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New Delhi, India — Addressing a rally of supporters in September 2024, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi confidently asserted that his Hindu majoritarian Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) would create a new Jammu and Kashmir, “which would not only be terror-free but a heaven for tourists”.

Seven months later, that promise lies in tatters. On April 22, an armed group killed 25 tourists and a local pony rider in the resort town of Pahalgam in Indian-administered Kashmir, setting off an escalatory spiral in tensions between India and Pakistan, which New Delhi accuses of links to the attackers – a charge Islamabad has denied.

The armies of the two nuclear-armed neighbours have exchanged gunfire for three days in a row along their disputed border. India has suspended its participation in the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) that Pakistan counts on for its water security, and Islamabad has threatened to walk out of past peace deals. Both nations have also expelled each other’s diplomats, military attaches and hundreds of civilians.

But India is simultaneously waging a battle on territory it controls. In Indian-administered Kashmir, security forces are blasting the homes of families of suspected armed fighters. They have raided the homes of hundreds of suspected rebel supporters and arrested more than 1,500 Kashmiris since the Pahalgam killings, the deadliest attack on tourists in a quarter of a century.

Yet, as Indian forces comb dense jungles and mountains to try to capture the attackers who are still free, international relations experts and Kashmir observers say the past week has revealed major chinks in Modi’s Kashmir policy, which they say appears to be staring at a dead end.

The Pahalgam attack “punctured the balloon of the ‘New Kashmir’ narrative”, said Sumantra Bose, a political scientist whose work focuses on the intersection of nationalism and conflict in South Asia.

‘Making tourists a target’

In August 2019, the Modi government withdrew the semi-autonomous status of Indian-administered Kashmir without consultation with either the political opposition or Kashmiris. That special status had been a critical condition for Kashmir to join India following independence from the British in 1947.

The Modi government argued that successive governments had failed to truly integrate Jammu and Kashmir with the rest of India, and that the semi-autonomous status had played into the hands of secessionist forces that seek to break the region from India.

The abrogation of the constitutional provision that gave Kashmir its special status was accompanied by a major crackdown. Thousands of civilians were arrested, including leaders of mainstream political parties – even those that view Kashmir as a part of India. Phone and internet connections were shut off for months. Kashmir was cut off from the rest of the world.

Yet, the Modi government argued that the pain was temporary and needed to restore Kashmir to what multiple officials described as a state of “normalcy”.

Since then, the arrests of civilians, including journalists, have continued. Borders of electoral constituencies were changed in a manner that saw Jammu, the Hindu-majority part of Jammu and Kashmir, gain greater political influence than the Muslim-majority Kashmir valley. Non-Kashmiris have been issued residency cards – which was not allowed before 2019 – to settle there, sparking fears that the Modi government might be attempting to change the region’s demography.

And though the region held the first election to its provincial legislature in a decade in late 2024, the newly elected government of Chief Minister Omar Abdullah has been denied many of the powers other regional governments enjoy – with New Delhi, instead,  making key decisions.

Amid all of that, the Modi government pushed tourism in Kashmir, pointing to a surge in visitors as evidence of the supposed normalcy that had returned to the return after four decades of armed resistance to Indian rule. In 2024, 3.5 million tourists visited Kashmir, comfortably the largest number in a decade, according to government figures.

But long before the Pahalgam attack, in May 2024, Abdullah – now, the chief minister of the region, then an opposition leader – had cautioned against suggesting that tourism numbers were reflective of peace and stability in Kashmir.

“The situation [in Kashmir] is not normal and talk less about tourism being an indicator of normalcy; when they link normalcy with tourism, they put tourists in danger,” Abdullah said in May last year. “You are making the tourists a target.”

Al Jazeera reached out to Abdullah for a comment on the current crisis but has yet to receive a response.

On April 22, that Modi government narrative that Abdullah had warned about was precisely what left the meadows of Pahalgam splattered in blood, said Praveen Donthi, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group. “New Delhi and its security agencies started buying their own assessment of peace and stability, and they became complacent, assuming that the militants will never attack tourists,” he said.

