10 years since Burhan Wani's death, how Kashmir's insurgency has changed

📌 Summary:

• Ten years after Burhan Wani was killed in a military operation in Kokernag (south Kashmir), every key indicator of Kashmir militancy — active terrorists, fresh local recruitment, attacks, killings — has sharply declined

• The data: terror operatives killed rose from 157 (2016) to a peak of 266 (2018), with another uptick to 230 (2020), but only 10 so far this year; security-force fatalities fell from a 2018 peak of 94 to just 1 this year; civilian deaths from 88 (2018) to 1

• The 'Burhan model': his 2015 Facebook photo with 10 armed associates broke with anonymity, using social media to draw educated, tech-savvy, well-off youth — triggering the worst crisis since the 1990s; officials now call it an unsustainable aberration given how quickly recruits were killed

• Landscape shift: insurgency has moved from towns/cities to dense high-altitude forests; renewed emphasis on anonymity and minimal digital footprint — less online chatter means less TECHINT (technical intelligence) for forces, increasing reliance on HUMINT (human intelligence)

• Command and control has shifted to Pakistani operatives: after 2019, Hizbul Mujahideen was almost wiped out and Lashkar-e-Taiba took centrestage; only 2-3 local terrorists remain active while ~30 Pakistani operatives operate from tactically advantageous high-altitude jungles (a Lashkar terrorist, Zakir Ahmad Ganaie, was killed in Shopian on Wednesday)

• Officials' caution: fewer terrorists, but the insurgency is now more opaque, harder to penetrate and harder to track — peace dividends are real but the challenge persists

🎯 UPSC Relevance: GS3 Internal Security — evolution of J&K militancy, role of social media in radicalisation and recruitment, HUMINT vs TECHINT, cross-border sponsorship by state/non-state actors

📝 Prelims Facts:

• Burhan Wani (Hizbul Mujahideen) was killed in July 2016 in Kokernag, south Kashmir

• HUMINT = human intelligence; TECHINT = technological/technical intelligence

• Post-2019, Lashkar-e-Taiba displaced Hizbul Mujahideen as the dominant terror group in the Valley

🔑 Key Term: TECHINT — intelligence gathered from technical sources (communications, digital devices, signals) used to corroborate and pinpoint targets, complementing human intelligence networks