India: State Response to Insurgency in Jammu & Kashmir – The Jammu Case

Abstract

Whether confronted with pure terrorism or terror-as-tactic within an insurgency, the state is faced with the same conundrum: how to provide security for the populace in a situation where resources, human and material, inevitably are limited. Key is the nature of response, with the quality critical to best use of quantity. The ability to implement a response that is both appropriate and sustainable, even when faced with ‘terrorism as strategy’ in an insurgent campaign, depends upon appropriate analysis of the challenge. Invariably, disaggregating a case such as Jammu & Kashmir, where terrorism has increasingly swallowed the original insurgent impulse, reveals discrete local battlefields that can be attacked in appropriate fashion. Thus Jammu & Kashmir, commonly regarded in the media as a hopeless case of disaffection and bloodshed, is more properly seen as a number of conflicts. In at least half the struggle, that in Jammu, the Indian response reveals itself as strategically and operationally correct.