Pakistan-Sponsored Terrorism in Jammu & Kashmir

Pakistan’s Proxy War

At the heart of the Kashmir conflict sits a single, uncomfortable fact: much of what looks like a home-grown uprising is in reality the product of a deliberate, decades-long proxy war waged by the Pakistani state.

Having failed to seize the Valley in three open wars, Pakistan concluded that its objective could be pursued only by indirect, deniable means — arming, funding and directing militancy while denying any hand in it.

This section examines the machinery of that proxy war; the operational shocks it has produced, and India’s punitive responses, belong to the later discussion of doctrinal shifts.

The ISI, Its Doctrine and the Logic of Proxy War

The instrument of the proxy war is Pakistan’s military intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which functions as the controlling hand behind the militant groups — recruiting, training, arming, financing and tasking them, while maintaining a screen of plausible deniability.

The strategic doctrine it serves is often summed up as ‘bleeding India through a thousand cuts’: a protracted, low-cost campaign designed to keep India’s forces tied down, drain its resources, and keep the Kashmir question perpetually open, without ever crossing the threshold into open war that Pakistan cannot win.

The ISI’s operational objectives in the Valley have been remarkably consistent, and it is worth carrying them as a checklist.

• Sustain infiltration across the Line of Control to keep the security forces continuously engaged.
• Attack the region’s secular, plural fabric — most brutally through the terror that drove out the Kashmiri Pandits — to recast a political dispute as a religious one.
• Internationalise the issue, painting India as a persecutor of Muslims and seeking outside intervention that India rejects as a bilateral matter.
• Wage a relentless information war, using propaganda and, increasingly, social media to defame the security forces and glamorise militancy.
• Keep the option of escalation open — converting the low-intensity conflict into a higher-intensity one ‘at an appropriate time’ and branding it a war of liberation.

Infiltration — Routes, Trends and the New Technologies

A proxy war needs a supply line, and infiltration across the border is its lifeblood. Militants and materiel are pushed in from launch pads in Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir, timed to the seasons — heavy attempts before the winter snow seals the passes, and along the forested stretches of the Line of Control. Two shifts in the pattern are examinable and current.

• A move to the technological. As border fencing, sensors and surveillance have tightened the Line of Control, the sponsors have turned to drones and quadcopters to drop weapons, explosives and narcotics across the border, and to cross-border tunnels beneath the International Border in the Jammu sector.
• A geographical shift southward. With the Valley more tightly gridded, infiltration and violence have partly relocated to the Jammu region — the Rajouri–Poonch belt and the areas south of the Pir Panjal — a development whose fuller analysis belongs to the study of recent trends.

Alongside these runs the fusion of narcotics and terror — the drug routes that carry heroin also carry weapons and cash — linking the Kashmir theatre to the wider problem of terror financing examined elsewhere in the study of internal security.

The Organisations — and the Art of Rebranding

The face of Kashmir militancy has changed repeatedly, but the hand behind it has not. The original indigenous, pro-independence Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) was deliberately sidelined in the early 1990s in favour of pro-Pakistan and Islamist outfits that would serve the sponsor’s ends. Learn the parent groups first, then the modern disguise.

Group	Character	Note
Hizbul Mujahideen (HM)	The largest indigenous-facing militant group; pro-Pakistan/pro-merger	Long the mainstay of local militancy; Burhan Wani was its face
Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT)	A Pakistan-based group responsible for major fidayeen attacks, incl. 26/11 Mumbai	Uses foreign cadres; deep ISI links; proscribed internationally
Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM)	A Pakistan-based group behind the Parliament, Pathankot and Pulwama attacks	Suicide-attack specialist; leadership based in Pakistan
The Resistance Front (TRF)	A proxy/offshoot of LeT, surfaced in 2019	Rebrand to appear ‘indigenous’ and secular; proscribed under UAPA
People’s Anti-Fascist Front (PAFF)	A proxy of JeM, surfaced in 2019	Same rebranding logic; proscribed under UAPA

Case Study — Old wine in a new bottle: the rebranding strategy After the abrogation of Article 370 in 2019, a set of new-sounding outfits — most prominently The Resistance Front (TRF) and the People’s Anti-Fascist Front (PAFF) — appeared on encrypted social media. They are not new groups at all but rebrands of Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed. The purpose of the disguise is threefold: to present militancy as a home-grown, indigenous ‘resistance’ rather than Pakistani export; to adopt non-religious, secular-sounding names that dodge the international scrutiny attached to jihadist labels; and to evade the terror designations and financial sanctions already fastened on the parent groups. India responded by proscribing these fronts under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. The lesson for the aspirant: when a ‘new’ Kashmiri group appears, the first question is always whose proxy is it?

