370 had become an impediment to development, the claim appeared abstract, even dismissive, to a population conditioned by decades of mistrust and instability.
Yet political meaning is not static. It is reconstituted through outcomes.
Following the lifting of restrictions, Jammu and Kashmir began operating as a Union Territory under direct central administration. What distinguished this phase from earlier cycles of “normalisation” was not rhetorical outreach but the systematic dismantling of the infrastructure of violence. According to official Ministry of Home Affairs data, the post-2019 period witnessed a structural decline in terrorism-related indicators across Jammu and Kashmir.
Between 2019 and 2024, terrorist incidents declined by over 50 percent, civilian killings by terrorists fell to their lowest sustained levels in decades, and local recruitment into militant organisations dropped sharply, with official briefings repeatedly noting that annual local recruitment had fallen to double-digit figures, compared to several hundred per year during the peak insurgency years of the 2000s and early 2010s.
This decline was not incidental. A sustained campaign targeted terror financing networks, hawala channels, and overground support systems, while the operationalisation of the State Investigation Agency institutionalised counterterror accountability. Street violence, once a recurring feature of Kashmiri political life, virtually disappeared. Shutdown calendars collapsed. Educational institutions completed uninterrupted academic cycles. Commercial activity ceased to be episodic and became continuous.
In political economy terms, peace crossed a critical threshold. It became durable enough to generate investment behaviour.
The most visible manifestation of this shift was tourism. Official government data shows that annual tourist visits to Jammu and Kashmir rose from approximately 2.5 million in 2020 to over 23 million in 2024, an expansion unprecedented in the region’s recent history. Foreign tourist arrivals, long suppressed by security concerns, crossed 60,000 in 2024, a modest absolute figure but a powerful signal of restored confidence.
Tourism’s significance in Kashmir lies not in headline numbers alone but in its labour absorption capacity. Stability translated into participation. Young Kashmiris entered the economy at scale, leasing hotels and guesthouses, investing in transport fleets, opening travel agencies, developing homestays and houseboats, and professionalising adventure tourism through trekking, skiing, rafting, alpine camping, photography tours, and heritage walks. Peace ceased to be a moral abstraction. It became income, continuity, and autonomy.
It was precisely this fragile yet consequential transformation that made 22 April 2025 such a rupture. The attack at Baisaran, deliberately targeting tourists, was not random violence. It was a strategic attempt to reverse behavioural change, erode confidence, and reinsert fear into daily life. By historical standards, it stood out as one of the deadliest civilian-targeted attacks in recent years precisely because such incidents had become increasingly rare.
What followed, however, marked a decisive societal departure from the past.
Public reaction across Kashmir was immediate, spontaneous, and unambiguous. Protest emerged not against the state, but against terrorism itself. This was neither curated outrage nor symbolic dissent. It reflected a recalibrated moral economy. The act of Syed Adil Hussain Shah, a local pony handler who confronted the attackers in an attempt to protect tourists and was killed, became emblematic of this shift. His death resonated because it captured a new instinct: civilian resistance to terror rooted in the defence of peace, not political alignment.
For perhaps the first time in a generation, a broad cross-section of Kashmiri society openly rejected Pakistan-backed terrorism in public spaces. This response was not ideological. It was experiential. People understood what violence threatened to dismantle because they had already experienced the dividends of stability.
The Home Minister’s earlier assertion that peace is the prerequisite for development acquired retrospective coherence, not as a political claim, but as an empirical observation. Data on security, tourism, education, and economic participation converged with lived reality.
In the immediate aftermath of the attack, tourism numbers declined and cancellations surged. Yet official indicators by mid-2025 already point to gradual recovery rather than systemic collapse. This resilience is itself instructive. It suggests that peace in Kashmir has moved beyond enforcement and entered the realm of social preference.
Baisaran thus constitutes a critical inflection point in Kashmir’s contemporary history. It exposed the diminishing returns of violence and clarified, with tragic precision, the costs of instability. For Kashmir’s youth, peace is no longer a contested narrative imposed from above. It is a condition that has been experienced, measured, nearly lost, and therefore consciously valued.
That recognition, forged under extreme pressure, may prove more consequential than any policy declaration.
(The author is a former Corporator)
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