‘The escalation risks are real': Why India and Pakistan are fighting over Kashmir

Sydney Morning Herald

07-05-2025

Siddiq Wahid remembers waking up in his home on the morning of August 5, 2019 and knowing that something wasn't right. 'It was an ominous silence,' he recalls. 'I was aware that something was going to happen.' So he got out of bed, dressed and went to take a look around.
There wasn't a soul in sight, but as he came to a little town square, he saw up ahead a dozen or so troops lingering menacingly. 'I couldn't tell if it was army, paramilitary, whatever,' he says, so he quickly made his way back home. There, he discovered his phone wouldn't work, and there was no internet. It had all been shut down. He didn't have a TV, but if he had, that would have been blocked as well. 'We couldn't call anybody,' he says today. 'We couldn't do anything.'
So began one of the most extraordinary periods in the modern history of Kashmir, a region in the shadow of the Himalayas controlled by three nuclear-armed states: India to the south, China to the east and Pakistan to the west. Both India and Pakistan claim the entire territory as theirs, their troops facing off across an informal border called the 'Line of Control' (more on that later). It is one of the world's most militarised regions, with hundreds of thousands of troops stationed on both sides of the line.
Wahid, an expert in Himalayan studies, was at his home in Srinagar in Indian-controlled Kashmir. For the next year-and-a-half, the city and surrounding towns endured a series of lockdowns far more severe than those imposed by governments to combat the spread of COVID. Travel was banned. Journalists were barred. Communications were blocked. Thousands of Kashmiri people were detained, even 'disappeared', under draconian anti-terrorist laws. And now they fear a similar crackdown is under way as India responds to a terrorist massacre of 26 tourists last month.
In its search for those responsible for the attack, India has flooded Kashmiri towns with troops and police, blown up homes and detained thousands. It has accused Pakistan of aiding the militants, and this week launched missile attacks against multiple Pakistani targets, including inside Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, in what it calls Operation Sindoor. Pakistan denies any responsibility for the terror attack. It has pledged to respond to India's strikes.
Why is this part of the world so fraught? Could India and Pakistan's friction escalate into a nuclear exchange? What will become of Kashmir?
What just happened?
On April 22, a small group of gunmen suddenly appeared among the throng of tourists visiting the Baisaran Valley, a popular attraction east of Srinagar, in Indian-controlled Kashmir, known as 'Little Switzerland' for its soaring peaks and wooded hillsides. They massacred 26 people and wounded some 17 others. The dead were mostly Indian Hindu men visiting the area. A survivor, on her honeymoon, told the Associated Press the men asked her and her husband about their religion. When her husband replied that they were Hindu, he was shot in the head.
A group called the Resistance Front later took responsibility, which has been reported as a proxy name for a Pakistan-based terror group called Lashkar-e-Taiba, although with the perpetrators still at large, exactly who is responsible remains unresolved. India responded with a massive manhunt. It also took the unprecedented step of threatening to cut off water supplies to Pakistan from the Indus River system, suspending a treaty that had been observed since 1960 – a move it said would endure until 'Pakistan credibly and irrevocably abjures its support for cross-border terrorism'.
How hundreds of millions of litres of water might be diverted is as yet unknown, but the threat served to increase friction with Pakistan, which said that any attempt to stop or divert the flow of water would be considered an act of war. 'The taps are not going to run dry immediately,' says Sudhir Selvaraj, a political scientist at the University of Bradford. 'But in the long run, that could have a significant impact for Pakistan.' In response, Pakistan suspended its participation in the Shimla Agreement, a pact signed in 1972 by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the president of Pakistan, and Indira Gandhi, the prime minister of India, to aid co-operation and understanding in the region – a significant symbolic act.
On Wednesday, matters escalated further when Indian warplanes struck several Pakistani sites. In a statement, the Indian government said that no Pakistani military facilities had been hit, and the raids had been 'focused, measured, and non-escalatory in nature' – apparently targeting militant strongholds. It said evidence pointed towards 'the clear involvement of Pakistan-based terrorists'. The Pakistani government said the strikes would not go unanswered, pledging that 'the temporary pleasure of India will be replaced by enduring grief'. It claimed to have shot down five Indian jets.
Why is Kashmir contested?
The situation is complicated by competing and as-yet unresolvable claims to the region. Pakistan says it is the rightful owner of the whole of Kashmir, including the Indian-administered territories; India lays claim to those parts administered by Pakistan. China, meanwhile, controls a mountainous and barely habitable sliver on the eastern border, ostensibly for strategic reasons. Then there are those Kashmiri who want independence from both India and Pakistan.