Low-Intensity Conflict — War by Another Name?

Is the proxy war really ‘war’? Analytically it is best understood as low-intensity conflict — a long, protracted strategy to achieve through attrition what cannot be won by open battle. It can take the form of armed revolt, guerrilla warfare, political subversion or a manufactured ‘war of independence’, and its defining feature is that it stays deliberately below the threshold at which a conventional military response becomes automatic.

The honest answer is that it is war conducted by other means. It has a strategic objective (wresting Kashmir), a state sponsor (Pakistan), an instrument (the ISI and its proxies), and a sustained campaign of organised violence — everything war has, except the open declaration.

Recognising this reframes the debate: because it is deniable, the classic response of open retaliation is complicated, which is exactly why India’s counter-strategy has had to combine a hardened internal grid with calibrated punitive strikes and diplomatic pressure — the elements examined in the treatment of India’s doctrinal response.

The Terror Ecosystem

A gunman is only the visible tip of militancy. Beneath every armed cadre lies a support ecosystem — the people who shelter and guide him, the money that sustains him, the politics that legitimises him, and the ideology that produces him. Modern counter-terrorism has learnt that you defeat militancy not by killing gunmen alone but by dismantling this ecosystem. Five of its components must be understood.

Over-Ground Workers — the Invisible Infrastructure

Over-Ground Workers (OGWs) are the unarmed civilian face of militancy — people who, without carrying a gun, provide the logistical backbone that lets armed groups operate: shelter, food, cash, couriered messages, real-time information on troop movements, and safe passage. Because they look like ordinary civilians, they are extraordinarily hard to detect, and yet without them the militant cannot survive a single week. They are the soft, invisible infrastructure of terror.

Their role goes beyond logistics. OGWs are central to recruitment and radicalisation — spotting and grooming vulnerable youth, spreading propaganda, and building the sympathetic ‘grey’ constituency from which fighters are drawn. Detention itself can be counter-productive: prisons where OGWs are held alongside committed terrorists can become schools of radicalisation. Neutralising the OGW network is therefore treated as a distinct and priority task, pursued along several tracks.

Measure	What it does
Choking the money	Cracking down on the NGOs, trusts and channels that route funds to the network
Sharper local intelligence	Specialised investigation units to map and track OGWs at the ground level
Monitoring inmates	Isolating hardened terrorists from ordinary detainees to stop prison radicalisation
Engaging the community	Working with local clerics and civil society on de-radicalisation, especially among the youth
Addressing alienation	Skilling, employment and youth-outreach missions to drain the recruitment pool

Mains Anchor — the OGW question A recent question tied the banning of Jamaat-e-Islami directly to the role of over-ground workers and asked candidates to examine that role and suggest measures to neutralise them. The structure is straightforward: define OGWs → explain their logistical, intelligence and recruitment functions → argue that they are the ecosystem’s connective tissue → then lay out the counter-measures above, balancing hard enforcement with addressing the alienation that produces OGWs in the first place.

Hybrid Terrorists and the Shift to Untraceable Cadre

The most significant recent tactical evolution is the rise of the ‘hybrid’ terrorist — an ordinary civilian with no prior record, who lives an apparently normal life, is handed a weapon to carry out a single targeted attack (often on a soft target such as a migrant labourer, a minority civilian or an off-duty policeman), and then melts back into the population. Because the hybrid has no militancy record, he does not appear on any watch-list, is nearly impossible to pre-empt, and blurs the line between civilian and combatant.

This is the Phase-IV, low-signature pattern anticipated in the account of militancy’s phases, and it is a direct adaptation to India’s success: as the security grid grew efficient at tracking known militants, the sponsors switched to cadres who are, by design, unknown and untraceable. It shifts the counter-terror challenge from firepower to intelligence — the battle is now won or lost in the quality of ground information, not in the encounter itself.

