For two harrowing weeks, South Asia teetered on the edge of nuclear confrontation.
April’s massacre in Kashmir ignited drone warfare and a barrage of missiles across the fraught India-Pakistan border, before a hastily-brokered ceasefire agreement seemed to bring the war to an end last week. But has the mushroom cloud faded from the horizon?
“When nuclear weapons can be involved, there is always an unacceptable level of danger,” John Erath, senior policy director at the non-profit Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, recently told the BBC. “The Indian and Pakistani governments have navigated these situations in the past, so the risk is small. But with nuclear weapons, even a small risk is too large.”
On the morning of May 7, India launched missiles at multiple sites in Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir. This assault followed the Pahalgam attack on April 22, where 26 civilians, mostly tourists, were killed by gunmen in Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir. India blamed Pakistan for the attack and immediately proceeded to downgrade its diplomatic ties with its neighbor and suspend the Indus Water Treaty between the two countries.
The Pakistani government denied any involvement in the Kashmir attack, and Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif said that Pakistan was open to a “neutral” investigation to confirm this claim. But a hunger for vengeance, driven by a public media frenzy, demanded a forceful response from India, which quickly retaliated with its May 7 attack on Pakistan.
“The Indian and Pakistani governments have navigated these situations in the past, so the risk is small. But with nuclear weapons, even a small risk is too large.”
After several days of shelling, missile and drone attacks across the border killed almost 70 civilians and military personnel, on May 10, U.S. President Donald Trump announced that the United States had brokered a “full and immediate ceasefire” between India and Pakistan.
The Pahalgam attack wasn’t the first time Kashmir has been caught between the two nuclear powers — and unless deeper issues are addressed, it won’t be the last.
Kashmir: A ticking time bomb
India and Pakistan have gone to war twice over the contested region of Kashmir, which has been split between the neighbors by a line of control.
Today, the greater Kashmir region is divided between three entities. Pakistan-administered Kashmir, known as Azad Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan, comprises the western portion of Kashmir. India controls the two central Union Territories, Ladakh as well as Jammu and Kashmir. China administers the small easternmost territory known as Aksai Chin.
India and Pakistan’s last major conflict in February 2019 was also a result of the Kashmir issue, after 42 paramilitary personnel were killed in a suicide bombing in the Pulwama district of Indian-administered Kashmir. Back then, India similarly claimed that the attack had been carried out by Pakistan-based armed groups, and that the Pakistani government was responsible for orchestrating the attack. It retaliated with a cross-border airstrike in Balakot, Pakistan; in response, Pakistan launched its own airstrikes toward India.
Since well before India and Pakistan’s partition in 1947, Kashmir has been a hotly contested region. Under the Indian Independence Act’s partition plan, the Muslim-majority region of Kashmir had a choice to either merge with India or Pakistan. In October 1947, the Hindu Dogra ruler Hari Singh asked Indian troops to help conquer Kashmir in return for acceding Kashmir to India. Weeks later, Indian paramilitary forces were led by Hari Singh’s armies, who orchestrated the Jammu Massacre, killing and exiling thousands of Kashmiri Muslims and eliminating the Muslim-majority population of Jammu overnight.
Seeing the Muslims in Jammu (many of whom were their relatives) being massacred, tribal militias from the area now known as Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in Pakistan invaded Kashmir and joined a war against India. After repeated skirmishes between India and Pakistan, a ceasefire was declared in January of 1949. The United Nations established a boundary between the two countries, initially known as the ceasefire line. It was redesignated as the Line of Control under the 1972 Simla Agreement.
The United Nations recommended a plebiscite be held for the people of Kashmir to determine which state they wanted to merge with. However, neither India nor Pakistan were willing to meet the conditions for a vote, making the referendum a distant dream. The Simla Agreement further sidelined the United Nations’ role in mediating the Kashmir dispute and arranging a fair plebiscite, marking a shift toward bilateral negotiations between India and Pakistan as the primary means of resolving the conflict. Ultimately, caught between the two countries’ rivalry, Kashmir never saw the referendum it was promised.
For several years, rebels in Kashmir have waged armed resistance campaigns to demand independence for the region or merge with Pakistan. In turn, India has deployed more than 500,000 soldiers, paramilitary forces and police officers in Indian-administered Kashmir, turning Kashmir into one of the most militarized zones in the world. India routinely blames Pakistan for supporting insurgents in Kashmir, claims that Pakistan denies.
‘Operation Sindoor’ and ‘Operation Bunyan Marsoos’
Following the Pahalgam attack in Kashmir last month, India quickly retaliated with an attack it named Operation Sindoor. The name is an apparent reference to the female survivors of the Pahalgam attack, who were widowed after their husbands were shot by gunmen; sindoor, the Hindu word for vermillion, refers to the red pigment that married women apply on their foreheads.
