IT was July 13, 1999. The two-month-long Kargil war was finally drawing to a close when sketchy details of a major militant attack began pouring in from Bandipore, 58 km to the north of Srinagar.

Unlike the ‘hit-and-run’ strategy adopted by Kashmiri militants for years, this attack saw a group of militants sneaking into the highly fortified headquarters of the Deputy Inspector-General of the Border Security Force situated on the Madar hills in the outskirts of Bandipore town. The militants scaled the eastern wall of the camp and ran straight to the residential compound, where they holed themselves up after killing six BSF personnel, including the Deputy-General himself.

The operation to flush out the militants took more than 24 hours, with the paramilitary force needing to call in the special forces of the army (paras). The National Security Guard personnel, too, had to be flown in to take part in the operation.

The militants had just changed the rules of the game.

Out of Oblivion

THE sensational attack was the first in Kashmir to deploy a special cadre of militants who would wilfully go into a suicide assault. The group that blasted its way into the headlines was Lashkar-e-Toiba, a Pakistan-based Jihadi organisation that began putting down roots in Kashmir in 1993.

The Fidayeen (suicide) attack took Lashkar out of the oblivion and put it at the heart of the militant movement in Kashmir, where years of counter-insurgency operations—including the fierce campaign by government-sponsored renegade militants called Ikhwan—had literally broken the resistance of indigenous groups like the Hizbul Mujahideen.

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