Kapil Komireddi is the author of Malevolent Republic: A Short History of the New India. He is based in Hyderabad, India.
The latest ceasefire between India and Pakistan has held for about a week. Pakistan has “welcomed the role” of Donald Trump in allegedly mediating the conflict; India maintains that the U.S. was not a factor, and that it halted hostilities in response to entreaties from Pakistan.
But the tragic truth is this: The brief conflict, which brought two nuclear-armed powers to the brink of all-out war, has not been resolved, and the causes that gave rise to it have not been eliminated.
This outbreak began with the savage murder of Indian tourists in the Pahalgam valley in Kashmir on April 22. Masked terrorists cornered vacationers, verified their religion, and selected non-Muslims for slaughter. Twenty-six men – Hindu and Christian, many of them newlyweds – were shot at close range in front of their wives, who were spared to carry the killers’ “message.” The Resistance Front, a terror group that New Delhi says is affiliated with the Pakistani jihadist outfit Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), initially claimed responsibility for the atrocity.
Despite Islamabad’s claims to the contrary, the LeT is believed to be part of the vast terror network erected by Pakistan’s military-intelligence cabal. Unable to best India in conventional war, Islamabad has sponsored an ensemble of armed proxies to bleed India, in much the same way that the Pakistan-supervised mujahedeen overcame the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
Pakistan has waged multiple wars for Kashmir, which are a product of the identity crisis that has paralyzed the country since its birth. Partitioned from India as a homeland for the subcontinent’s Muslims in 1947, the rationale behind Pakistan’s foundation – that Muslims and Hindus could not co-exist in one nation – was immediately invalidated when India refused to become a Hindu state and embraced a secular constitution. As long as Kashmir, a Muslim-majority region, remains part of a constitutionally secular Indian union, Islamic Pakistan’s sense of itself as the authentic home of India’s Muslims cannot be vindicated.
Pakistan‘s defeats in previous efforts to wrest the region from India led Islamabad to change its approach. I have witnessed its coziness with terrorist organizations firsthand: A year after the LeT butchered its way through Mumbai, in 2008, killing 166 people, I interviewed one of its leaders in Lahore, the Pakistani city where the group is headquartered. Under intense international pressure – and desperate to ward off an Indian military response – Pakistan had placed its chief, Hafiz Saeed, on trial. But a deputy of Mr. Saeed’s laughed when I mentioned the case. Three weeks later, Mr. Saeed was freed.
But Pakistan’s fixation with Kashmir has not only shed Indian blood – it has also corrupted and crippled Pakistan’s own potential. Its armed forces, citing an existential threat from “Hindu India,” have long appropriated a major portion of the country’s coffers, and they have ousted virtually every civilian government in Pakistan’s history before its term ended.
Just days before the recent attack in Kashmir, Pakistan’s military chief, Asim Munir, renewed the pledge to claim the region and exhorted the country’s lawmakers to remind the young that Muslims “are different from the Hindus in every possible aspect of life.” This rhetoric should be decried as bigoted; yet in Pakistan, it is the foundational basis of the state, echoing the ideology of its founder MA Jinnah.
For decades, India absorbed Pakistan’s deadly provocations in order not to become distracted from its own developmental goals. India’s economy is now 11 times the size of Pakistan’s and it has lifted 170 million people out of extreme poverty over the past decade. Yet India’s capacity to bear the human cost of Pakistan’s dysfunction was never going to be limitless. New Delhi’s attitude changed once Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist who campaigned on a promise to retaliate against terror, became Prime Minister in 2014. Still, Mr. Modi initially poured significant political capital into pursuing peace with Pakistan. The upshot of these overtures? Two major terrorist attacks in 2016.
Boxed in by his own pledge to act, Mr. Modi ordered military strikes. But terrorist attacks continued – in 2019 and then this April – and India’s responses have grown bigger and bolder. On May 7, Indian missiles destroyed nine sites that, according to New Delhi, housed “terrorist infrastructure.” When Pakistani army officials, seen mourning at the funerals of men designated as terrorists by the United Nations, escalated the conflict, India struck multiple military installations deep inside the country, including the Nur Khan air base about 25 kilometres from Pakistan’s military headquarters. India has suffered losses, too – including at least two fighter jets – and they are more than embarrassing. They are dangerous, because they risk deluding Pakistan’s military into the belief that it can sustain a war with India.
There are two obvious ways out of what could still become a calamitous full-blown war. One is that India agrees to a second Partition in the name of religion and relinquishes Kashmir; the other is for Pakistan to accept the finality of the first Partition and relinquishes terror. Neither is realistic. So India, a country with so much at stake, is left with the painful option of accepting that terrorism is the geographic curse of living next to Pakistan – a curse it might only be able to mitigate, not eliminate.