Hyderabad: February 14, which is celebrated as the love festival the Valentine's Day world over, has been a day to commemorate a tragedy since the year 2019 India when at least 40 CRPF personnel were killed while scores of others were injured in a horrific suicide attack in Lethpora area of Jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama district that year etching the date in the permanent memory of every Indian.
Suicide Attack That Shook the Nation
On February 14, 2019, a convoy of 78 vehicles transporting over 2,500 Central Reserve Police Force personnel from Jammu to Srinagar was traveling along National Highway 44. The convoy had left Jammu around 03:30 IST, carrying a large number of personnel as the highway was closed for two days. The convoy was scheduled to arrive at its destination before sunset.
Around 15:15 IST, a bus carrying security personnel was hit by a car carrying explosives in Lethpora, near Awantipora. It caused a blast, killing 40 CRPF personnel from the 76th Battalion and injuring many more. The injured soldiers were shifted to the Army Base Hospital in Srinagar. The Pakistan-based militant group Jaish-e-Mohammed released a video of the assailant, Adil Ahmad Dar, a 22-year-old local from Kakapora area of Pulwama who joined the group a year ago.
Dar's family last saw him in March 2018, when he left the house on a bicycle and never returned. Pakistan denied involvement, although Masood Azhar, the leader of Jaish-e-Mohammed, is known to operate in the country. It was the most gruesome terror attack on Indian state security forces in Kashmir since 1989.
The Indian Response: Operation Bandar
The attack was followed by a punitive strike by the Indian Air Force (IAF) on a terrorist training facility, a non-military target in Pakistan, across the international border in the early hours of February 26, 2019. This subsequently led to a retaliation by the Pakistan Air Force (PAF) the next day and in the ensuing skirmish, a PAF F-16 was shot down along with an IAF MiG-21, with its pilot taken hostage by Pakistan.
The planning for the calibrated response to the Pulwama attack code-named ‘Operation Bandar’ was a secret known to only a select few. This operation in the early hours of February 26, 2019, took the Pakistan establishment by surprise. More importantly, the international community perceived it as a just and appropriate response by an aggrieved India on a non-military target in response to a terrorist attack on its soil.
The aftermath of Pulwama Attack and Indo-Pak relations:
Diplomatic relations nosedived since the Pulwama attack with India withdrawing the Most Favoured Nation (MFN) status to Pakistan in February 2019. In August 2019, Pakistan suspended bilateral trade with India. Indo-Pak relations since then have continued in a downward spiral with both nations having withdrawn their staff and closing down their respective consulates.
The possibility of any rapprochement appears slim; the fractured verdict in the Pakistan elections has ensured that the military establishment is likely to set the agenda.
How India and Pakistan emerged after Pulwama attack
India: India, continues on its path of being a resurgent and responsible nation that not only desires friendly relations with its neighbours but also aims to be a leading voice of the Global South.
Pakistan: In the five years since the Pulwama attack, Pakistan has lost out on international goodwill. It has also lost salience in strategic terms after the United States (US) withdrew from Afghanistan and the Taliban returned to run the government in Kabul. With International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailouts being the norm rather than the exception and a faltering electoral democracy, the prospects of a turnaround in Pakistan’s trajectory of growth and prosperity appear remote.
Investigations into the attack
The National Investigation Agency (NIA) sent a 12-person team to investigate the attack alongside the Jammu and Kashmir Police. Initial investigations indicated that the car was carrying more than 300 kilograms of explosives, including 80 kilograms of RDX, a high explosive, and ammonium nitrate. Lt Gen Hooda stated that the explosives could have been stolen from a construction site. He initially denied that they had been smuggled across the border, but later said he couldn't rule it out.
The National Investigation Agency was able to determine and confirm the identity of the suicide bomber after DNA samples from fragments of the car used in the attack matched Adil Ahmad Dar's father. Despite a year of investigation, the NIA was unable to determine the source of the explosives. The NIA filed a charge sheet in August 2020, naming 19 accused.