Until the Pahalgam attack, armed fighters had largely spared tourists in Kashmir, keeping in mind their importance to the region’s economy, noted Donthi. “But if pushed to the wall, all it takes is two men with guns to prove that Kashmir is not normal,” he said.

Dealing with Kashmir, dealing with Pakistan

On April 8, just two weeks before the attack, Indian Minister of Home Affairs Amit Shah, who is widely seen as Modi’s deputy, was in Srinagar, Kashmir’s largest city, to chair a security review meeting. Abdullah, the chief minister, was not a part of the meeting – the most recent instance where he has been kept out of security reviews.

Analysts say this underscores that the Modi government views Kashmir’s security challenges almost exclusively as an extension of its foreign policy tensions with Pakistan, not as an issue that might also need domestic input for New Delhi to tackle it successfully. India has long accused Pakistan of arming, training and financing the armed rebellion against its government in Indian-administered Kashmir. Pakistan claims it only offers moral and diplomatic support to the secessionist movement.

The Pahalgam attack has shone a light on the folly of the Modi administration’s approach, Donthi said.

“Projecting this as a security crisis that is being fuelled entirely by Pakistan can make it useful politically, domestically, but it’s not going to help you resolve the conflict,” he said.

“Unless the Indian government starts engaging with the Kashmiris, there can never be a durable solution to this violence.”

So far, though, there is little evidence that the Modi government is contemplating a shift in approach, which appears shaped “to cater to domestic jingoism and hyper-nationalist rhetoric”, Sheikh Showkat, a Kashmir-based political commentator, said.

The focus since the Pahalgam attack has been to punish Pakistan.

Since 1960, the IWT – the water-sharing agreement between India and Pakistan – survived three wars and has been widely hailed as an example of managing transnational waters.

Under the treaty, both countries get water from three rivers each, from the Indus Basin: three eastern rivers – the Ravi, Beas and Sutlej – to India, while three western rivers – the Indus, Jhelum and Chenab – carry 80 percent of water to Pakistan.

But the future of that pact is uncertain with India suspending its participation in the treaty after the Pahalgam attack. Pakistan has responded by warning that attempts to stop or divert water resources would amount to “an act of war”. Islamabad has also warned that it might suspend its participation in all bilateral treaties, including the 1972 Simla Agreement, signed after their 1971 war, which in essence demarcates the Line of Control, the de-facto border, between them.

“Pakistan genuinely views this matter [the loss of water] in existential and even apocalyptic terms,” said Bose, the political scientist. “India knows this – and it signals a policy of collective punishment towards Pakistan, which impacts tens of millions of people.”

However, experts have raised several questions about India’s and Pakistan’s announcements.

How can India practically stop water when it does not have the capacity to hold these powerful rivers? Can it divert water, risking flooding in its own territory? And if Pakistan walks away from the Simla Agreement, is it in effect signalling a state of war?

“All of these measures are juvenile, on both sides,” said Bose, but with “concrete implications”.

For its part, India has been seeking to renegotiate the IWT for several years, claiming that it does not get its fair share of the water. “The recent Kashmir crisis gives [New] Delhi an opportunity, a pretext to pull the trigger on the treaty,” said Showkat, the Kashmiri-based commentator.

Will Modi change his Kashmir approach?

Two days after the Pahalgam attack, Modi was touring Bihar, the eastern state due for elections later this year. Addressing an election rally, the prime minister said that he would chase the attackers “to the end of the earth”.

To Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, a Modi biographer, such speeches are reflective of what he argues is the sole objective of Modi’s Kashmir policy: “maximising the core electoral constituency of the BJP in the rest of the country by being tough on Kashmir”.

Since independence, the BJP’s ideological parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, has viewed Kashmir as an unfinished project: The RSS for decades called for the region’s special status to be scrapped, and for a firm security-driven approach to the Muslim-majority region.

“Now, the only thing is, ‘We want revenge’,” said Mukhopadhyay, referring to the jingoism that currently dominates in India.

Since the attack, several Kashmiris have been beaten up across India, with landlords pushing out tenants and doctors turning away Muslim patients. Social media platforms are rife with inflammatory content targeting Muslims.

