Pahalgam, Indian-administered Kashmir – On Monday this week, Pahalgam in Indian-administered Kashmir was a bustling tourist destination. Today, it’s a ghost town.

Suspected rebels killed at least 26 people on Tuesday in the picturesque tourist resort in the deadliest such attack in 25 years in Indian-administered Kashmir, raising fears of an escalation in India-Pakistan tensions.

The Resistance Front (TRF), a little-known armed group that emerged in the region in 2019, claimed responsibility for the attack. In recent years, armed rebels who are demanding Kashmir’s secession from India, have largely spared tourists from their attacks. Tuesday’s killings have changed that.

Along the Liddar River, which winds through the picturesque valley, all the hotels have closed, and the shops stand shuttered. The town, which draws millions of visitors each year, has emptied almost overnight.

“I was so busy yesterday morning, I didn’t even have time to speak to anyone,” Mushtaq Ahmad, 45, a restaurant owner, tells Al Jazeera. By Wednesday, he had been forced to close his restaurant, and now believes the outlook is bleak.

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“We are condemned forever. I don’t think the industry will recover now,” he says.

Another hotelier, Arshad Ahmad, says he had been overwhelmed by customers this year. Now, that has all changed.

“All my 20 rooms were booked for the next month,” he says. “But everything changed overnight. All my customers left early this morning. They were sad, frightened, and terrified – and rightly so.”

Among the dead at Baisaran meadow, Pahalgam, a beauty spot favoured by tourists, was local Kashmiri pony rider and guide Adil Hussain Shah, 29, who lost his life while trying to protect people.

Set amid panoramic mountains, women in colourful scarves and grey tweed pherans – long, traditional Kashmiri garments – stand outside the portico of Adil’s home in Pahalgam. Resting against the beams, they watch solemnly as representatives of India’s national television outlets and correspondents from major newspapers stream into this remote village.

“A woman whose father was killed told me that my brother confronted the terrorists and tried to reason with them not to kill innocents,” Adil’s brother, Naushad Shah, tells Al Jazeera at his home in Hapat Nar village in Pahalgam, where most of the people either work as pony riders or tourist guides, earning an income of up to $5 a day. “He tried to snatch their rifle and was trying to save the woman’s father, but he was shot in the head and shoulder,” his brother, Naushad Shah, told Al Jazeera.

Jammu and Kashmir’s Chief Minister Omar Abdullah attended his funeral on Wednesday and praised his bravery.

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“Terrorism has no religion. We have always taken care of tourists and have been their support in the high mountains. This tragedy will hit us in the worst ways,” Naushad says, crying.

A mass exodus

Amid the rising tension following the attack, which has prompted a strong response from India – including suspension of a key water-sharing treaty and the closure of the mainland border crossing to Pakistan – thousands of tourists across Kashmir have packed their bags and were seen rushing to the airport.

“I had come to Kashmir on April 21 and was planning to stay till the 28th, but now I am terrified and leaving for my home in Haryana,” 45-year-old Himani Sharma, who was staying at a hotel on the banks of Dal Lake in Srinagar city, tells Al Jazeera near the lake as she boards a taxi towards the airport with her family.

“My two kids and husband are scared.”

The Indian government issued an advisory instructing airlines to assist tourists in the face of a surge in prices for airfares, citing “an unexpected demand from tourists seeking to return to their homes” and waiving cancellation and rescheduling fees.

In a post on X on Wednesday, Chief Minister Omar Abdullah wrote, “It’s heartbreaking to see the exodus of our guests from the Valley after Tuesday’s tragic terror attack in Pahalgam, but at the same time, we totally understand why people would want to leave.”

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The situation is compounded by the shutdown of the national highway, the major road link between Kashmir and the rest of India, because of landslides on April 20 in the Ramban area, located 150km (93 miles) from the main city of Srinagar, that have destroyed part of the highway.

Abdullah said that while New Delhi is working to organise extra flights for people wishing to leave Kashmir, the highway between Srinagar and Jammu has been reconnected for traffic in a single direction.

