A paramilitary trooper stands guard in front of a mural, on August 22, 2019, in Srinagar, the summer capital of Indian-administered Kashmir, India. Seventy-five years after the British split India and Pakistan, both countries are fighting for control over the Jammu and Kashmir provinces.
Photo: Yawar Nazir/ Getty Images
Tension remains high between India and Pakistan, which both mark 75 years of independence this month.
This week, the Altamar team of Peter Schechter and Muni Jensen talk to Shamila Chaudhary, the former director for Pakistan and Afghanistan on the National Security Council and nonresident senior fellow at the South Asia Center at the Atlantic Council, to make sense of the tensions between these nuclear-armed neighbors.
In 1947, India and Pakistan split based on religious majorities — Hindu and Muslim. Soon thereafter, the two countries went to war over control of the Jammu and Kashmir provinces, and since then, the conflict has escalated into confrontations on multiple fronts, with global implications. Is this region the world’s third tripwire, after Ukraine and Taiwan?
Kashmir Is the Original Grievance
Chaudhary explains that to understand the roots of their conflict you have to go back to 1947: “The boundaries were largely determined by British bureaucrats and South Asian political elites who saw some advantage in working with the British. Kashmir, which is a Muslim majority region in South Asia, was claimed both by the newly established Indian state and the Pakistani state.
“The nuclear component is what should keep us up at night. And it’s the confrontation over Kashmir that repeatedly brings the two countries to the brink of escalation. It’s a very complicated situation because India believes that authority over Kashmir is an internal matter [while] Pakistan wants to internationalize the issue.”
Over the years, international bodies and countries have attempted to mediate. However, Chaudhary worries that the conflict is not getting enough attention today to keep it from escalating. “The geopolitics of the region have changed. India and the United States are on one side now, and the Pakistani and Chinese are on the other side. So, it’s going to be a lot harder to de-escalate.”
China Is Moving In
This has left a lost generation of youth in the region with no economic future. “Both India and Pakistan have consistently subjugated Kashmiri interests to their own national security agendas. They’ve become heavily militarized, heavily politicized. What’s keeping people down are draconian laws that encourage human rights abuses by security forces. There’s a lot of corruption, and the economy has not been developed. … The opportunity will come once there’s greater autonomy for Kashmiris to decide their own fate, and it still hasn’t happened yet.”
Since Pakistan’s inception, it’s experienced tensions between civilian leaders at a powerful military. It’s not unlike a lot of other countries that went through the postcolonial experience.
China has heavily expanded its infrastructure investment in Pakistan. According to Chaudhary, “The bordering regions between China and Pakistan include militants that are anti the Chinese state, the Uyghurs and this border region of Xinjiang. The Chinese feel that greater involvement in Pakistan connects them more to the Pakistani security establishment, which can be helpful in containing the militant threat on its border.”
US-Pakistan Relations Remain Fraught
The Quad, or the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, is a regional security dialogue between Australia, India, Japan and the United States that attempts to counter China’s influence in the area and create a powerful democratic bloc in an age of rising authoritarianism.
“The Pakistanis are uncomfortable with it because it, again, elevates their main competitor to the global stage. It also excludes Pakistan from a conversation about the Pacific, which it feels like it should very much be part of.”
The recent removal of Prime Minister Imran Khan has thrown Pakistan into yet another political crisis.
“Since Pakistan’s inception, it’s experienced tensions between civilian leaders at a powerful military. It’s not unlike a lot of other countries that went through the postcolonial experience. That being said, I think Imran Khan’s ouster was done legally and democratically, and that shows that Pakistan has this very vibrant, democratic culture and a formal democracy in place, which, of course, has been consumed by these growing … kleptocratic forces, corruption, and dynamic politics and the overbearing military.”
The recent assassination of al-Zawahiri in Pakistan also “puts Pakistan in a very uncomfortable situation because they have a very close relationship with the Taliban. So that U.S.-Pakistan tension will remain unresolved.”
Meanwhile, Chaudhary says that the rising tide of Hindu fundamentalism in India is concerning. “I don’t think that it’s representative of all Indians, of course. But there’s definitely been a shift in the acceptance of fundamentalist ideas and behavior. And that’s coincided with the tenure of Prime Minister Modi. And in fact, he’s consistently consolidated his power around it, which I think is more worrisome. [Prime Minister] Modi views fundamentalist forces as important political stakeholders of his. As long as that is the case, I think we can expect more extremist politics in Indian politics.
“If I’m looking at what is hopeful about both countries, I would say the idea that we can take advantage of the demographic opportunity, the human capital that is so dynamic in the countries. But I get much more pessimistic when I think about the socioeconomic development needs and how the populations have been underserved by their governments.”
An armed conflict in Kashmir has thwarted all attempts to solve it for three quarters of a century.
Kashmir, an 85,806-square-mile valley between the snowcapped Himalaya and Karakoram mountain ranges, is a contested region between India, Pakistan and China. Both India and Pakistan lay claim to all of Kashmir, but each administers only part of it.
