Why This India-Pakistan Conflict Is Different
The conflict between India and Pakistan has just escalated faster than at any previous point since they both acquired nuclear weapons at the end of the 20th century. That may be because the two countries’ regimes have never been more alike.
In the past, India’s commitment to secularism and democracy stood in sharp contrast to Pakistan’s religious orientation and military dictatorship. Now, despite their avowed hostility, the governments have become mirror images of each other—defined by democratic repression and restive borderlands, and animated by notions of religious supremacy. They are fueling each other’s grievances and extremism.
On April 17, Asim Munir, Pakistan’s army chief, gave a belligerent speech in Islamabad, offering his version of Pakistan’s founding myth and asserting that “we are different from the Hindus in every possible way.” He described Kashmir as Pakistan’s “jugular vein” and vowed that the country would “never abandon Kashmiris in their heroic struggle against Indian occupation.”
Five days later, on April 22, a group of yet-to-be-identified militants attacked tourists in Pahalgam, in the Indian-administered section of Kashmir. Baisaran Valley, a picturesque meadow accessible only by foot and animal transport, teemed with roughly 2,000 visitors at the time. The militants asked the tourists to identify themselves by faith or to recite the kalma, a form of Islamic prayer. In this way, they identified the Hindu men among the crowd. Then they killed 26 people, most of them with a shot to the head, execution-style. Except for a lone Kashmiri victim who had confronted the militants, all of the deceased were Hindu.
Within India, the Pahalgam killings met with shock and rage across the political spectrum. They also raised questions—about security lapses, and about the country’s flawed Kashmir policy under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who revoked the territory’s autonomy in 2019. But probably not coincidentally, an orchestrated drumbeat of hypernationalism soon drowned out those concerns, as pro-government networks and broadsheets, together with an organized scrum of Hindu-nationalist accounts on social media, led a chorus for military retaliation.
[Tom Nichols: A crisis is no time for amateurs]
That India would respond militarily appeared inevitable. Two days after the militant attack, Modi gave a speech at an election rally during which he abruptly switched to English, as though to address a global audience: “I want to say to the whole world that India will identify, trace, and punish every terrorist and their backers. We will pursue them to the ends of the Earth.”
India and Pakistan have fought three wars and numerous smaller skirmishes over the disputed region of Kashmir since emerging from British colonial rule in 1947. During his decade in power, Modi has pursued a doctrine of punitive deterrence, which in practice means that no attack goes unanswered. In 2019, a terror attack in Kashmir resulted in the death of several dozen paramilitary officers. Less than two weeks later, India launched an air strike deep inside Pakistani territory, leading to an air battle that fell short of full-scale war. That 2019 Indian strike hit Balakot, in Pakistan’s Khyber-Pakhtuntwa province—an early indication of Modi’s willingness to expand the theater of military action beyond Kashmir.
Shortly after midnight yesterday, the Indian military went still further. It struck nine locations across Pakistan and the Pakistani-administered section of Kashmir, hitting targets in Punjab province, the heartland of Pakistani military and political power—home to roughly half of Pakistan’s population. Lahore, the country’s second-largest city, lies in that province, as does Rawalpindi, the headquarters of Pakistan’s politically powerful military.
Pakistan has chosen to wage an asymmetrical struggle with India since at least 1971. That year, it lost a war with India that led to its eastern wing becoming the independent nation of Bangladesh. In the 1980s, Pakistan assisted Islamist fighters, under the tutelage of the CIA, in their drive to expel the Soviets from Afghanistan. By the end of that decade, the Soviets had been defeated, and the jihadist movement turned toward Kashmir, where they were able to exploit widespread disaffection with Indian rule. To the extent that strategic thinking guides attacks such as the one on Pahalgam, the idea is to fuel religious discord in India, in the hope that India’s Hindu majority will turn against its Muslim minority. An India weakened by internal strife will be vulnerable to secessionist movements and impeded in its rise as a global power.
The Pakistani establishment has an unwitting ally in the Hindu right. Modi’s 10 years in power have emboldened and strengthened a Hindu-nationalist movement whose proponents demonize Muslims both in India, which has a large Muslim minority, and in Pakistan. Hindu-nationalist rhetoric often deliberately conflates the two. The Pahalgam attack was followed by violent assaults on Muslims all across India. The Indian government, for its part, underscored religious divisions by naming its military action Operation Sindoor, after a traditional marker of married Hindu women. As heavy fighting broke out across the Line of Control, the Pakistani military targeted a Sikh temple in Indian-administered Kashmir in an attack that led to at least 10 civilian deaths.
[From the November 1960 Issue: India and Pakistan]
India and Pakistan came precariously close to nuclear war during their previous standoff in 2019. At that time, a late intervention by U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo helped defuse tensions. But the current crisis exceeds that one in both scope and scale. The region is gripped by a foreboding not felt in generations, as Indian military strikes spark pandemonium across Pakistani cities. Mumbai and New Delhi plunged into darkness during trial blackouts yesterday.
Today, the Indian government said that it had struck air-defense installations in several Pakistani cities, including Lahore, in response to Pakistani attempts to target military facilities overnight in northern and western India. Pakistan said it had shot down 29 Indian drones and called the attack “a serious provocation.”
In the evening, Pakistani missiles and drones attacked military stations in three locations across northern India and Indian-administered Kashmir. Indian networks and news websites reported retaliatory strikes in Lahore and Islamabad, among other Pakistani cities. Many media outlets have begun describing the hostilities as a war. And U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has spoken with Indian External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar and the Pakistani prime minister, urging de-escalation and the resumption of dialogue between the two nations.
For the moment, however, India and Pakistan seem to be vying for escalation dominance—and veering toward catastrophe—without an off-ramp in sight.