“I have directed the administration to facilitate traffic between Srinagar & Jammu, allowing tourist vehicles to leave,” Abdullah wrote. “This will have to be done in a controlled and organised way because the road is still unstable in places, and we are also working hard to clear all the stranded vehicles. We will not be able to permit completely free movement of vehicles at the moment & we hope that everyone will cooperate with us.”

In Kashmir this week, people have come out in large numbers alongside regional politicians and trader guilds to protest against the killings.

In the southern district of Doda, mosques were blaring out their condemnations on loudspeakers on Wednesday. Many hotels and residents are offering free lodgings for stranded tourists and are waiving cancellation fees for those leaving the valley in distress.

But this untimely mass exit by tourists has come as a major blow to local people, many of whom rely on the tourism industry. Gulzar Ahmad Wani, 40, a taxi driver, earns up to $52 a day ferrying tourists from other parts of India to and from the three most popular resorts in Pahalgam.

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“They are brought to us by travel agents. I generally make two back-and-forth rounds across three destinations in a day. One from 9am to 12noon, and the second from 1pm to 4pm,” he says.

Since the devastating attack, all his bookings have been cancelled, and the clients who had already arrived have now fled. Almost 90 percent of all tourist bookings in the region have now been cancelled, industry insiders say.

“What has happened is akin to pouring a vial of poison into the food that has just been prepared,” Wani says. “This was the peak tourist season, and we were expected to keep this momentum and earn a decent income this year.”

Wani shares a three-storey house with his siblings in Laripora, an idyllic village ringed by the majestic pine-covered forests in southern Kashmir. But the structure is 40 years old and crumbling.

He had applied for financial assistance under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana, a federal government credit-linked subsidy scheme to facilitate access to affordable housing for low- and moderate-income residents.

“I had even been selected to receive the assistance. But unfortunately, it now seems that I cannot take it because I won’t be able to scrape together the rest of the money needed to build the house,” he says.

Peak tourism season

According to official figures, more than 23 million tourists visited the Indian-administered region of Jammu and Kashmir in 2024, and this year, the figures had been expected to rise even higher. But tourism has suffered here before.

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In 2019, when Article 370, which previously granted autonomous status to Jammu and Kashmir state, was revoked, a major clampdown on Kashmiris by the Indian government took place, with police and paramilitary forces deployed in large numbers to prevent protests. People were jailed under strict pre-trial laws, the internet was suspended and government critics were subsequently arrested on “terrorism” charges. Tourism figures dropped off and continued to be flat throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

In recent years, however, numbers were rising again – backed by promotional campaigns by the Indian government.

Pahalgam is one of Indian-administered Kashmir’s most popular tourist destinations, with breathtaking landscapes perfect for photography, trekking, pony rides, fishing, river rafting and nature walks. It is surrounded by vast alpine meadows and pine forests with multiple lakes.

The place is also politically significant for New Delhi as it serves as a base camp for the annual Amarnath Yatra, one of the holiest pilgrimages for Hindus in India. Every year, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims pass through the high meadows for more than a monthlong pilgrimage.

The area has also long been a favourite Bollywood filming location, and features in classics such as Betaab, after which one of the nearby valleys too is named.

With its efforts to restore tourism, however, the Indian government has come in for accusations of trying to suggest that Kashmir had returned to a state of normalcy. One parliamentarian even called tourism a “cultural invasion” and accused the government of politicising tourism in a region where critics can still be arrested using draconian laws under which a person can be held in detention for lengthy periods of time without a trial.

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India’s decision to host a G20 tourism meeting in 2023 in Kashmir was also criticised by Fernand de Varennes, UN special rapporteur on minority issues, as “seeking to normalise what some have described as a military occupation by instrumentalising a G20 meeting and portraying an international ‘seal of approval’.”

Given its significance in the region, the area is heavily patrolled by the army, paramilitary troops, and local police.