Investigations in India found 19 people to be responsible for the attack. Of them, eight have been killed, seven arrested and four, including three Pakistanis, are still alive. As on 2023 Jaish-e-Mohammad’s (JeM) four militants — Masood Azhar, his brother Abdul Rauf Azhar, Ammar Alvi and Ashiq Nengroo — are the only on-the-run militants among the 19 others who plotted the 2019 attack in south Kashmir’s Pulwama.
How the Pulwama Attack was Planned and Executed
As per the NIA investigation, Pulwama attack was a result of “well-planned criminal conspiracy hatched by Pakistan-based leadership of terrorist organisation Jaish-e-Mohammad”. The JeM leaders are learnt to have been sending their cadres to the terrorist training camps of Al-Qaida-Taliban-JeM and Haqqani-JeM in Afghanistan to be trained in explosives and other terrorist tactics.
The main accused, Mohammad Umar Farooq, also visited Afghanistan for explosives training in 2016-17. Investoigations revealed he infiltrated into India through the International Border in Jammu-Samba sector in April 2018, and took over as JeM commander of Pulwama. Farooq, along with his Pakistani associates Kamran, Ismail alias Saifullah, and Qari Yasir, and local associates Sameer Dar and Adil Ahmad Dar, planned and prepared for the attack on security forces using IEDs.
Accused Shakir Bashir, Insha Jan, Peer Tariq Ahmed Shah and Bilal Ahmed Kuchhey provided all logistics and harboured the JeM terrorists in their houses. From December 2018 onward, Shakir Bashir started doing reconnaissance of the movement and deployment of security forces on the Jammu-Srinagar National Highway.
Mudasir Ahmad Khan arranged Gelatin sticks and handed them over to Shakir Bashir. RDX was brought by the Pakistani terrorists who infiltrated into India. Shakir Bashir collected the explosive material - RDX, Gelatin sticks, Aluminium power and Calcium-Ammonium Nitrate - and stocked them at his house for making the IED.
In January 2019, Sajjad Ahmed Bhat purchased a Maruti EECO car to carry out the IED attack. The car was kept in the frontyard of Shakir Bashir’s house. Waiz-ul-Islam ordered 40kg of Aluminium powder from his Amazon account on the directions of accused Ismail alias Saifullah and gave it to him. Towards the end of January 2019, Farooq, Sameer Dar and Adil Dar made the propaganda video clip of the suicide attack at Insha Jan’s house which was released immediately after the attack.
In the first week of February 2019, Farooq, Sameer Dar, Adil Dar and Shakir Bashir made the IED using RDX, Calcium-Ammonium Nitrate, Gelatin Sticks and Aluminium Powder and assembled it in two containers, one weighing around 160kg and the second one weighing around 40kg. The two IED containers were fitted in Maruti EECO car and were ready by the morning of February 6, 2019.
However, because of heavy snowfall, the National Highway got closed for the vehicular movement. On February 14, 2019, as the National Highway opened, Shakir Bashir drove Adil Dar till the National Highway, after which the latter took charge of the vehicle and drove on to the National Highway and carried out the suicide attack by ramming the Maruti EECO car laden with 200kg of high-grade explosives into a bus of the CRPF convoy, resulting in 40 CRPF personnel getting killed and damage worth around Rs 33 lakh to the public property.
The NIA investigation has revealed that the Pakistan-based JeM leadership consisting of Masood Azhar, Rauf Asghar and Ammar Alvi alias Chacha alias Chota Masood, were continuously giving directions and guidance to the Pakistani JeM terrorists, who had infiltrated into India, both before and after the attack. They had also planned to carry out another suicide attack which got averted due to India’s retaliatory air-strikes at the Jaish camps at Balakot, Pakistan, and also due to the killing of main conspirator Farooq by the security forces.
The NIA investigation also revealed a well-crafted mechanism by Pakistani establishment to push terrorists into the Indian territory from the launch pads located in Shakargarh (Pakistan), opposite Samba-Kathua sector in Jammu.
