The Battle of Narratives and Perception: Will Pahalgam 2025 Mark the Change in Kashmir Forever?
Much like COVID-19 split the contemporary world into two time zones, it seems that Pahalgam 2025 may mark the narrative shift in Kashmir. The pandemic marked time references in the world as Before Covid and After Covid.
After Pahalgam 2025, Kashmir is witnessing a distinctive binary in the space of narratives and perceptions. The unfortunate and tragic killings in Pahalgam have shaken the soul of Kashmir. Additionally, the ripple effects of the attack and the impact on Kashmir’s tourism sector have jolted the region’s economy. On account of various factors which have come into play, the narrative has become pro-India for a much larger percentage of Kashmir society. This may be one of the most abiding impacts of Pahalgam 2025.
More and more Kashmiris are firmly identifying themselves as Indians and are keen to establish their loyalty to the nation in these testing times. In the last few years, the most pressing concern for the state and its security forces was that despite significant gains, India was not winning the battle of narratives and perceptions in Kashmir. Pahalgam 2025 seems to have changed this.
Narrative Shift Post Pahalgam 2025
The deleterious impact of Pahalgam 2025 on Kashmir’s economy is one of the major reasons for this shift. Tourism is the mainstay of Kashmir’s economy. With the Pahalgam attack, the Kashmiris have suffered body blows. Lakhs of Kashmiris whose monthly income was tied to the tourism industry are now staring at squeezed home budgets.
With robust returns from tourism, businesses in Kashmir had undertaken bold expansions by securing loans. The loans have to be repaid but revenue streams are drying up. The terror attack in Pahalgam in 2025 did not just claim innocent lives—it punctured the very idea of peace in Kashmir, exposing the fragility beneath the normalcy that Kashmiris have yearned for. The bullets that tore through that meadow echoed far beyond the snow-capped Pir Panjal —they split the valley’s timeline into a moment before, and everything after.
The Crime Scene: Paradise Undone
What transpired in Pahalgam wasn’t merely another act of terrorism. It was a scalpel cutting through the trust that India had slowly begun to rebuild with its crown jewel. On a day that began like any other—horses pacing through Baisaran, children sipping Kahwa, and tourists capturing their own slice of paradise—the peace was shattered with mechanical precision. Militants, reportedly backed and trained with cross-border support carried out targeted attacks on non-Muslims, transforming the serene valley into a grotesque killing field.
Twenty-eight lives were lost. Among them: a retired professor who taught Gandhian nonviolence in Bengal, a newlywed army officer honeymooning with dreams of peace, and a teenager who had just secured a scholarship to Oxford. The Lidder River, usually a canvas of whitewater and serenity, flowed that evening with a silent sorrow.
Here, American political scientist Hannah Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil becomes tragically relevant. This was not the chaotic madness of an enraged mob. It was deliberately structured violence clad in corrosive ideology and carried out by individuals who may have believed they were on a righteous path. Evil, Arendt argued, does not always arrive with horns—it arrives in routine, in protocol, in calculated action.
Pakistan: Hitting the Job and Belly of Kashmir
Pakistan did not just strike at the scenic heart of Kashmir—it struck at its economic lungs and emotional liver. The Pahalgam attack wasn’t simply about terror; it was a targeted assault on the core that sustains Kashmiri dignity: tourism, hospitality, and daily commerce. The livelihoods of thousands of Kashmiris rest not in ideology, but in the warp and weft of tourism —hosting, guiding, feeding, and sheltering visitors who came for peace, snow, and simplicity.
For decades, Kashmiris have battled the scars of history—Partition, insurgency, terror, curfews, communication blackouts, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Hence for Kashmir, tourism is more than an economic engine. It is a bridge to normalcy, to humanity. Every shikara ride, every embroidered shawl sold, every bowl of wazwan and kehwa offered—these are not luxuries. They are daily affirmations that life can be kind again.
Bilal Ahmad, a third-generation pony handler in Pahalgam, recounts the moment the shooting began. “I was brushing my pony, Sultan. I heard loud cracks—like thunder. Then I saw people fall. A girl screamed and ran. Her dupatta caught on a branch, and she tripped. I ran to help her, but… she didn’t make it.” He pauses, wiping his eyes with a calloused hand. “We wait the whole year for the tourist season. This year, we waited for nothing but funerals.”
