2025 broke Kashmir’s fragile calm, exposed new security threats

26 tourists were killed at Baisaran in Pahalgam. (file)

The year 2025 opened on a calm note in Kashmir. With the guns falling largely silent, the Valley slipped into a rare era of normalcy, with packed hotels and resorts signifying a tourism boom and briefly letting the dread of violence recede into the past.

That calm was broken by two incidents — the April 22 attack in Pahalgam’s Baisaran Valley, and the crackdown on an interstate terror module involving Kashmir-linked doctors and the November 10 Red Fort blast — which not only shattered the perception of peace but also underscored Kashmir’s latest threat: hybrid militancy.

For security forces, the incidents highlighted new security threats in the coming years. According to senior officials, militancy in Jammu and Kashmir has changed its contours over the past few years.

“The underground local militancy is almost over and the majority of the terror operatives are Pakistani nationals, who are moving in the dense and high mountains. But our biggest challenge is hybrid militancy. Fighting it is like shooting in the dark,” he said.

“Hybrid militants” are those not listed as ultras but radicalised enough to carry out a terror strike and then slip back into routine life, making them difficult to track. Though allegedly on the rise for the last few years, the Red Fort attack sharply highlighted this trend.

That attack involved an explosive-laden vehicle allegedly driven by suicide bomber Dr Umar un Nabi, a doctor from a village in Pulwama who worked in Faridabad in the National Capital Region, which blasted outside the Red Fort metro station in the national capital, killing 15 people. In the lead-up to the explosion, law enforcement authorities, acting on intelligence inputs about a terror network, arrested four people — three doctors and a preacher — and seized 3,000 kg of explosives, chemicals, reagents, inflammable material, electronic circuits and timers, besides guns and ammunition, from the alleged module.

According to sources, while the Kashmir Valley has seen little or no local recruitment into militant ranks in 2025, the busting of the interstate terror network that had spread from Kashmir to Haryana and Lucknow and the subsequent attack signalled a major challenge: a shifting of the battleground out of the Valley.

Officials said these small modules, working independent of Pakistan or existing militant groups, pose a growing challenge as they use locally available resources for terror activities, as seen in the Red Fort blast.

“The busting of the interstate terror module is an indicator of radicalisation especially among the educated youth,” the officer said. “This could be dangerous as it is difficult to track and expose small and well-knit terror modules”.

Security agencies also apprehend that Pakistan is attempting to revive militancy in the Valley. While the Border Security Force (BSF) has reported heightened activity at militant launch pads along the Line of Control (LoC), Valley police have taken pre-emptive measures to prevent any revival.

A senior police officer said the renewed crackdown on Jamaat-e-Islami and militant sympathisers with any past record is aimed at stopping fresh recruitment.

“There are serious inputs that Pakistan is trying to revive militancy in coming months and we have already started work on our counter plan,” said another police officer. “The ban on use of VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) in several districts of the Valley and the Jammu region is part of this effort. The aim is to cut communication channels between militants, their sleeper cells and handlers.”