Muslim-majority Kashmir has been divided between India and Pakistan since their independence from British rule in 1947, and each side claims it in full.
Rebel groups have waged an insurgency since 1989, demanding independence for the territory or its merger with Pakistan.
The incident brings the number of soldiers and police killed this year on the Indian side of the disputed Himalayan territory to 17.
A security official, who asked not to be named, said fighters had shifted operations from the mainly Muslim Kashmir valley to the Hindu-dominated southern Jammu area, where “counter-insurgency measures are not as strong”.
Kashmir’s top political official Manoj Sinha said forces would “avenge (the) death of our soldiers”.
The Indian army’s 16 Corps said security forces had launched an operation in the Doda forest yesterday evening, some 135km southeast of the territory’s capital Srinagar, in the Jammu area.
“Contact with terrorists was established …(a) heavy firefight ensued,” the army said.
A police officer, speaking on condition of anonymity as he was not authorised to talk to journalists, said that “four soldiers died of injuries they had received during the initial exchange of fire”.
A police officer also later died of his wounds, he said, adding two other soldiers had been hospitalised.
‘Cowardly’
Minister of defence Rajnath Singh said he was “anguished to learn about the cowardly attack” on the soldiers and police who had made the “supreme sacrifice”, but did not provide a toll.
Reinforcements were deployed to track the gunmen in the forested mountains.
This year, 61 people have been killed – including 17 civilians, 17 members of the security forces, and 27 rebels, according to the New Delhi-based South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP), which tracks the violence.
That compares to 132 people killed in 2023, including 12 civilians, 33 security officers and 87 rebels, according to SATP data.
This year, almost all the soldiers killed were in Jammu, while last year almost all were killed in the Kashmir valley.
Yesterday’s clash came a day after the Indian army said it killed three suspected fighters as they tried to cross from the Pakistan-controlled side of the heavily militarised dividing line, in Kashmir’s Kupwara district.
New Delhi and Islamabad accuse each other of stoking militancy and espionage to undermine each other, and the nuclear-armed rivals have fought multiple conflicts for control of the region.
The fighting has killed tens of thousands of civilians, soldiers and rebels.
In June, nine Indian Hindu pilgrims were killed and dozens wounded when a gunman opened fire on a bus carrying them from a shrine in the southern Reasi area.
It was one of the deadliest attacks in years and the first on Hindu pilgrims in Kashmir since 2017, when gunmen killed seven people in another ambush on a bus.