'From a contemporary point of view, Kashmir is where Indian, Pakistani and Chinese interests interact and, more often than not, collide,' says Indian author and policy researcher Abhijnan Rej. 'Kashmir has traditionally been a counter-insurgency as well as a counter-terrorism challenge, an internal security issue for India as much as an external military one.' He suggests there are a small number of highly trained terrorists operating with modest local support whose aim is to 'inject sectarian fuel into a dying flame'. That was fuelled in 2019, when India revoked the 'protected status' that gave its parts of Kashmir limited autonomy, changing them into what's called 'union territories', controlled directly from New Delhi (technically by revoking Article 370 of the Indian constitution, a controversial move that was nevertheless upheld by India's Supreme Court).
In Jammu and Kashmir, in particular, this was seen as a blatant attempt by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a hawkish Indian nationalist, to homologate its Muslim-majority people and culture into Hindu-majority India.
'In addition to making it less powerful politically, it also allowed for a change in demographics,' says Sudhir Selvaraj, as the change for the first time let Indians from the rest of India buy land in Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir.
To head off any possible separatist uprising, Modi ordered the brutal clampdown on travel, internet and dissent. Siddiq Wahid, an academic with the Shiv Nadar University in New Delhi, remembers a friend riding a bicycle over to his house 'to come and tell me to keep my mouth shut'.
Historically, Pakistan has sponsored militants in Kashmir, Michael Kugelman, a South-East Asia analyst, tells us from Washington. 'But in recent years, groups have emerged that are largely indigenous, depending heavily on local fighters and resources. That's not to say that there can't be cases of external backing for local militants. This has been a reality, too. We're a long way from past decades, when Pakistan would directly dispatch jihadists into Kashmir. But the nexus between indigenous militants in Kashmir and the Pakistani security establishment remains murky.'
How did we get here?
When we say Kashmir, we mean the entire mountainous region bordered by China (to the north and east), India (to the south), Pakistan (to the west) and Afghanistan (in the northwest). It is a land of lush valleys, soaring peaks, Himalayan foothills and massive glaciers. Politically, however, Kashmir is divided into several territories with varying degrees of autonomy. To the north-west, the regions of Azad Jammu Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan are administered by Pakistan; India controls Jammu and Kashmir in the south and the territory of Ladakh in the east; China controls a region further east called Aksai Chin.
This is a relatively recent development. Until 1947, the wider Kashmir area was a 'princely state' ruled by a maharaja (prince) under the auspices of colonial Britain. That all changed after 1947 when the British withdrew from India. Fearing religious conflict across the subcontinent once it had departed, Britain drew up a plan to divide India into two new nations along religious lines, a plan known as Partition. It was a time of great upheaval, according to Delhi's Partition Museum, 'a nightmare for the thousands of families who suddenly found themselves uprooted in a land they had inhabited for generations. Law and order broke down, and there were large-scale massacres and looting as families left their homeland to trudge across the new, arbitrarily drawn borders.' The Hindus would remain mostly in the south – in what we know as India today – while two Muslim-majority territories in the north-west and south-east were to become the new nation of Pakistan, reportedly an acronym derived from Punjab, Afghanistan, Kashmir, Sindh, Tukharistan and Baluchistan.
The status of Kashmir, stuck between Pakistan and India, was ambiguous. While majority Muslim, its maharaja, Hari Singh, did not particularly want to become part of Pakistan. So as part of the negotiations over Partition, India and Pakistan initially appeared to agree that Kashmir's maharaja could take his time and decide whether he wanted to become part of either of the two nations, or remain largely independent.
Soon, however, armed tribesmen from Pakistan began insurgencies into Kashmir. Under pressure, the maharaja decided to strike a deal to accede to India, hoping this would provide temporary military protection and that once things settled down, Kashmir would be able to hold a referendum to decide its own future. Says Rej: 'The maharaja understood that the cost of defence against the Pakistan-backed invasion would be accession to India, or utter destruction of his kingdom.'
Some believed, and still do to this day, that the maharaja did not have the authority to accede unilaterally without the support of his people. 'The legality of the whole thing is contested,' says Sudhir Selvaraj. 'To the best of my recollection, the king was not immediately clear of which country they would support, and therefore got caught in the mess between both of those. The legality is still in question because there was a question of the ascension document signed to India that is constantly brought into question.'
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Pakistan certainly saw accession as an act of aggression against its interests and formally invaded north-west Kashmir; India sent in troops to push them back. Skirmishes continued for over a year until the United Nations successfully intervened and, in January 1949, the warring nations agreed to a ceasefire, separated by an unofficial border that came to be known as the Line of Control. To the east, meanwhile, another ersatz border called the Line of Total Control separates Indian-held Kashmir from a portion of the region that was later claimed by China, comprising around 18 per cent of the Kashmir region, according to Siddiq Wahid.
