Two months later, five young men, heavily armed with assault rifles and grenades, managed to drive a car into the compound of India's parliament building in New Delhi on December 13, 2001. All five were killed by guards in the course of 45 minutes of fighting as they desperately attempted to gain entry to the imposing colonial-era parliament building, with hundreds of parliamentarians and government ministers still inside. One attacker was shot literally at the front door of the building, and died on the steps. Nine people were killed by the intruders, including parliament stewards, a gardener tending the building's lawns, and security staff. A bloodbath inside parliament, which would almost certainly have triggered a war between India and Pakistan, was only narrowly averted. The Indian government claimed the raiders to be Pakistani nationals. Three men, all from the Kashmir Valley, were arrested in Delhi in the days following on charges of aiding and harboring the suicide squad. India began a massive military build-up on its border with Pakistan, as well as on the Line of Control ( LoC) in Kashmir, in response to the incident. The mobilization sparked worldwide fears of an imminent military conflict between India and Pakistan.

Just a month later, on January 12, 2002, Pakistan's president, General Pervez Musharraf, made an hour-long speech, carried live by Pakistani state television and by international broadcast networks such as CNN. In his address, Musharraf affirmed the legitimacy of the struggle for 'self-determination' in Kashmir and of Pakistan's 'political, diplomatic and moral' support to that struggle. He also harshly criticized the violent activities of Pakistani militant Islamist groups, which he said are not only aggravating internal instability and sectarianism in Pakistan, but threatening to plunge the nation into a war with India. He announced the proscription of several extremist groups active in the war against India in Kashmir, including Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (LeT) and JeM. In the following weeks, some 2,000 activists of the banned groups were detained in Pakistan, and some of their offices and recruiting centers closed down by police. India responded that it would watch and wait to see the concrete outcome of Pakistan's apparent change of policy, especially its effect on the curbing of guerrilla infiltration across the 740-kilometer LoC and the further 200 kilometers of 'working international border' (IB) between Pakistani Punjab and Indian Jammu. Spokesmen of the proscribed organizations branded the Pakistani government's moves a betrayal of the sacred national cause of liberating Kashmir. Musharraf's speech was widely viewed, in Pakistan, India and the West, as a somewhat reluctant concession to American pressure on him to 'do something'. Tensions were somewhat reduced, but the Indian and Pakistani armies, air forces and navies remained mobilized, and a million troops stayed eyeball-to-eyeball on the borders.

On May 14, 2002, a hit squad of three men disguised in Indian Army uniforms carried out a deadly strike on the outskirts of Jammu city, barely 30 kilometers from the international border. After indiscriminately shooting passengers on a public bus, the men forced their way into a camp-like complex housing families of Indian soldiers and proceeded to kill at random. In all, forty people were killed before the intruders were gunned down. Most of the fatalities were wives and children of Indian army personnel, in addition to eight passengers on the bus and a few soldiers. The massacre triggered a dramatic resurgence of tension. Renewed fears of an India--Pakistan war gripped the West as India's leaders resorted to belligerent rhetoric, and the Pakistani military asserted that it would defend Pakistan and Pakistani Kashmir at any cost. Tensions eased somewhat by mid-June, after Musharraf apparently promised prominent United States officials that he would do everything in his power to clamp down on the Pakistani radicals engaged in attacks across the LoC and the IB.

Before the stand-off eased, the atmosphere of crisis was aggravated by the assassination of a prominent 'moderate separatist' Kashmiri leader in Srinagar on May 21. The leader in question, Abdul Ghani Lone, aged 70, was killed execution-style by two masked gunmen at a public gathering in the heart of Srinagar's old city--at an event organized to observe the twelfth anniversary of the death of another 'moderate separatist' leader, killed inside his Srinagar home by gunmen in May 1990. Lone, a top functionary of the pro-'self-determination' coalition of Kashmir groups, the All-Parties Hurriyat [Freedom] Conference (APHC), had repeatedly spoken out since the late 1990s against the ideology and activities of non-local jehadi groups of Pakistani provenance active in the armed campaign against Indian rule in Kashmir.

July 13 occupies a special place in Kashmir's political history. On July 13, 1931, 21 people, all Muslims, were killed when the autocratic Maharaja's police fired on protest demonstrations in Srinagar. That date is usually regarded as marking the birth of modern politics in Kashmir: the J&K Muslim Conference party was founded a year later, in 1932, and the National Conference party was born in 1939. Seventy-one years later, on July 13, 2002, 29 people--all Hindus--were killed in a slum area on the eastern fringes of Jammu city by three gunmen indiscriminately firing automatic weapons and lobbing grenades. The gunmen then fled into adjoining forested hills. The victims were mostly wage laborers eking out a meager daily existence. The attack was obviously designed to once again ratchet up tensions between India and Pakistan, and to further inflame communal divides within Jammu and Kashmir. The Pakistan government sharply condemned the massacre and the Indian government reacted with relative verbal restraint. But the incident yet again underscored the volatility and risks associated with the festering conflict in and over Kashmir.

The impact of September 11
The main impact of the September 11 events on the subcontinent was the United States' rediscovery of Pakistan, its erstwhile ally in the war against Communism, as an essential ally in the 'War against Terror'. India, which had been steadily improving and expanding its relations with the United States during the preceding decade at the expense of Pakistan, was deeply alarmed by the United States' renewed embrace of Musharraf's Pakistan.

The events of October 1 and especially December 13, 2001, presented India's political leaders and diplomats with golden opportunities to turn the tables on Pakistan and its military regime. The Indian strategy following these attacks, based on a combination of saber-rattling rhetoric and actual mobilization of military power, aimed to put pressure simultaneously on the Pakistani leadership and on that leadership's patron, the government of the United States. Musharraf, a tough ex-commando, and his fellow generals have been reluctant to be seen as cracking down on radical groups in deference to India's pressure tactics, understandable since most Pakistanis see insurgency in Indian Kashmir as legitimate resistance to Indian occupation, although many disagree with and even oppose the extremist politics of the religious radicals who now spearhead that resistance. But it has proved much more difficult, indeed practically impossible, for Pakistan's military junta to resist pressure from Washington, D.C., to act decisively against the jehadi forces in order to avert war with India. Such a war would utterly destabilize the region and provide fertile ground in Pakistan and its vicinity for the growth of radical Islamist tendencies not just opposed to India but also fiercely hostile to the United States' role in the greater Middle East.

The May 14 incident gave the Indians the opportunity to further escalate their brinkmanship. Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, visiting combat troops on the LoC in north Kashmir in late May, called on them to prepare for a 'decisive battle with the enemy', sparking panic in Western capitals and renewed American-led pressure on Musharraf to crack down on jehadi elements to the greatest extent possible. An apparent assurance from Musharraf to the visiting US deputy secretary of state in early June 2002 that the Pakistani army and intelligence agencies would take steps to 'permanently end' infiltration across theLoC into Indian-controlled regions was the critical development that reduced tensions along the borders. In that sense, the Indian strategy of coercive diplomacy appears to be yielding some tentative dividends.