A HUGE CAR bomb struck a convoy of paramilitary police in Indian-administered Kashmir on February 14th, killing at least 40 paramilitary police. The suicide attack, claimed by a Pakistan-based Islamist terror group, was the deadliest single blow to Indian security forces since the start of unrest in Kashmir 30 years ago.

Amid public outrage in India, and with national elections approaching in April, Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, has promised a “jaw-breaking response”. Having boosted his nationalist credentials by ordering retaliatory “surgical strikes” across the Pakistani border following a similar attack in 2016, Mr Modi will be pressed to react even more harshly this time. Chronically tense relations between India and Pakistan, both nuclear-armed states, appear headed towards a dangerous showdown.

Indian officials were quick to underline Pakistan’s links to Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM), the group that claimed responsibility for the attack. Its leader, Masood Azhar, “has been given full freedom by the government of Pakistan...to carry out attacks in India and elsewhere with impunity,” declared a statement from India’s foreign ministry. Many Indians have also expressed anger with China, which has repeatedly blocked Indian efforts to get Mr Azhar included on the UN Security Council’s list of designated terrorists. Pakistan, a close ally of China, condemned the attack but in the same breath rejected “insinuations” of any link to the Pakistani state.

Those links are not hard to find, however. Mr Azhar has a long history of involvement in terrorism. His group has been particularly active in Kashmir, a territory that ended up divided following the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, but which both countries claim. Freed from an Indian prison in a hostage swap that ended a hijacking in 1999, Mr Azhar soon after addressed a crowd of 10,000 people in the Pakistani city of Karachi. Although JeM has often struck just when Indo-Pakistani relations were improving—as in its attacks in 2001 on India’s parliament building and in 2016 on two Indian military bases—Pakistani authorities have repeatedly released Mr Azhar after brief spells in detention. In 2014 he publicly announced a “resumption of jihad” in Kashmir, and in 2016 he inaugurated a grand new headquarters in his hometown of Bahawalpur, from where he last year announced a speaking tour around Pakistan.

Indian police say that although JeM had been virtually wiped out in Kashmir by 2015, it has recently rebuilt its network and overtaken two rival Pakistan-backed groups, Hizbul Mujahideen and Lashkar-e-Taiba, in the pace of its attacks. This week’s car bombing marked a significant escalation. Estimates put the size of the bomb at a hefty 350kg, enough to leave nothing except tangled undercarriages of the SUV carrying the device and its objective, a bus that was part of a lumbering 78-vehicle military convoy ferrying some 2,500 conscripts from the Central Reserve Police Force. The bomber was identified in a video as a 22-year-old youth from a nearby village.

All this indicates that despite India’s heavy security presence, and a fierce campaign against militants that has left 20 dead so far this year, JeM was able to recruit locally and to construct and deploy a sophisticated bomb, as well as to plan and execute a deadly attack on an obvious target. Although initial responses in India have focused on grief for the fallen and anger with Pakistan, some have pointed to intelligence lapses, as well as policy choices that have failed to address the underlying problems of Kashmir.

Violence has ebbed and flowed in the densely populated Kashmir Valley, a Muslim-majority region of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, since Pakistani-backed separatist militants took up arms in 1988. Massive deployments of Indian forces and pressure on Pakistan, plus efforts to woo the valley back into mainstream politics, had slowly dampened tensions. By 2012 the number of people killed each year had fallen from more than 4,000 at its peak to below 150. But since the election of Mr Modi in 2014, his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has pursued a get-tough policy that, far from calming the region, has provoked rising unrest.

The annual number of “terror-related incidents” in the state rose by 177% between 2014 and 2018, according to police statistics. The death toll of security forces increased by 94%, to 91 last year. Perhaps more tellingly, police estimates of the number of active insurgents in the area have also risen, despite the killing of more than 800 of them over the past five years, and despite the fact that infiltration from Pakistan has slowed. The rise in local recruitment, say analysts, in part reflects resentment against harsh policing methods. Police routinely quell stone-throwing crowds with shotguns. Although the pellets these fire are usually not lethal, they have left hundreds with impaired eyesight and other with severe injuries.

Kashmiri resentment also reflects disillusionment with Indian politics. Last year Mr Modi’s BJP pulled out of a coalition to topple the elected state government, and then imposed direct rule from Delhi. Adding to unhappiness in the Kashmir Valley, freezing temperatures this winter have been accompanied by lengthy power cuts—in a state that exports hydro-electricity to the rest of India. Wiser heads would argue that winning hearts and minds in Kashmir is just as important as getting tough with Pakistan. But the vast majority of Indians have little time for nuance just now.