On the afternoon of April 22, 2025, four armed men walked into the Baisaran meadow nearPahalgaminJammu and Kashmir. They did not begin shooting. They began asking questions. The first question they asked the tourists they encountered was about religion. Are you Hindu or Muslim? Recite the Kalma. Drop your trousers, so we can verify. The questions were the most chilling part of what followed. They turned an act of terrorism into something older, darker, and harder to name without flinching. They turned it into a religious massacre.
By the time the gunmen finished, 26 people lay dead. Twenty-five were tourists. One was a local Muslim pony-ride operator who, according to survivor accounts, had tried to intervene to save the others. The dead included a young naval officer named Vinay Narwal, who had been married six days earlier and was visiting Kashmir for his honeymoon. His wife survived. In a video that has since circled the world, she is heard repeating, in disbelief, what the gunman said before pulling the trigger: he is not Muslim. The gunman shot her husband three times, in the neck, the chest, and the thighs.
Words like terrorism, attack, and even massacre fail to capture what happened in the Baisaranmeadow that afternoon. Terrorism implies political violence directed at the state. The Baisaran killings were not directed at any state. They were directed at human beings, identified one by one, on the basis of what they believed or did not believe. Attack implies a single act with a beginning, a middle, and an end. The Baisaran killings unfolded over more than ninety minutes, with the killers moving methodically from group to group, asking the same questions, demanding the same proofs, executing the same judgements.
The clearest English term for what happened at Pahalgam is the one that international law uses for systematic, identity-based killing of civilians. It is a crime against humanity. The 1998 Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court, defines crimes against humanity to include acts of murder when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack. The Baisaran killings meet that definition with brutal clarity.
The targeting was systematic. The targets were civilians. The basis of selection was religious identity. The attackers knew exactly what they were doing. They had been trained to do it. They were sent to do it. And the men who sent them, members of The Resistance Front, an offshoot of thePakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba, had a long record of organised violence directed against Indian civilians.
Words like terrorism, attack, and even massacre fail to capture what happened in the Baisaran meadow. The killers moved methodically from group to group, asking the same questions, executing the same judgements.
What gave the Pahalgam killings their full meaning was the political context in which they took place. On April 16, 2025, six days before the massacre, Pakistan's Army Chief General Asim Munir gave a speech at the Overseas Pakistanis Convention in Islamabad. In that speech, Munir reaffirmed the two-nation theory, the foundational ideological claim that Hindus and Muslims constitute fundamentally different peoples who cannot live together. He described Kashmir as Pakistan's jugular vein. He emphasised that Hindus and Muslims differ in religion, culture, traditions, thoughts, and ambitions, and could never be one nation.
Six days later, four men walked into Baisaran meadow and acted on precisely that ideological framework. They did not ask their victims for political views, or for opinions about Kashmir, or for positions on Indian government policy. They asked them whether they were Hindu or Muslim. Then they killed the Hindus.
The international response to Pahalgam, in the immediate aftermath, was strong and largely uniform. The UK Foreign Secretary called the killings completely unacceptable. The French President expressed solidarity with India. Israel affirmed India's right to self-defence. Russia condemned all acts of terrorism. The US State Department issued a Level 4 travel advisory for Jammu and Kashmir and called for the perpetrators to be brought to justice.
Yet the response, however supportive, has not yet led to the structural conclusions that the killings demanded. A targeted religious massacre of civilians by an organisation linked to a Pakistani-based terror group, occurring days after a public speech by the Pakistan Army Chief affirming a two-nation ideology, ought to have produced more than condolences. It ought to have produced a reassessment of how the international community engages with Pakistan, what conditions are placed on its access to global financial institutions, and what consequences follow when its territory continues to host the men who plan such attacks.
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