The Jammu-Srinagar National Highway is a lifeline and a target. Carved through the mountains of Indian-administered Kashmir, it is the only reliable road connecting the valley to the rest of India -- and on 14 February 2019, a convoy of 78 vehicles carrying more than 2,500 Central Reserve Police Force personnel was moving along it when a vehicle packed with explosives rammed into one of the buses near Lethapora in the Pulwama district. Forty CRPF personnel were killed. It was the deadliest terror attack on India's security forces in Kashmir since the insurgency began in 1989, and its consequences would reach far beyond the blast site.
The attack did not emerge from a vacuum. Kashmir is a disputed territory claimed by both India and Pakistan, and the decades since 1989 have claimed roughly 70,000 lives in the cycle of insurgency and crackdown. Unrest had intensified after Indian forces killed the popular militant leader Burhan Wani in 2016, and by 2018, the annual death toll included 260 militants, 160 civilians, and 150 government personnel. Attacks on security forces along the highway had become a grim pattern: nine killed at Pampore in February 2016, eight more there in June, nineteen soldiers dead in the Uri attack that September, and five personnel killed at the Lethpora Commando Training Centre in December 2017. The highway was both a supply route and a fault line, and intelligence agencies had flagged the danger. At least eleven separate intelligence inputs warned of an impending attack in the days before February 14. Two days prior, Jaish-e-Mohammed had uploaded a video hinting at a suicide operation in Kashmir.
The convoy had left Jammu around 3:30 in the morning, swollen with personnel because the highway had been closed for the previous two days. A Maruti Eeco van carrying more than 300 kilograms of explosives, driven by 22-year-old Adil Ahmad Dar from the nearby town of Kakapora, accelerated into one of the convoy buses. The blast was enormous. The Pakistan-based militant group Jaish-e-Mohammed claimed responsibility and released a pre-recorded video of Dar, who had left his family's home on a bicycle in March 2018 and never returned. Between September 2016 and that final departure, Indian authorities had arrested him six times, releasing him each time without charges. The National Investigation Agency later confirmed his identity through DNA matched from fragments of the vehicle to samples from his father. Even after a year of investigation, the NIA was unable to trace the source of the explosives. The charge-sheet filed in August 2020 named nineteen accused.
India's response was swift and military. On 26 February, twelve Mirage 2000 jets of the Indian Air Force crossed the Line of Control and struck what India described as a Jaish-e-Mohammed training camp near Balakot, Pakistan. Pakistan scrambled its own jets, and the following day an aerial engagement resulted in the downing of an Indian MiG-21 over Pakistani territory. The pilot, Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman, was captured and became the focus of intense international diplomacy. Pakistan released him on 1 March, a gesture framed as a step toward de-escalation, but tensions between the two nuclear-armed nations had reached their highest point in decades. On 5 March, Pakistan arrested 44 members of various militant groups, including relatives of Jaish-e-Mohammed leader Masood Azhar. The international community -- the United States, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and others -- condemned the original attack, though China temporarily blocked a UN Security Council resolution to designate Azhar a global terrorist.
State funerals were held across India for the forty fallen personnel, most of them young men from states like Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, and Rajasthan who had joined the paramilitary for steady government employment. Protests, shutdowns, and candlelight vigils swept the country. But the aftermath also exposed uglier currents. Kashmiri students living elsewhere in India faced harassment, violence, and eviction from their homes. The Jammu and Kashmir Students Organisation reported that 97 percent of Kashmiri students in Dehradun had been evacuated. Two colleges in the city announced they would no longer admit Kashmiri students. A Kashmiri merchant was beaten in Kolkata. The governor of Meghalaya publicly endorsed a boycott of "everything Kashmiri." In response, many ordinary Indians offered to house displaced Kashmiris -- a counter-current of solidarity running alongside the anger. The Indian cricket team wore camouflage caps during an ODI match against Australia in tribute, donating their match fees to the National Defence Fund. The attack had rippled outward from a stretch of mountain highway into every corner of the subcontinent's consciousness.
Located at 33.965°N, 74.964°E along the Jammu-Srinagar National Highway (NH44) near Lethapora in the Pulwama district. The highway is visible as a thin line threading through the valley between mountain ridges. Srinagar lies approximately 15 nm to the north, and the Line of Control with Pakistan is roughly 40 nm to the west. Nearest major airport is Sheikh ul-Alam International Airport (VISR) approximately 12 nm north-northwest. The Pir Panjal range is visible to the south. Best viewed from 5,000-8,000 ft AGL.