There are multiple security checkpoints at entry points, and during the annual Hindu pilgrimage, which is set to begin on July 3, security is heightened through the use of drones, surveillance equipment, and road checks. Against that backdrop, Tuesday’s attack has shocked locals and visitors alike.

“In a scenario where normal life is heavily under surveillance, it is the government that has to be held accountable. This incident has hurt the locals most; we are in grief,” a local handicraft shopkeeper in the main city of Srinagar tells Al Jazeera, requesting anonymity.

‘Taking us back to the 1990s’

Mir Imaad was taking pictures of the vibrant tulip buds adorning his hotel in Pahalgam on Tuesday when he noticed helicopters whirring overhead. He says the unusual activity caused him to suspect that something must be amiss. “Then, someone brought a female visitor who had been lodging at our hotel back to her room. Her husband had been killed in the attack,” the 31-year-old hotelier tells Al Jazeera.

By the next day, thousands of fear-stricken tourists had packed up their belongings and begun racing to the airport in taxis through the highways flanked on both sides by sprawling mustard fields.

Meanwhile, mass cancellations by tourists have put about 500 hotel owners in Pahalgam in a fix. Imaad has paid out $2,400 in refunds, and others are doing the same.

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“We hired skilled professionals over the last few years. Our chefs and the staff overseeing the catering are among the best in the region,” says Imaad. “This hotel was built in 1938 and had a huge reputation to which we had to live up. But now we are confronted with the staff that simply doesn’t want to be here. I don’t know what will happen now.”

Economic experts also believe the news of the attack on Tuesday will discourage direct investment into Kashmir. “The precursor for good economic activity is how much good news is coming out of the state,” says Ejaz Ayoub, a Srinagar-based economist. “When tourism increases, a sense of positivity towards investment increases. In the last three years, the investment ratio in the region’s GDP has increased – albeit marginally.”

But Ayoub also believes that the tourist exodus will not undermine the region’s economy in the way it is being projected in the mainstream Indian media.

“Tourism’s overall contribution to our GDP is marginal. The hotel industry [in this region] earns $324m annually, which accounts for only 1 percent of our GDP. When considering the trickle-down effect through the secondary and tertiary sectors, which includes tour operators or individuals associated with the gig-economy like the ponywallas, the figure can expand to $720m. But that’s still very little compared to agriculture’s contribution.”

Ayoub, however, said the damage to tourism will affect the collection of a form of indirect tax called Goods and Services Tax (GST). “Indirect taxation decreases due to lower trade volumes,” he added.

‘Anxious about the future’

Abdul Wahid Wani, 38, a pony-ride operator, was one of the first people to reach the bloody scene to look for survivors on Tuesday after a friend in the police alerted him to the tragedy.

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He climbed the scree-laden path leading to Baisaran meadow, where the carnage took place. Since the route is rugged and uphill, only pony ride operators like Wani can carry people up to the beauty spot.

“I couldn’t have lifted all the injured survivors myself,” he explains. So, he shot a video of the scene and shared it on a WhatsApp group with hundreds of his fellow ponywallas, as they are called. “Some of them arrived quickly,” Wahid says. “That’s how we rescued them.”

The videos, which went viral all over India, now form the crucial evidence that police are relying on as part of their probe into the incident.

But while he is locally being hailed as a hero, Wani is plagued with anxiety about how he will earn a living from now on. On Thursday, the flights landing in Srinagar were nearly empty while the airport itself was packed with the panicked tourists looking to catch the first flight on their way out.

Some Indian nationals have even put their plans to visit the Valley on hold. “I was planning to come this year. But now, I won’t,” said Bhaskar Bhatt, who lives in New Delhi.

In the current season, which Wani described as the “best”, he was earning up to $11 a day, a decent income in this area.

“I could afford to get my children to study at a private school,” he said. Wani has two daughters aged 14 and 11, and a son who is seven years old.

“I don’t want my children to suffer from the lack of education that I have. I don’t want them to have a hardscrabble life as a pony operator.”

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