The International Crisis Group’s Donthi said that the Pahalgam attack, in some ways, serves as “a shot in the arm” for Modi’s government. While the security challenges in Kashmir and the crisis with Pakistan represent strategic and geopolitical tests, “domestically, it is a great position for the Modi government to be in”.

He said this was especially so with a weak opposition largely falling in line – the principal opposition Congress party has backed a muscular response to Pakistan for the attack.

However, Bose, the political scientist, argues that the Modi government was not focused on short-term political calculations. Modi’s comments in Bihar, and the largely unchecked hate against Kashmiris and Muslims spreading across Indian social platforms and on TV channels, were reflective of the BJP’s broader worldview on Kashmir, he said.

Kashmir is an ideological battle for Modi’s party, he said, adding, “This government is never going to change its Kashmir policy.”

Bangkok, Thailand – Methinee Phoovatis scoured a small computer screen in the teeming metropolis of central Bangkok in search of survivors.

Surrounding Methinee, other members of Thailand’s Department of Disaster Prevention and Mitigation (DDPM) coordinated the dozens of rescue workers shuttling along a path that led to an enormous mound of debris.

The rescue teams scoured the area for any signs of life beneath the imposing hill of cement and steel.

We’re just hoping that some of the people are still alive, Methinee, a DDPM plan and policy analyst, told Al Jazeera.

It was four days after a magnitude 7.7 earthquake jolted Bangkok on March 28, and as the hours and days passed, the chances of Methinee and her colleagues finding survivors were increasingly slim.

We are making every effort to help the people. They are still alive, she said, standing next to a whiteboard that displays the list of 73 people still missing under the rubble of the 30-story, unfinished building that was meant to house Thailand’s National Audit Office.

The earthquake that rocked the Thai capital was particularly shallow, just 10km (6.2 miles) deep, which intensified the shock waves on the earth’s surface.

Bangkok was brought to a standstill by the earthquake, which was located more than 1,200 kilometers (750 miles) from the epicentre of Myanmar, where thousands of people died. As buildings swayed and shuddered, panicked residents of this city of more than 11 million people rushed out into the streets in search of safety.

A month on, life in the Thai capital has returned to normal.

However, some in Bangkok are concerned about the safety of high-rise living in the world’s 12th tallest city because of the dozens of fatalities, the majority of which occurred at the site of the collapsed audit office building.

‘ People were screaming ‘

Harry Yang was suddenly put off by a sudden nausea-inducing sway of the lamps in his 41-story, nine-story apartment.

The 29-year-old has called Bangkok his home since he was a child and ran out onto my balcony and “everything was shaking.”

“People were screaming”, he said.

Yang immediately recalls his aging father, who has mobility issues and lives on the 32nd floor of a different high-rise building in Bangkok.

Although his father, an antique dealer, was unharmed, the earthquake razed many of his antiques and terrified him.

“My dad is 68 years old, he has leg problems, and he needed to climb down” stairs to reach the ground floor, Yang said.

People were scared for a good reason. Bangkok trembled, with debris falling to the ground and water rushing in torrents from skyscraper infinity swimming pools, according to social media video clips.

Lapaphutch Lertsachanant was in her condominium on the 27th floor when the quake struck.

“The building was figuratively squat side to side,” the statement read. At that point, I really thought the building might be split in half, Lapaphutch said.

“I really thought that I wouldn’t survive”, she added, recalling her desire to speak to her partner one final time by phone. I believed I might speak with him in his final moments. In my final moments of life, he would be there for me.

Although seismic events in the wider Southeast Asia region are common, the scale of the quake that hit Myanmar – where more than 3, 700 people were killed – and shook Bangkok took many by surprise.

Myanmar is directly on a tectonic fault line, the Sagaing Fault, according to Wang Yu, associate professor in the National Taiwan University’s geoscience department. The March 28 earthquake resulted from a strike-slip fault between the India and Eurasian plates.

A strike-slip refers to a tectonic fault in which two plates move horizontally past one another, according to the USGS. Since 1900, the USGS reports that six other large earthquakes with a magnitude of 7.0 or more have occurred within 250km (155 miles) of the epicentre in Myanmar of the March 28 quake.