Terror Funding in the Valley — Hawala, NGOs and the NIA Cases

Money is the oxygen of the ecosystem, and the Valley’s terror economy has drawn on several channels — hawala (informal, paperless money transfer), the misuse of NGOs, trusts and charities as conduits, cross-border smuggling of narcotics and fake currency, and funds raised in the guise of donations. This money paid for weapons, sustained OGWs, and financed the organised stone-pelting and shutdowns that were, for years, a manufactured feature of Valley unrest.

The decisive shift came when the state began to treat terror financing as the centre of gravity rather than a side issue. The National Investigation Agency (NIA) opened terror-funding cases against separatist leaders, exposing the flow of money from across the border through Hurriyat figures and others, and choking it produced a sharp fall in organised stone-pelting and street mobilisation — demonstrating that much of the ‘spontaneous’ unrest had in fact been funded and organised. The broader machinery of terror financing and money-laundering is developed in the dedicated study of that subject.

Case Study — Following the money: the NIA terror-funding case The NIA’s investigation into terror financing in Kashmir struck at the ecosystem’s wallet. It alleged a conspiracy in which funds raised at home and abroad — including through hawala and the misuse of front organisations — were channelled to sustain militancy and organised unrest, in connivance with Pakistan-based handlers. The case’s most prominent conviction came in 2022, when Yasin Malik, chief of the JKLF, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life imprisonment. The prosecutions demonstrated a strategic truth: attacking the finance of terror can be more decapitating than attacking its foot-soldiers, because it dries up the resource that the whole ecosystem depends on.

Separatist Politics — Hurriyat and the Jamaat-e-Islami Ban

For decades the militancy had a political-ideological overground, chiefly the All Parties Hurriyat Conference, an umbrella of separatist groups that provided militancy with a respectable political vocabulary, called the shutdowns and protest calendars, and served as an interlocutor that internationalised the dispute. Working alongside it, the socio-religious organisation Jamaat-e-Islami (Jammu and Kashmir) supplied an ideological and cadre base for separatism and was assessed to sustain the OGW network.

Since 2019 the state has moved hard against this overground. Jamaat-e-Islami was banned as an unlawful association in 2019 and the ban was extended for a further five years in 2024, on the ground that it fed secessionism and the support structure of terror — the very ban that put the spotlight on OGWs. The Hurriyat has since fragmented and lost influence, with a stream of its constituent groups publicly dissociating from separatism in recent years. The strategic logic is that cutting off the political and ideological oxygen — the legitimising overground — is as important as fighting the armed underground.

Radicalisation — the Mosque–Madrasa–Social Media Chain

Ultimately the ecosystem must manufacture new believers, and radicalisation is the process that turns an ordinary young person into a willing recruit or sympathiser. In the Valley this has worked through a chain: ideological indoctrination in some religious and educational spaces, peer and community pressure, the glamorisation of ‘martyrdom’, and, increasingly, a powerful online dimension in which encrypted apps and social media spread propaganda, romanticise militancy and enable remote recruitment far beyond the reach of any one preacher.

The Burhan Wani phenomenon of 2016 — a militant whose social-media persona drew a wave of local youth into militancy — was the signal that the decisive battlefield had partly moved online. Countering it therefore requires more than policing: counter-narratives, de-radicalisation and community engagement, credible economic and educational alternatives for the young, and regulation of the digital space — a challenge that connects directly to the wider study of the role of media and social-networking sites in internal security.

Current Status (as of July 2026) Militancy is at a low ebb but has gone low-signature: overall violence is down, but the sponsors rely increasingly on hybrid terrorists, proxy fronts like TRF and PAFF, and drone-enabled logistics, with violence having shifted partly into the Jammu region. The overground has been squeezed: the Jamaat-e-Islami ban stands (extended in 2024), terror-funding prosecutions continue, and the Hurriyat has largely disintegrated, with many affiliates renouncing separatism. External pressure has eased for Pakistan: its removal from the FATF ‘grey list’ in 2022 reduced one lever of financial pressure, even as India presses the terror-sponsorship case in international forums. The centre of the contest has moved from the encounter site to intelligence, finance and the information space — exactly where a low-signature insurgency is won or lost.