Kashmir tourism bears the brunt after tourist massacre and India-Pakistan military strikes

SRINAGAR, INDIA: There are hardly any tourists in the scenic Himalayan region of Kashmir. Most of the hotels and ornate pinewood houseboats are empty. Resorts in the snow-clad mountains have fallen silent. Hundreds of taxis are parked and idle.

It is the fallout of last month’s gun massacre that left 26 people, mostly Hindu tourists, dead in Indian-controlled Kashmir, followed by tit-for-tat military strikes by India and Pakistan, bringing the nuclear-armed rivals to the brink of their third war over the region.

“There might be some tourist arrivals, but they are almost negligible. It is almost zero footfall right now,” said Yaseen Tuman, who operates multiple houseboats in the region’s main city of Srinagar. “There is a haunting silence now.”

Tens of thousands of panicked tourists left Kashmir within days of the rare killings of tourists on April 22 at a picture-perfect meadow in the southern resort town of Pahalgam. Following the attack, authorities temporarily closed dozens of tourist resorts in the region, adding to fear and causing occupancy rates to plummet.

Graphic images, repeatedly circulated through television channels and social media, deepened panic and anger. India blamed Pakistan for supporting the attackers, a charge Islamabad denied.

Those who had stayed put fled soon after tensions between India and Pakistan spiked. As the two countries fired missiles and drones at each other, the region witnessed mass cancellations of tourist bookings. New Delhi and Islamabad reached a US-mediated ceasefire on May 10, but hardly any new bookings have come in, tour operators said.

Sheikh Bashir Ahmed, vice president of the Kashmir Hotel and Restaurant Association, said at least 12,000 rooms in the region’s hundreds of hotels and guesthouses had been previously booked until June. Almost all bookings have been cancelled, and tens of thousands of people associated with hotels are now without jobs, he said.

“It is a huge loss,” Ahmed said.

The decline has had a ripple effect on the local economy. Handicrafts, food stalls and taxi operators have lost most of their business.

Idyllic destinations like the resort towns of Gulmarg and Pahalgam, once a magnet for travellers, are eerily silent. Lines of colourful hand-carved boats, known as shikaras, lie deserted, mostly anchored still on Srinagar’s normally bustling Dal Lake. Tens of thousands of daily wage workers have hardly any work.

“There used to be long lines of tourists waiting for boat rides. There are none now,” said boatman Fayaz Ahmed.

Taxi driver Mohammed Irfan used to take tourists on long drives to hill stations and show them grand Mughal-era gardens. “Even a half-day break was a luxury, and we would pray for it. Now, my taxi has been standing still for almost two weeks,” he said.

In recent years, the tourism sector grew substantially, making up about 7% of the region’s economy, according to official figures. Omar Abdullah, Kashmir’s top elected official, said before the attack on tourists that the government was aiming to increase tourism’s share of the economy to at least 15% in the next four to five years.

Indian-controlled Kashmir was a top destination for visitors until the armed rebellion against Indian rule began in 1989. Warfare laid waste to the stunningly beautiful region, which is partly controlled by Pakistan and claimed in full by both countries.

As the conflict ground on, the tourism sector slowly revived, but occasional military skirmishes between India and Pakistan kept visitors away.

However, India vigorously pushed tourism after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government scrapped the disputed region’s semi-autonomy in 2019. Tensions have simmered, but the region has also drawn millions of visitors amid a strange calm enforced by an intensified security crackdown.

According to official data, close to 3 million tourists visited the region in 2024, a rise from 2.71 million visitors in 2023 and 2.67 million in 2022. The massive influx prompted many locals to invest in the sector, setting up family-run guesthouses, luxury hotels and transport companies in a region with few alternatives.

Tourists remained largely unfazed, even as Modi’s administration has governed Kashmir with an iron fist in recent years, claiming militancy in the region was under control and that the tourism influx was a sign of normalcy returning.

The massacre shattered those claims. Experts say that the Modi government’s optimism was largely misplaced and that the rising tourism figures it boasted about were a fragile barometer of normalcy. Last year, Abdullah, the region’s chief minister, cautioned against such optimism.

Tuman, who is also a sixth-generation tour operator, said he was not optimistic about an immediate revival, as bookings for the summer had almost all been cancelled.

“If all goes well, it will take at least six months for tourism to revive,” he said.

Ahmed, the hotel association official, said India and Pakistan need to resolve the dispute for the region’s prosperity. “Tourism needs peace. If the Kashmir problem is not solved … maybe after two months, it will be the same thing again.”

By RSS/AP