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India has summoned Pakistan’s top diplomat in Delhi after announcing a series of measures to downgrade ties with Islamabad after a deadly militant attack in Kashmir, an Indian diplomatic source has told the Guardian. Local media carried similar reports.
Saad Ahmad Warraich, the charge d’affaires at the Pakistan embassy, was summoned late on Wednesday night by the ministry of external affairs, according to a senior ministry official who was not authorised to speak to the media.
Warraich, Pakistan’s highest-ranking diplomat in Delhi, was summoned after India closed a key land border with Pakistan, suspended a water-sharing treaty, and barred Pakistani citizens from entering under a visa exemption scheme.
Twenty-six tourists died in Tuesday’s attack. On Thursday, police in Kashmir published notices naming three suspected militants “involved in” the attack, and announced rewards for information leading to their arrest. Two of the three suspected militants are Pakistani nationals, according to the notices.
The late-night summoning of Pakistan’s top diplomat reflected India’s “anguish” over the attack, the official said. “We raised our concerns and formally notified the measures India has taken in the wake of the terror attack.”
India also announced it would withdraw its defence attaches from Pakistan, reduce its mission staff in Islamabad from 55 to 30 and declare Pakistan’s defence personnel persona non grata.
According to the diplomatic source and local media, the Pakistani diplomat was informed that all defence advisers at the country’s mission in New Delhi had been declared persona non grata and were expected to leave within a week.
India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, has called for an all-party meeting with opposition parties on Thursday, to brief them on the government’s response to the attack.
In Islamabad, the prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, was scheduled to hold a meeting of the national security committee to discuss Pakistan’s response, the foreign minister, Ishaq Dar, posted on X.
The Indus water treaty, mediated by the World Bank, splits the Indus River and its tributaries between the neighbours and regulates the sharing of water. It had until now withstood wars between the neighbours.
India would hold the treaty in abeyance, the Indian foreign secretary, Vikram Misri, said.
Diplomatic ties between the two nuclear-armed rivals were weak even before the latest measures were announced, as Pakistan had expelled India’s envoy and not posted its own ambassador in Delhi after India revoked the semi-autonomous status of Kashmir in 2019.
Indian security forces fanned out across the Himalayan region of Kashmir on Wednesday as the army and police launched a massive manhunt for the perpetrators of the attack.
Amid rapidly rising tensions in the region, which has been riven by militant violence since the start of an anti-Indian insurgency in 1989, survivors said the militants had asked men they had rounded up to recite Islamic verses before executing those who could not.
A little-known militant group, the Kashmir Resistance, claimed responsibility for the attack. Posting on social media, it expressed discontent that more than 85,000 “outsiders” had been settled in the region, spurring a “demographic change”.
Tuesday’s attack is seen as a setback to what Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party have projected as a huge achievement in revoking the special status that Jammu and Kashmir enjoyed, and bringing peace and development to the long-troubled Muslim-majority region.
Reuters contributed to this report