According to India, it targeted nine sites in Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir on the morning of May 7. The Indian Ministry of Defence said it hit “terrorist infrastructure”, but Pakistan states that mostly civilian areas and mosques were targeted. The missile strikes resulted in the deaths of at least 31 civilians, two of whom were children.
In the following days, tensions between the two countries escalated as India accused Pakistan of sending drones across the border, a charge that Pakistan denied. In response, India conducted its own drone strikes, which penetrated deep into Pakistani territory. This marked the first time in the decades-long rivalry between the two neighbors that Indian strategic strikes are believed to have reached as far as major cities like Karachi and Lahore.
“What is most stunning here is the range of targets chosen by India and where those targets are,” Sushant Singh, a lecturer in South Asian studies at Yale and a consulting editor with The Caravan magazine, explained in an interview with The New Yorker. “These nine targets which India claims to have hit have been chosen not only in Pakistani Kashmir but also in Punjab … the heartland of Pakistan.” But at the same time that Modi’s government chose these targets to present a strongman image and deter future militancy, Singh notes, India has also made an effort to highlight the “non-escalatory” nature of its retaliatory strikes.
On May 10, Pakistan launched its own military operation, “Bunyan Marsoos” — an Arabic term borrowed from the Quran which means “a structure made of lead” — to retaliate against India’s aggression.
The Pakistani Army’s media wing stated that 40 civilians were killed in the latest airstrikes and shelling by India. These statistics included seven women and 15 children. India has yet to release an official number of casualties which emerged from its hostile exchange with Pakistan.
A fragile ceasefire
On May 10, a truce was announced, puting an end to the crossfire. Despite complaints from both countries accusing the other of violations, the ceasefire remains intact. As of May 16, diplomatic dialogue between the two nations has led to repeated extensions of the ceasefire, the most recent holding until May 18.
“I will work with you, both to see if, after a ‘thousand years,’ a solution can be arrived at concerning Kashmir,” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform, after announcing a ceasefire between India and Pakistan that he claimed his administration had facilitated.
While a ceasefire might have been brokered, India and Pakistan still have many unresolved issues before a lasting peace is reached. Just hours after the announcement, both India and Pakistan accused one another of violating the ceasefire agreement.
Residents of Srinagar and Indian-administered Kashmir reported hearing explosions and seeing flashes in the sky. Villagers across the line of control also continued to report cross-border shelling even after the ceasefire was announced. While Indians and Pakistanis celebrate their escape from war, many Kashmiris roam in fear at being collateral for India and Pakistan’s wars.
If Modi perceives his hold on Kashmir to be threatened further, it will almost certainly result in a response that would only increase the suppression of Kashmiris.
On May 12, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi delivered a televised address to the nation and said that India has only “paused” its military action against Pakistan. “If another terrorist attack against India is carried out, a strong response will be given,” he said, offering a very different picture from Trump’s claims of a “full and immediate” peace.
In the same address, Modi also alluded to the Indus Water Treaty, which he had recently suspended in retaliation for the Pahalgam attacks, stating that “blood and water cannot flow together.” India’s continued suspension of the treaty makes clear that hostilities between the two nuclear powers remain rife and all has not been forgiven.
Modi did not credit the Trump administration for mediating any diplomatic dialogue. Rather, his words reasserted India’s age-old position — echoed by the Simla Agreement — that the Kashmir issue was to remain a bilateral one between India and Pakistan, and no outside actors were going to settle this conflict for them. As former Pentagon official and Stimson Center fellow Christopher Clary told Al Jazeera, “India has consistently sought to avoid third-party involvement in the Kashmir dispute even as it has occasionally welcomed third-party help in crisis management.”
After Pakistan’s suspension of the longstanding Simla Agreement, it is very likely that the long-simmering Kashmir issue is close to blowing up. Previously, India relied on this agreement to confine all Kashmir-related disputes to strictly bilateral discussions.
But the U.S’s apparent involvement in the recent ceasefire poses a threat to both countries’ national projects: the much-coveted territory of Kashmir could slip out of India and Pakistan’s hands due to external involvement.
“Hindutva ideology, which Modi subscribes to, sees Kashmir as a land rather than a people,” Singh, the Yale lecturer, told The New Yorker. “Whereas, fundamentally, what I am arguing is that Kashmir is about the people more than the land. We should try and win over the Kashmiris, and not just look at how we can control the land.”
Kashmir is already one of the world’s most militarized regions, constantly caught in the crossfire of the countries which administer it. In the wake of the Pahalgam attack, Indian authorities carried out a sweeping crackdown in Indian-administered Kashmir, detaining more than 2,000 people under counterterrorism laws. The legislation, which has drawn criticism from human rights groups for its broad scope, was also used to justify a series of home demolitions targeting individuals alleged to have links to rebels.
If Modi perceives his hold on Kashmir to be threatened further, it will almost certainly result in a response that would only increase the suppression of Kashmiris.
