Baisaran Massacre: India Bleeds Again

 

A Heartfelt Tribute, by an Indian — B. S. Dara

All who fire the bullet will die by the bullet.

This isn’t just another headline in the long conflict over Kashmir. This is personal. This is Indian blood spilled on Indian soil, again.

It was supposed to be a retreat, soft pine breezes, crisp skies, ponies clopping through flower-draped meadows. Baisaran Valley, a postcard vision just seven clicks from Pahalgam, had never looked more innocent. But on April 22nd, the paradise peeled its skin back and showed the world its underbelly.

What followed was the bloodiest act of terrorism on Indian soil since the 2008 Mumbai attacks, twenty-six dead, more than twenty wounded, and an entire nation staring into the abyss of its own vulnerabilities. The valley became a slaughterhouse, soaked not in the blush of spring but in the thick, ugly red of fear, faith, and geopolitics gone rancid.

They came like ghosts from a forgotten war. Five men, automatic rifles slung like casual promises, moved through the tall grass with the fluid confidence of those who knew the terrain and the value of surprise. 

The tourists, mostly Hindu men from across India, didn’t stand a chance.

Some were asked their names.

Others were told to recite the Kalima.

One man, a Christian from Madhya Pradesh, was asked about Palestine. He didn’t know what to say.

Seconds later, he was face down in the grass, a wet hole where his thoughts had just been.

The killers were precise, surgical even. They knew what they were looking for, not just bodies, but symbols. Hindu men, particularly. Government officials among them. 

The insurgency had moved past ambushes and firefights. This was messaging, wrapped in ammo belts and spat out through the muzzle of an M4.

One woman was spared, on purpose.

“Go,” one of them reportedly said. “Tell Modi what you saw.”

She will.

Initially, The Resistance Front, an offshoot of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, with footprints in Pakistani soil and eyes on Indian instability, took credit. On Telegram, their grainy logo accompanied declarations against “outsiders” settling in Kashmir, warnings wrapped in ideological prose. The demographic reshaping of Kashmir, they claimed, would not be allowed to unfold unchallenged.

But then, curiously, they took it back. Four days later, the same account disavowed responsibility. 

Blamed a "communications breach." 

The retraction only added layers to the fog.

Who really pulled the trigger?

Whose chessboard is Kashmir this week?

India moved quickly, diplomatically, militarily, and emotionally.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi cut short a high-profile trip to Riyadh, returning to Delhi to chair an emergency CCS meeting.

By sundown, the rhetoric had become action: the Indus Waters Treaty was suspended, borders sealed, visas revoked, and diplomats expelled like pawns in a burning game.

Across the Line of Control, Pakistan responded in kind, suspending the Simla Agreement, grounding trade, sealing airspace. 

What began in the misty folds of a meadow now had global implications. Water, war, and airspace became weapons without a shot being fired.

But on the ground, the guns didn’t wait.. 

It’s hard to clean a crime scene when the crime shouts through the trees. Survivors told stories that felt more like scripts from dystopian thrillers than actual human memory.

A local pony operator reportedly tried to tackle one of the attackers. He died with his hands around the barrel of an AK-47. Eleven tourists were carried out by his peers on makeshift stretchers, some barely breathing. 

Gurudwaras opened their doors. Muslims in Pahalgam helped the wounded. The people, ironically, stood taller than the politics they were drowning in.

Emergency services scrambled. Two critical patients were airlifted to Srinagar. A helpline buzzed with the frantic voices of families thousands of kilometers away, seeking names, confirmations, any thread of hope.

And under all of it, a silent question grew louder: How did this happen?

Baisaran had been opened to tourists early, two months ahead of schedule.

The security forces hadn’t been told. 

No patrols. No perimeter. No intel

It was a welcome mat, unintentionally laid out for terrorists who walked in and turned a tourist trail into a kill zone.

In Delhi, an all-party meeting turned sour as opposition leaders slammed the government for the lapse. 

PM Modi was absent.

Home Minister Amit Shah flew to Srinagar and faced the fury on behalf of a cabinet under fire.

This wasn’t just a breach. It was a blunder..

The victims weren’t just statistics. 

They were an Air force officer, recently married. 

A naval official. 

An Intelligence Bureau operative.

A local Muslim man shot while trying to stop the carnage. 

A Nepali tourist, who probably never understood the language of his own execution.

Most were men. Most were Hindu.

One was a Christian, and another, perhaps the most tragic, was spared only to carry the horror in her eyes forever.

The dead came from nearly every corner of India: Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Odisha, Arunachal Pradesh. 

India bled through every region that day.

By April 23rd, the counter-operation was in full swing. Army helicopters chopped the thin mountain air. Commandos moved into the forests of the Pir Panjal. 

Sketches of three suspects were released, codenames: Moosa, Yunus, Asif. Two of them believed to be foreigners. 

All of them, ghosts with guns and old vendettas.

Indian intelligence named Saifullah Kasuri, aka “Khalid,” as the mastermind, a known LeT commander with previous digital footprints traced back to safehouses in Karachi and Muzaffarabad.

Pakistan, predictably, denied it.

And so, the cycle spins.

This wasn’t just another act of terror.

It was a message, crude, bloody, and deliberate. 

A pushback against the 2019 Reorganization Act that made non-Kashmiris eligible for land and jobs.

For some, it was a constitutional shift. 

For others, a demographic invasion.

And somewhere in the tension between identity and territory, religion and land, five men took it upon themselves to write their protest in bullets and bone.

The irony? 

Locals in Kashmir, Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, did more to protect the victims than harm them. 

The average Kashmiri, exhausted by decades of war and betrayal, didn't need more blood in their rivers. 

But ideology, like wildfire, doesn’t ask permission.

As the sun sets on this chapter of Kashmir's long, tortured history, the smoke is far from clearing. 

India and Pakistan teeter on the edge of escalation.

Both sides blame. 

Both sides suffer. 

Diplomats return home. 

Missiles wait in silent, metallic patience.

And Baisaran? 

It remains empty now. 

The ponies walk without saddles. The pine trees still whisper, but now their language is grief. 

The tourists won't return for a while. Maybe longer.

But someday, someone will. 

Maybe to remember. Maybe to forget.

Until then, Baisaran waits, a valley of the dead, still shaking with the thunder of a day when peace was gunned down in broad daylight.

And while the world watches for the first spark in what could become an uncontrollable fire between two nuclear-armed nations, one can’t help but wonder, is this the same Pakistan India faced in 1971?  Or has the battlefield, the actors, and the very DNA of the state shifted so dramatically that history offers no reliable compass anymore?

"B. S. Dara is an Indian writer and political observer focused on the stories from the subcontinent."