India has announced reprisals against Pakistan for a suicide bombing that killed at least 40 paramilitaries in the disputed region of Kashmir.

India’s finance minister, Arun Jaitley, has placed a 200% tariff on Pakistani imports and the home ministry announced on Sunday it was withdrawing the security details of a several Kashmiri separatist leaders.

A car laden with explosives driven by a member of the Pakistan-based militant group, Jaish-e-Mohammed, is believed to have been responsible for the deadliest attack in the history of Kashmir’s 30-year insurgency on Thursday.

Ceremonies have been held in the capital, Delhi, and across the country to farewell the dead as public anger continues to boil. “The fire that is raging in your hearts, is in my heart too,” the prime minister, Narendra Modi, told an audience in Bihar state on Sunday.

India’s home ministry has also directed police to protect Kashmiris studying or working in states across India following reports of revenge attacks including attempts to storm a female students’ hostel in the northern city of Dehradun.

Authorities cut mobile internet in Kashmir and roads and markets were deserted on Sunday as residents observed a general strike to protest the vigilante violence.

Soldiers and paramilitaries stationed in the region were on high alert and a new protocol was in force banning civilian cars from driving near convoys of security personnel.

In Jammu, the region adjacent to Kashmir, several thousand people have been stranded for the past four days and been placed in a relief camp. A curfew has been established in the area after arson attacks on Kashmiri homes. Mohammad Akram, a volunteer at a relief camp in Jammu, said more than 3,000 Kashmiri Muslims were being provided shelter and food.

“More people who were stranded at hotels are coming and some are leaving for Kashmir during the night,” he told the Guardian.

At a cricket club in Mumbai, a portrait of Pakistan’s prime minister Imran Khan – one of several pictures of cricketers hanging in the premises – was covered “as a mark of protest”, the club president told India’s Press Trust International.

Thursday’s bombing has raised tensions between the nuclear-armed neighbours to their highest point since the September 2016 attack by Jaish-e-Mohammed on an army camp in Uri, a town near Kashmir’s ceasefire border.

Quick Guide Kashmir Show Who controls Kashmir? The region in the foothills of the Himalayas has been under dispute since India and Pakistan came into being in 1947. Both claim it in full, but each controls a section of the territory, separated by one of the world's most heavily militarised borders: the ‘line of control’ based on a ceasefire border established after a 1947-48 war. China controls another part in the east.

India and Pakistan have gone to war a further two times over Kashmir, most recently in 1999. Artillery, mortar and small arms fire are still frequently exchanged. How did the dispute start? After the partition of colonial India in 1947, small, semi-autonomous ‘princely states’ across the subcontinent were being folded into India or Pakistan. The ruler of Kashmir dithered over which to join until tribal fighters entered from Pakistan intent on taking the region for Islamabad. Kashmir asked Delhi for assistance, signing a treaty of accession in exchange for the intervention of Indian troops, who fought the Pakistanis to the modern-day line of control. In 1948, the UN security council called for a referendum in Kashmir to determine which country the region would join or whether it would become an independent state. The referendum has never been held. In its 1950 constitution, India granted Kashmir a large measure of independence. But since then it has eroded some of that autonomy and repeatedly intervened to rig elections and dismiss and jail democratically elected leaders. What was Kashmir’s special status? Kashmir’s special status, given in exchange for joining the Indian union, had been in place since 14 May 1954. Under article 370, the state was given a separate constitution, a flag, and autonomy over all matters except for foreign affairs and defence.

An additional provision, article 35a, prevented people from outside the state buying land in the territory. Many Kashmiris believed this was crucial to protecting the demography of the Muslim-majority state and its way of life. The ruling Bharatiya Janata party repeatedly promised to scrap such rules, a long-term demand of its Hindu nationalist support base. But analysts warned doing so would almost certainly ignite unrest. On Wednesday 31 October 2019, the government formally revoked Kashmir’s special status. The government argued that the provision had only ever intended to be temporary and that scrapping it would boost investment in Kashmir. Critics, however, said the move would escalate tensions with Pakistan – which quickly called India’s actions illegal – and fuel resentment in Kashmir, where there is an insurgency against Indian rule. What do the militants want? There has been an armed insurgency against Indian rule over its section of Kashmir for the past three decades. Indian soldiers and Pakistan-backed guerrillas fought a war rife with accusations of torture, forced disappearances and extra-judicial killing.

Until 2004, the militancy was made up largely of Pakistani and Afghan fighters. Since then, especially after protests were quashed with extreme force in 2016, locals have made up a growing share of the anti-India fighters. For Indians, control of Kashmir – part of the country’s only Muslim-majority state – has been proof of its commitment to religious pluralism. For Pakistan, a state founded as a homeland for south Asian Muslims, it is the last occupied home of its co-religionists.



Michael Safi and Rebecca Ratcliffe

That incident killed 19 people and led India to announce it had sent army teams into Pakistani-held territory to destroy militant camps, an operation labelled the “surgical strikes” and celebrated in a blockbuster film released this year.

Modi has promised to avenge the suicide attack and says his security forces have been given full freedom to respond. But despite the strong rhetoric, India’s options are limited, said Paul Staniland, an associate professor in political science at the University of Chicago.

Sending troops deep into Pakistani-held territory would risk escalating a conflict where nuclear weapons have been in play on both sides since 1998, as well exposing Indian soldiers to capture or warplanes to being shot down.

More likely, he said, was a similar small-scale attack along the lines of the 2016 surgical strikes, but this time accompanied something like a precision-guided munition attack.

“It moves slightly beyond the response to Uri and lets Modi say he’s not just doing the exact same thing again, but doesn’t open the door to hard-to-predict escalation dynamics,” Staniland said.

But such an attack would be unlikely dissuade Pakistan from continuing to allow armed groups to operate on its territory, he added. “India might need to really move up the escalation ladder to impose costs, but that in turn creates bigger risks that Indian governments thus far have decided were ultimately not worth it.”