One day after militants killed 26 people in a tourist group in Kashmir, the Indian government on Wednesday pointed a finger at its archnemesis, Pakistan, announcing a series of punitive actions against its neighbor and hinting at further retaliation.
India has not officially blamed any group for the massacre, in which all but one of the dead were Indian citizens. But it described the aggressive moves outlined on Wednesday as a response to Pakistan’s support of terrorist attacks on Indian soil.
The Indian government suspended its participation in an important water treaty that since the 1960s has governed the flow of rivers that Pakistan’s irrigation system depends on. India declared a key land border between the two nations shut. And it announced that it was downgrading diplomatic ties, expelling Pakistan’s military advisers from the country’s New Delhi mission, and further restricting already-limited visas for Pakistani citizens.
The decision came at a cabinet meeting presided over by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, as coffins of the civilians slaughtered in the picturesque Kashmir Valley began arriving to emotional scenes around the country. The prime minister was briefed on “the cross-border linkages of the terrorist attack,” said India’s foreign secretary, Vikram Misri, without offering details.
Hours earlier, in the Indian government’s first public reaction, the defense minister, Rajnath Singh, said the country had “a zero-tolerance policy toward terrorism” and hinted at the possibility of military strikes.
“We will not only go after the perpetrators of this act,” he said, “but also the actors sitting behind the scenes drawing such conspiracies to be carried out on India’s soil.”
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