Pakistan’s claim to Kashmir is irredentist. Its leaders believe that Pakistan is “incomplete” without the absorption of a Muslim-majority region that is adjacent to it. India’s initial claim to Kashmir was based on its commitment to secularism: namely that a Muslim-majority region could thrive within a predominantly Hindu but secular polity. Indian secularism today, owing to the rise of Hindu nationalism, is moth-eaten. Consequently, today its claim is based on the imperatives of statecraft: no sovereign state wishes to concede territory that it considers to be its own.
Why are India and Pakistan again at odds? The answer must be traced to the time of their creation in 1947 following the collapse of the British Indian Empire. The empire in South Asia had been composed of twin classes of states. Those under the control of the British Crown and the so-called, “princely state” —- nominally independent as long as they recognized Britain as the paramount power in South Asia. With the imminent departure of the British, the rulers were given a choice: they had to join India or Pakistan based on their geographic location and their demographic composition.
Predominantly Hindu states that were adjoining would go to India. Muslim-majority states that were contiguous would go to Pakistan. The state of Jammu and Kashmir was an anomaly. It abutted both India and Pakistan, but it had a Hindu monarch and a predominantly Muslim population. The ruler, Maharaja Hari Singh, did not wish to join either India or Pakistan but wished to remain independent and so he refused to accede to either state.
His hand was forced when in October 1947, Pakistani forces disguised as local tribesmen attacked his realm. In a panic, he appealed to India for assistance. When he agreed to sign the Instrument of Accession and after Prime Minister Nehru had consulted the leader of the principal, popular, secular party in the state, India sent in troops to stop the Pakistani advance. However, Pakistan managed to seize a third of the “princely state” and war ensued, which ended in the spring of 1948 when India sought UN mediation. Unfortunately, at the UN the issue quickly became embroiled in Cold War politics and neither India nor Pakistan implemented the UN resolutions.
On April 22, terrorists belonging to a shadowy terrorist organization, The Resistance Force, widely believed to be an offshoot of a Pakistan-based terrorist organization the Lashkar-e-Taiba, mercilessly killed 26 Indian and foreign tourists as well as a local guide in Pahalgam, a tourist resort near Srinagar, the summer capital of the Indian-controlled portion of the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir. The sheer cruelty of the attack, given that the terrorists sought to ascertain the religious identity of their victims before killing them, generated a widespread nationalist backlash across much of India. More to the point, it caught the Hindu-nationalist government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India flat-footed.
In the days and weeks prior to the attack, his government had touted the return of normalcy to a region which had been long wracked with an indigenous insurgency that has subsequently seen substantial Pakistani involvement. Modi and his party had highlighted the return of tourists to the highly picturesque region, underscored the growth of infrastructure and highlighted the reduction of routine violence as the insurgency had all but waned, especially following the termination of Kashmir’s special status under the Indian Constitution in August 2019.
With claims of peace now deflated and faced with an inflamed citizenry, Modi had little choice but to argue that the terrorists, as on several past occasions, were Pakistan-based, even as his government did not proffer any evidence to that end. Nevertheless, given Pakistan’s long-standing involvement with a range of terrorist groups, many of whom had previously carried out a range of attacks on India, his assertion was not entirely unreasonable.
After a pause of barely two weeks, India launched a series of drone, missile and airborne attacks on both Pakistan-administered Kashmir and within Pakistan itself. This was the first time since the 1971 India-Pakistan war that India had chosen to attack the Pakistani heartland. Even during the war in the Kargil region of Kashmir in 1999, which Pakistan had initiated, Indian leaders had refrained from attacking targets with Pakistan itself for fear of provoking a wider war. Consequently, the decision of the Modi government to take the war directly into Pakistan represented a dramatic, new level of escalation.
Not surprisingly, Pakistan responded with vigor, sending in swarms of lethally armed drones into Indian-controlled Kashmir and across the international border into Indian territory. Pakistan also claimed that its air force shot down as many as five Indian fighter aircrafts. Some of these claims have yet to be independently verified.
Meanwhile, the United States, which had intervened in previous crises to prevent escalation, appeared unconcerned with the crisis between these two nuclear-armed adversaries that had fought four wars over the Kashmir dispute. Vice-President J.D. Vance, for example, in an interview with Fox News had stated that the conflict was “fundamentally none of our business.” Only when the crisis seemed to escalate with increased cross-border shelling and the use of airpower did Secretary of State Marco Rubio call senior officials in both India and Pakistan urging them not to escalate the crisis.
Finally, even though suitable corroboration is lacking, President Donald Trump claimed that he had played a critical role in preventing the two countries from escalating the conflict. Following substantial pushback from New Delhi, the State Department has sought to walk back his assertion about the U.S.’ role in containing the crisis.
Without adjudicating these competing claims about what led to the de-escalation and the ceasefire, it can be affirmed that a ceasefire was announced on Saturday, May 10. Since then, both sides have alleged that the other has violated the terms of ceasefire. But independent verification of these charges is difficult. What is, however, evident is that the tensions between the two countries remain high and are unlikely to abate anytime soon.
Given the risks of escalation from conventional to nuclear level, it is understandable that many analysts and policymakers remained concerned about tensions on the subcontinent. These misgivings aside, the India-Pakistan rivalry is unlikely to end in the foreseeable future. Pakistan, which has claimed the entire disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir since its emergence as an independent state following the end of British colonialism and the break-up of the British Indian Empire in 1947, will not abandon its quest. By the same token, India, which controls two-thirds of the original state, is equally unwilling to cede ground. Despite fighting three wars over Kashmir specifically and engaging with multiple attempts at conflict resolution at multilateral, bilateral and even unilateral levels, the two states remain immovably at odds. Worse still, with the overarching role of the Pakistani military in its politics, civilian governments within Pakistan have very limited leeway when it comes to pursuing reconciliation with India.
On the other side of the border, the present Hindu-nationalist government, which had initially made several overtures toward Pakistan during its first term between 2014-19, has no inclination to offer it an olive branch after suffering several Pakistan-based terrorist attacks. Under the current circumstances, any hope of a return to a modicum of stability in the region remains an elusive goal.
The Pakistani military, with its overweening role in the country’s politics, is committed to a vision of unremitting hostility toward India. Unless the military is somehow discredited, an unlikely prospect in the foreseeable future, I see no prospect of conflict resolution. Furthermore, India, especially after the Pahalgam attack, is in no mood whatsoever to make any concessions to Pakistan. Consequently, we are looking at a deadlock.
Students from the subcontinent at Stanford, even though passions are running high in both their home states, should eschew the temptation to fall prey to nationalist sentiments. Instead, to the extent possible, they should set aside such anger and try to understand the underlying sources of the conflict and the precipitants of the recent crisis.
Sumit Ganguly is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the director of the Huntington Program on Strengthening US-India Relations. He is also the author of “Conflict Unending: India-Pakistan Tensions since 1947.“