Many diplomatic efforts have been attempted to bring a resolution to this now 78-year dispute, including one with an Australian flavour. In 1950, the High Court judge Owen Dixon, widely regarded as one of our finest legal minds, travelled to the Pakistani city of Karachi, India's New Delhi and Kashmir for several weeks as an envoy to the UN in an attempt to permanently end hostilities and resolve the dispute.
Dixon roamed widely, he later reported back, gaining a first-hand understanding of the geography of the ceasefire line and the 'general disposition of the armed forces on either side'. He met the prime ministers of both nations (India's Jawaharlal Nehru and Pakistan's Liaquat Ali Khan) and came up with a proposal he hoped would settle their differences. His so-called 'Dixon Plan' would grant the region of Ladakh to India and the northern areas and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir to Pakistan. It split the region of Jammu between the two and called for a plebiscite in the Kashmir Valley to decide its fate.
He seemed to make progress, reporting that both sides had agreed to a plebiscite. What they were not able to agree on, however, were any of the preliminary measures that would eventually allow it to take place, such as the timing of troop withdrawals, neither side wanting to go first. 'The situation as I found it presented strange features,' he wrote. 'I have found it impossible to bring about any agreement upon the substantive dispute.' Nor would anybody else in the years to follow.
What could happen next?
'Let's be clear,' says Michael Kugelman. 'This is an extremely serious crisis, with high risks of escalation. The terrorist attack that triggered the crisis was unusually egregious.' It came somewhat out of the blue, he says, at least in the context of the usual simmering tensions. 'India-Pakistan relations had actually been relatively calm, what I'd call a cold peace, in the years before this crisis,' he says. 'A border truce signed in 2021 had kept tensions under wraps. And so that makes this sudden and serious flare-up all the more significant.'
Meanwhile, says Abhijnan Rej, 'Public anger across the country is palpable. Frankly, there is no question of letting this slide as far as India is concerned.' India and Pakistan have now fought three of their four wars over the region, the last in 1999, though skirmishes and terror attacks have regularly threatened to escalate further. In February 2019, some 40 paramilitary troops were killed in Indian-administered Kashmir in a suicide car bombing that was claimed by a Pakistan-based terrorist group. India responded by sending warplanes into Pakistani territory on bombing raids, where one of its pilots, Abhinandan Varthaman, was shot down and captured. He was later returned safely.
Shots are not uncommon across the Line of Control, with one region particularly fraught. The Siachen Glacier is a desolate, unoccupied wilderness wedged between Pakistan- and Indian-controlled areas where India maintains a force of some 5000 troops, who are supplied by helicopter and have to endure subzero temperatures year-round, high wind speeds and the threats posed by avalanches and unseen crevasses.
As with any dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, the world takes notice for its potential to lead to a nuclear exchange, with both nations estimated to have 170 -180 nuclear warheads each – 'one of the most concerning nuclear hotspots on the planet', according to a 2024 report in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Don't be surprised if the prospect of nuclear war is threatened, says Rej. 'Whenever Pakistan is cornered by India after a major terrorist attack leading to a crisis, Islamabad inevitably starts dropping unsubtle hints about Pakistan's nuclear capabilities. This is a tactic that has been repeated so often as to become a little shopworn by now.'
Wahid agrees, at least to some extent. 'New Delhi and Islamabad are not novices when it comes to sabre-rattling and have done so before, giving us in South Asia several minor heart attacks in the last two-and-a-half decades,' he says. 'The problem is that several minor heart attacks could end up in a major one that will kill the patient. That is my fear.'
Other analysts suggest that the presence of nuclear weapons, while scary, has acted as a deterrent to all-out war in the past and will do so again. 'Full-scale war is unlikely,' says Abdullah Yusuf, a specialist in UN peacekeeping and Middle East politics at the University of Dundee. 'Nuclear weapons transform states into exceedingly cautious actors, not because they are wiser but because the cost of a mistake is annihilation. India and Pakistan both know this, which is why even amid fiery rhetoric, their actions remain measured.'
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Beijing, meanwhile, has no interest in a subcontinental war, suggests Kugelman, with commercial interests in Pakistan and a desire to increase co-operation with India. 'This suggests it may be a useful potential mediator.'
Fundamentally, though, conflict over Kashmir's future can't just blow over, says Yusuf. 'Make no mistake. For Washington and Beijing, Kashmir is not a people's tragedy. It is a pawn in their larger geopolitical chessboard,' he says. 'The real issue, Kashmir's denied right to self-determination, remains unaddressed. Violence will keep flaring because repression has replaced reconciliation. Too often, Kashmir is spoken about, not listened to. Global commentary reduces a nation's unfinished decolonisation to a geopolitical chess move, a 'dispute' to be managed between India and Pakistan, a 'flashpoint' to be contained for the comfort of Washington and Beijing.'