Home Minister Amit Shah in Srinagar, vows harshest action
Hours after the terror attack in Pahalgam, Union Home Minister Amit Shah rushed to Srinagar and straightaway headed to the Raj Bhavan where he held a high-level meeting to review the security situation.
Jammu and Kashmir Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha and Chief Minister Omar Abdullah were among those present at the meeting.
Prior to his departure to Kashmir, the Home Minister held a meeting with top security and intelligence officials in the national capital.
At the meeting Shah’s at his residence in Delhi, Intelligence Bureau chief Tapan Deka, Union Home Secretary Govind Mohan and CRPF DG Gyanendra Pratap Singh were among those present. J&K DGP Nalin Prabhat and Army officials joined the meeting through video-conferencing, sources said.
The attack prompted Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who had in the morning left on a visit to Saudi Arabia, to speak to Shah, asking him to visit the attack site and take all possible measures.
Highly placed sources indicated at an intelligence failure with the attack coinciding with US Vice-President JD Vance’s visit to India.
They said there was a possibility of the probe into the attack being handed over to the NIA.
President Droupadi Murmu, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah condemned the terror attack.
“It is shocking and painful. The dastardly and inhuman act must be condemned unequivocally. Attacking innocent citizens is utterly appalling and unpardonable,” the President said in a post on X.
Incidentally, the attack has occurred just days after Pakistan Army Chief Gen Asim Munir, on April 17, said Kashmir was Islamabad’s “jugular vein”… and that Pakistan “won’t forget it”.
He had also defended the two-nation theory that was the basis for Partition in 1947.
Earlier, reacting to the Pahalgam terror attack, Shah, after speaking to the Prime Minister, expressed his anguish over the incident in a post on X.
“Anguished by the terror attack on tourists in Pahalgam. My thoughts are with the family members of the deceased. Those involved in this dastardly act of terror will not be spared, and we will come down heavily on the perpetrators with the harshest consequences…,” he said.
With the terror attack in Pahalgam coinciding with US Vice-President Vance’s visit, it struck an eerie coincidence with the Chittisinghpora massacre in J&K’s Anantnag district, which had occurred just a day before then US President Bill Clinton was to visit India, 25 years ago.
The massacre in the Sikh-dominated village of Chittisinghpora had taken place on March 20, 2000, when masked terrorists, dressed in Army fatigue, had gunned down 35 Sikh men. Clinton visited India between March 21 and March 25, 2000.
Donald Trump’s visit to India during his first tenure as US President had taken place between February 24 and 25, 2020. It had coincided with the Delhi riots, which had erupted at the same time.
Meanwhile, the Pahalgam attack has come during the peak tourist season in the Valley and at a time when the registration for this year’s Amarnath Yatra is going on across the country.
J & K