Kashmiris Fear Their Economy Is Unraveling
This is not just emotion—it is the economy unraveling. As German philosopher Immanuel Kant said, the measure of a just society lies in how it treats people not as means, but as ends. The Pahalgam attack flips that morality on its head. It weaponizes the civilians, targets the innocent, and treats daily livelihood as collateral in a larger, dangerous game by the enemy nation.
Shakeela Bano, who runs a modest homestay with her husband, describes the betrayal she feels. “We had guests from Bengaluru. A young couple. She was pregnant. They were so happy to be here. When the firing started, they hid in our basement. I remember her voice—she kept whispering, ‘We thought it was safe here. We thought it was safe.’ What do I tell her now? That feeding people, welcoming them, can get them killed?”
In this moment, Karl Marx’s understanding of structural violence finds a tragic modern echo. This is not just terror—it is the planned disruption of subsistence. Every strike is a blow not at the government, but at the working class of Kashmir—the horsemen, tea sellers, artisans, guides, weavers, and waiters who form the living fabric of its economy. Pakistan’s doctrine is cruelly effective. This is not the chest-thumping of war. It is our enemy nation’s efforts towards the slow exsanguination of a region by cutting off its lifelines. It has hit Kashmir’s job and belly—its dignity and sustenance—with one calculated blow.
Imtiyaz Lone, who used to guide trekkers along the Tulian Lake trail, now sharpens kitchen knives in a Srinagar alley. “After Pulwama, we rebuilt. After Article 370, we adjusted. After COVID, we survived. But after this?” He gestures toward a faded photo of him with tourists from Sweden. “I don’t think anyone’s coming back. Not now.” A sizable percentage of Kashmiris now believe that our enemy nation wants to kill and bleed Kashmir without ever invading it. Not by taking its land, but by making sustained efforts to erode its spirit, silence its laughter, and paralyze its economy.
A Philosophical Crisis: The Graveyard of Reason
This was not merely a security lapse—it was a philosophical implosion. Kashmir has been framed for too long as a cartographic itch, a border dispute, a chess piece in geopolitical maneuvering. But the attack in Pahalgam exposes something more ancient and disturbing: the collapse of reason at the altar of fanaticism. German jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction thrives in the foreign policy apparatus of Islamabad, where India exists not just as a rival nation, but as the necessary “other” to sustain Pakistan’s own fragmented identity. Without the “enemy,” there is no unity—only incoherence. Kashmir is not the cause; it is the excuse. The tragedy is that British political philosopher Thomas Hobbes’ ‘Leviathan’, meant to be the sovereign power protecting its people from the state of nature, has in Pakistan mutated into a machine that breeds chaos under the guise of control. The monster that Hobbes feared has been not just born, but nurtured—fed with proxy wars, ideological exports, and strategic silence.
In the last few years, the most pressing concern for the state and its security forces was that despite significant gains, India was not winning the battle of narratives and perceptions in Kashmir. Pahalgam 2025 seems to have changed this
In doing so, Pakistan has turned Kashmir into a convenient battleground, where the innocent are sacrificed not in pursuit of freedom, but as currency in a propaganda war. Dystopia seems to define Pakistan. It seems to be a failed idea, parading as sovereignty. As Italian philosopher and politician Antonio Gramsci has observed, the crisis emerges when “the old is dying and the new cannot be born.” In that interregnum, the monsters come out. India must see this clearly. This is not a question of retaliation, but of re-imagination. India must reframe the battle not just in military terms, but in moral and philosophical ones. It must ensure that Kashmiris don’t feel abandoned to fight ideology with economy, and bullets with tourist brochures.
The Existential Turn: From Reaction to Resolution
If the tragedy of Pahalgam teaches us anything, it is this: that a nation must confront its pain not only with justice but with clarity. It must protect not just borders, but bread. Not just geography, but dignity. Not just peace treaties, but peace itself. This is where British economist and political theorist John Stuart Mill’s wisdom rings true: “The worth of a state in the long run is the worth of the individuals composing it.”
The war is not just on land; it is on trust, on memory, on resilience. The shift in Kashmir is not merely political. It is existential. And existential crises require existential clarity. We as Indians must now decide: Will we build a Kashmir that thrives, or simply a Kashmir that survives? Pahalgam 2025 may forever mark the line between what was, and what must never be again. Because what was—was a people trying to heal. And what must be—is a nation that never lets them be wounded like this again.
Dr Syed Eesar Mehdi is a Research Fellow at the International Centre for Peace Studies, New Delhi, India. The views expressed here are his own. He can be reached @ eesar.mehdi@gmail.com
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