According to Wang Yu, the impact of these earthquakes can be increased because Bangkok is built on an unstable basin of soil.

The seismic wave’s amplitude will increase as it travels from the outside into the basin, he said.

But the precise reason why the building in central Bangkok collapsed remains under investigation. No other structure in Bangkok experienced such a catastrophic failure, despite the destruction of numerous structural structures. Officials in Thailand have begun an investigation to check whether proper building regulations were followed.

Earthquake resistant design:

In 1997, Thailand first enacted building seismic regulations. In 2007, new legislation specified that buildings higher than 15 metres (49ft) in high-risk areas like Bangkok must be built to withstand quakes of up to magnitude 7.0. The Thai Department of Public Works and Town and Country Planning developed a comprehensive “Standard for Earthquake Resistant Design of Buildings” in 2009, two years after.

In light of these building and engineering regulations, how might Bangkok’s almost-built structure collapse?

“I think we need to find the root cause so at least we can learn some lessons and improve building regulations”, Bangkok Governor Chadchart Sittipunt said shortly after the quake, as local authorities fanned out across Thailand to test buildings and assess whether they were still structurally sound.

The majority of the time, according to the safety standards, have been met.

The Metropolitan Authority of Bangkok, aside from the building collapse site, announced the end of the “disaster situation” in Bangkok on April 3, just six days after the earthquake.

Some residents are still concerned after the disaster because of lingering feelings of insecurity caused by superficial cracks and other damage to their high-rise homes.

Varuth Pongsapipatt, 32, was dealing with the series of cracks running up the walls of his apartment despite engineers’ assurances that it was safe to live there.

“It’s quite scary, but it has no effect on the structure of the building, so it’s OK”, he told Al Jazeera.

After the earthquake, Lapaphutch claimed that she was forced to move into her parents’ home for almost three weeks and was not ready to move back to her 27th-floor apartment because the elevator in her condominium was out of commission.

She said, “I don’t feel safe moving back to living in a tall building.”

Harry Yang said his father had refused to return to his 32-floor home, worried that aftershocks may occur.

“My parents are very worried,” my parents said. Since the earthquake struck, my father has been staying at a hotel, Yang reported to Al Jazeera earlier this month.

Slow response

According to research conducted by Thailand’s National Institute of Development Administration (NIDA), about 68 percent of respondents were concerned about building stability and safety.

Some people were concerned about the impact on the real estate market as well.

“I’m more concerned about property prices”, Yang said.

“I believe that this will have a significant impact on consumer confidence and the housing market.” Many people are trying to relocate, he said.

Following the quake, Thai financial analysts predicted that condominium sales could be hit with potential buyers thinking twice before purchasing a high-rise building in Bangkok, placing further pressure on the country’s property sector.

Low-rise homes, which are thought to be less susceptible to seismic events, are anticipated to experience windfall as a result of the March 28 earthquake. This pattern will be similar to what was said earlier this month in the Bangkok Post newspaper about the trend that homebuyers were led to prefer condos over low-rise homes in 2011.

The quake also exposed serious shortcomings in Thailand’s emergency alert system.

Although an earthquake warning system was intended to provide information to the Thai public, batches of 200, 000 could only be distributed at once, causing a bottleneck that slowed down communication in the nation of almost 72 million.

Harry Yang claimed neither his parents nor he received any text messages for an immediate response. They were forced to search online for information after the quake hit.

Lapaphutch, a resident of Bangkok, added that she had never received any emergency information after the earthquake.

She said, “We really need this kind of system that can alert us.” “Everyone in Thailand should be reviewing these kinds of notifications to make us well prepared”.

Nearly 60% of those polled were concerned about the effectiveness of early warning systems, according to the survey conducted by NIDA. According to local reports, Thai Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra has since called for system upgrades to increase the alert batches’ broadcast capacity to one million at once.

Despite the challenges, Thailand emerged from the tremor relatively unscathed.

Bangkok’s Chatuchak Weekend Market, which was just meters away from the collapsed 30-storey structure, was already attracting tourists just days after the earthquake, making the events seem almost distant memories in a city that never sleeps.

Harry Yang agreed.

Bangkok residents had initially felt scared, but that would pass, he said.