Analysts have anticipated a new clash between India and Pakistan since terrorists attacked tourists picnicking near the town of Pahalgam in Indian Kashmir on April 22. In that attack, one of the worst on Indian civilians in decades, 26 people were killed, all but one of them Hindu tourists.
The Pakistani government denied any involvement, and more generally insists that it does not support militants in Kashmir. But India quickly accused it of playing a role and has now claimed that it had evidence to support its claims, though that is yet to be produced.
Here’s what else you need to know.
What are the origins of the conflict?
In 1947, the partition of British India led to the creation of Pakistan as a predominantly Muslim state, and India as a predominantly Hindu one. But the Hindu ruler of the “princely state” of Kashmir acceded to India, despite the Muslim majority in the region. After Pakistan sought to take the territory by force, a border was established in 1949 that split Kashmir in two. It is now one of the most heavily militarised borders in the world.
As Peter Beaumont set out in this explainer last month, armed insurgents in Indian Kashmir have resisted Delhi for decades, and many Muslim Kashmiris support their goal of uniting the territory under Pakistani rule, or as an independent state. India and Pakistan have gone to war twice over the territory, most recently in 1999. Pakistan has since acknowledged that it provided training and support to militants operating in Kashmir in the ’90s, but banned two major groups, Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad, in 2002.
A peace process was derailed by the terrorist attacks in Mumbai that killed 166 people in 2008, which were attributed to Lashkar-e-Taiba. Mirza Waheed’s superb 2016 long read reports on a ruthless crackdown on protesters in Indian Kashmir ordered by prime minister Narendra Modi that year.
Since 2019, tensions have grown after Modi revoked the region’s special status, which has granted it limited autonomy since 1949 – a longstanding goal of his Hindu nationalist movement. Direct administration from Delhi came with a massive security presence, communications to the outside world being cut off, the suspension of elections, and the imprisonment of thousands of political actors and human rights activists. The targeted killing of Hindus by militants has increased in the years since.
Why are tensions escalating now?
The attack last month was deeply shocking, partly because civilians have rarely been targeted by militants in recent years. Survivors said that many of the victims were asked about their religion before they were shot in the head. One described her father being asked to recite an Islamic verse and being killed when he could not do so. That has created significant internal pressure in India for a substantial response, as Hannah Ellis-Petersen and Aakash Hassan report in this piece. In Pakistan, meanwhile, there is anger at being blamed for an attack which the government insists it did not direct.
India has already suspended the Indus water treaty, which had survived for 65 years despite the three wars between the two sides in that time, and governs the flow of water from the Indus that feeds 80% of Pakistani’s irrigated agriculture. It says that it will remain suspended until Pakistan “credibly and irrevocably abjures its support for cross-border terrorism”. (Shah Meer Baloch wrote an excellent piece explaining the dismay at that decision among Pakistani farmers last week.)
Pakistan, which is in the depths of an economic crisis, sought to ward off military retaliation by promising a full investigation. But, South Asia analyst Michael Kugelman wrote for Time before the Indian strikes, the civilian and military leadership in Islamabad is unpopular. “An attack would give Islamabad an additional incentive to strike back, and rally citizens around the flag,” he wrote.
What form did the Indian response take?
India said that it had struck nine sites in Pakistan and Pakistani Kashmir. Pakistan said that six places were hit. Eyewitness accounts suggested that some of the targets were in places associated with militant organisations, including Lashkar-e-Taiba. Bu the Pakistani authorities said that they were civilian areas. The attack last month had initially been claimed by a little known insurgent group, the Kashmir Resistance Front, although that claim was later withdrawn; India believes the group to be a proxy for Lashkar-e-Taiba.
Kugelman also noted that the response was on a much larger scale than in 2019. “They’re already higher up the escalatory ladder than any time in ’19 crisis,” he wrote on X. Part of the reason many observers take that view is that the attacks reached beyond the disputed Kashmiri region controlled by Pakistan this time, hitting targets in Punjab.
How did Pakistan react?
In the aftermath of the attack, Pakistan stepped up shelling across the line of control that separates the two sides. India claimed that the firing was indiscriminate, and at least seven people were reported to have died. (Aakash Hassan has a report from Kashmir on the impact of the shelling.) Meanwhile, Pakistan’s Defence Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif declared that five “enemy aircraft” had been shot down. An Indian security source told AFP that three fighter jets had crashed on home territory without giving a cause, while a photographer for the agency saw wreckage of a jet (pictured above) in Indian Kashmir.
But there appears to have been no incursion of Pakistani airspace by Indian planes, and claims that several were shot down should be treated with caution. As the former head of South Asia for Amnesty International Omar Waraich notes, misinformation is rife: “There’s an image of a crashed plane from 2021 and both Indian and Pakistani journalists are using it to claim their airforces just shot it down on different sides the border,” he wrote on X.
How serious is the risk of full-scale war?
Most analysts see the confrontation as the most serious in recent years, with warnings that there are political incentives on both sides to take an uncompromising stance. Another factor is the response of China and the United States, who back Pakistan and India respectively. Donald Trump appeared uninterested in the conflict at the White House last night: “I guess people knew something was going to happen based on the past,” he said sagely. “They’ve been fighting for many, many decades and centuries, actually, if you really think about it … I just hope it ends quickly.”.
That is not to say that a war is inevitable, or the most likely outcome. The presence of nuclear weapons on both sides, while raising the stakes of an all-out confrontation significantly, also acts as a deterrent. And while claims from either side insisting that it has only taken a measured response should be viewed with caution, India’s language – and its observation that it has struck “known terror camps,” not military or civilian targets – appears to be an attempt to define its attack as a conclusion to the exchange rather than the beginning of a new phase. In this piece, the Economist notes that while the strikes on Punjab are escalatory, “everything else appears to have been calibrated to minimise the risk of full-scale war”.
If Pakistan responds further, as comments from government ministers imply is likely, the question is whether it steers clear of targets that could result in a significant civilian death toll. That appears to be the most likely outcome, whatever the rhetorical temperature. But such confrontations always carry a risk beyond the strategic intentions of the protagonists: a miscalculation from either side which begins a spiral towards all-out war.
