Nagrota Attack

Does Nagrota attack prove that India's aggressive stance against Pakistan is not working?

The attack on the Army camp in Nagrota which killed three Army men is one more in the long list of hard proof that the new tit-for-tat policy towards Pakistan isn't yielding the desired results.

Instead, the troubled Line of Control (LoC) may be only giving Pakistan military an opportunity to push more militants into J&K and bolster an otherwise depleted militancy which is now subsisting on the local recruits.

This is apparent from a conspicuous increase in the infiltration over the previous years. This year, there has been a three-fold increase in infiltration into Kashmir.

According to the information provided recently to Rajya Sabha by the Minister of State for Home Hansraj Ahir, 105 militants have infiltrated into Kashmir in the first nine months of 2016 against just 33 in 2015. There have been 121 infiltration attempts in the period.

Such attempts have since only gone up further. A security estimate puts the number of militants in Valley at 300 as against 100 or thereabouts over the past five years.

UNREST IN THE VALLEY

In the last week, the Army foiled two successive infiltration attempts by militants along the LoC in Gulmarg and Nowgam sectors in the Kashmir Valley.

The infiltration has complemented the local recruitment, which has seen a spike during the current upsurge.

According to estimates of J&K Police, around 60-70 youth went missing in Kashmir in the first 100 days of the turmoil, the highest such number in such a short period since the early nineties.

Police say that most of them, if not all, may have joined the militants, a fact also confirmed by the new militant videos on social media which have shown some new faces.

In fact, thirteen militants are said to have joined in Baramulla, a district that has seen little local militancy in the recent years. This is already leading to a visible rise in the violence.

As against 174 fatalities in 2015 -

113 militants

41 security personnel