Religion and Pakistan's relations with India

Express Tribune

25-05-2025

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Religion became a major factor in the recent military encounter between India and Pakistan. Analysts said that the popular mood in Pakistan was a key factor as the government weighed whether and where to retaliate against its larger, more powerful rival when India used its air force to launch attacks on Pakistan in early May.
Many Pakistanis applauded the military's response to the Indian strikes. Some took to the streets to applaud actions against a country that was poorly treating its large Muslim minority. In Islamabad, authorities urged citizens to join the civil defence brigades. The United States and China called for a diplomatic solution, but it was unclear who would lead those efforts.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke with both Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Jaishankar, the Indian foreign minister. "At this moment in time, there is one thing that has to stop which is a back-and-forth and a continuation, and that is what we are focused on right now," State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said in a news briefing on May 8.
Other countries with interest in keeping peace in South Asia also got involved with both India and Pakistan as the two were drifting towards a military confrontation. Jaishankar was approached by Adel al-Jubeir, Saudi Arabia's minister of state for foreign affairs, for an unannounced visit to Delhi. He also met with the Iranian foreign minister, Syed Abbas Aragchi.
The Modi government in India was using all the means at its disposal to paint a positive picture of its situation with respect to Pakistan. Modi sought to define the conflict in religious terms. It named the operation against Pakistan as Sindoor, the vermillion that adorns Hindu brides and a likely reference to Hindu women grieving over the loss of their husbands in the killings by Muslim fighters in the Indian occupied part of Kashmir who had appeared from the dense forests in the area.
Pravin Sawhney, the editor of an Indian defence magazine and a former army official, said he was troubled by the religious connotation of the name of the operation which local media said was chosen by Narendra Modi himself. He said that politicising India's secular military would be harmful to unit cohesion. "A political message was being sent to the people of India, that Hindus were killed in Kashmir, so we have to take revenge."
The Hindu, an Indian newspaper based in the country's more secular south, deleted a social media post on May 7 that said that three Indian jets had been downed because there was no "on record official information", fueling concerns among journalists that Modi's administration might intensify its clampdown on the media.
The Global Government Affairs team on X said that it had received orders from the Indian government to block more than 8,000 accounts in the country. "To comply with the orders, we will hold the specified accounts in India alone," the post from X read but "we disagree with the Indian government's demands," characterising them "as contrary to the fundamental right of free speech." Across Kashmir - where Indian and Pakistani forces continued to exchange artillery shells across the contested border - people braced for long nights.
There was considerable frustration among people on the Indian side of the Line of Control (LoC), the name the border in Kashmir was given after an earlier confrontation. A story by its correspondents Anupreeta Das and Salman Masood in The New York Times on May 10, that covered the use of aerial drones by the two sides as the weapon of choice, was written following interviews with affected people on ground.
"Speaking on Friday [May 9] morning, residents in both parts of Kashmir said they were exhausted; some said it was the worst shelling they had experienced in nearly three decades. 'We're fed up with running every time the shelling begins,' said Atta Muhammad, 70, a resident of Uri, a town on the Indian side of Kashmir. 'It's better that both countries go for a nuclear war and kill us all. At least that will rid us of this suffering'."
The steps taken by India were most likely to increase resentment on the part of the way the Indian occupying force was treating the local populace. They were destroying the houses that were believed to be the residences of those who were upset about the way the Indian authorities were ruling the part of Kashmir that was under their control. New Delhi was also encouraging Hindus to move into the parts of the state that already had people of their faith in residence. This was the demographic strategy aimed at reducing the proportion of Muslims in the population.
Drones manufactured at home by the two countries were a relatively new weapon in their arsenal. Early on May 10, a day after India said that Pakistan had sent waves of drones toward Indian airspace, the Pakistani military accused Indian forces of launching air-to surface missiles that targeted at least three air bases across Pakistan. Among them was a key installation near the capital Islamabad.
The base is named after Air Marshal Nur Khan who had occupied several high positions in the Pakistani government. It is located on the main road that connected the cities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi. On May 9, Indian defence officials said Pakistan's military had attempted aerial intrusions in 36 locations with 300 to 400 drones to test India's air-defence system.
Both India and Pakistan have been developing their respective drone-building industries in recent years, and both import drones from foreign allies - Pakistan from China, for instance - but neither country appears to have any that can carry nuclear warheads, according to James Patton Rogers, a drone expert at Cornell University. And while he calls the conflict "incredibly worrying", he also notes that drones generally are used as the lowest possible escalatory step in a conflict, usually to pressure and test the opponent's air defences.
According to one expert, "Although many countries now have drones in their arsenals, this is the first time the unmanned aerial vehicles were used by the two countries against each other." The use of drone warfare may have been inevitable, but it could reshape the way the world views hostilities between India and Pakistan, much as it did after the two countries became nuclear powers in the 1990s.