During the British rule of India, Kashmir was a feudal state with its own regional ruler. In 1947, the Kashmiri ruler, Maharaja Hari Singh, agreed that his kingdom would join India under certain conditions. Kashmir would retain political and economic sovereignty, while its defense and external affairs would be dealt with by India.
But Pakistan, newly created by the British, laid claim to a majority-Muslim part of Kashmir along its border. India and Pakistan fought the first of three major wars over Kashmir in 1947. It resulted in the creation of a United Nations-brokered “ceasefire line” that divided Indian and Pakistani territory. The line went right through Kashmir.
Despite the establishment of that border, presently known as the “Line of Control,” two more wars over Kashmir followed, in 1965 and 1999. An estimated 20,000 people died in these three wars.
International law, a set of rules and regulations created after World War II to govern all the world’s nation-states, is supposed to resolve territorial disputes like Kashmir. Such disputes are mainly dealt with by the International Court of Justice, a United Nations tribunal that rules on contested borders and war crimes.
Yet international law has repeatedly failed to resolve the Kashmir conflict, as my research on Kashmir and international law shows.
International law fails in Kashmir
The U.N. has made many failed attempts to restore dialogue after fighting between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, which today is home to a diverse population of 13.7 million Muslims, Hindus and people of other faiths.
In 1949, the U.N. sent a peacekeeping mission to both countries. U.N. peace missions were not as robust as its peacekeeping operations are today, and international troops proved unable to protect the sanctity of the borders between India and Pakistan.
In 1958, the Graham Commission, led by a U.N.-designated mediator, Frank Graham, recommended to the U.N. Security Council that India and Pakistan agree to demilitarize in Kashmir and hold a referendum to decide the status of the territory.
India rejected that plan, and both India and Pakistan disagreed on how many troops would remain along their border in Kashmir if they did demilitarize. Another war broke out in 1965.
In 1999, India and Pakistan battled along the Line of Control in the Kargil district of Kashmir, leading the United States to intervene diplomatically, siding with India.
Since then, official U.S. policy has been to prevent further escalation in the dispute. The U.S. government has offered several times to facilitate a mediation process over the contested territory.
The latest U.S. president to make that offer was Donald Trump after conflict erupted in Kashmir in 2019. The effort went nowhere.
Why international law falls short
Why is the Kashmir conflict too politically difficult for a internationally brokered compromise?
For one, India and Pakistan don’t even agree on whether international law applies in Kashmir. While Pakistan considers the Kashmir conflict an international dispute, India says it is a “bilateral issue” and an “internal matter.”
India’s stance narrows the purview of international law. For example, regional organizations like the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation cannot intervene on the Kashmir issue – by convening a regional dialogue, for example – because its charter prohibits involvement in “bilateral and contentious issues.”
But India’s claim that Kashmir is Indian territory is hotly debated.
In 2019, the Indian government abolished the 1954 law that gave Kashmir autonomous status and militarily occupied the territory. At least 500,000 Indian troops are in Kashmir today.
Pakistan’s government denounced the move as “illegal,” and many Kashmiris on both sides of the Line of Control say India violated its 1947 accession deal with Maharaja Singh.
The U.N. still officially considers Kashmir a disputed area. But India has held firm that Kashmir is part of India, under central government control, worsening already bad relations between India and Pakistan.
Military coups and terror
Another obstacle to peace between the two nations: Pakistan’s military.
In 1953, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Pakistani Prime Minister Mohammad Ali Bogra agreed in principle to resolve the Kashmir problem through a U.N. mediation or with an International Court of Justice proceeding.
That never happened, because the Pakistani military overthrew Ali Bogra in 1955.
Several more Pakistani military regimes have interrupted Pakistani democracy since then. India believes these non-democratic regimes lack credibility to negotiate with it. And, generally, Pakistan’s military governments have preferred the battlefield over political dialogue.
Terrorism is another critical factor making the Kashmir situation more complex. Several radical Islamist groups, including Lashkar-e-Toiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, operate in Kashmir, based primarily on the Pakistani side.
Since the late 1980s the terrorist groups have conducted targeted strikes and attacks on Indian government and military facilities, leading the Indian military to retaliate in Pakistani territory. Pakistan then alleges that India has breached the borderline, defying international treaties like the 1972 Simla Agreement to conduct its anti-terror attacks.
Intractable struggles
In many cases, treaties and international court decisions cannot be enforced. There is no international police force to help implement international law.
If a country ignores an International Court of Justice ruling, the other party in that court case may have recourse to the Security Council, which can pressure or even sanction a nation to comply with international law.
But that rarely happens, as such resolution processes are highly political and any permanent Security Council member can veto them.
And when conflicting parties are more inclined to view a conflict through the lens of domestic law – as India views Kashmir and Israel views the Palestinian territories – they can argue that international law simply does not apply.
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Kashmir is not the only contested territory where international law has failed.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the Gaza and West Bank territories is another example. For decades, both the U.N. and the United States have repeatedly and unsuccessfully intervened there in an effort to establish mutually acceptable borderlines and bring peace.
International law has grown and strengthened since its creation in the 1940s, but there are still many problems it cannot solve.