Kashmir conflict

The Kashmir conflict is an ongoing dispute between the neighboring South Asian countries of India and Pakistan over control of the Kashmir region, an area that abuts both nations’ northern borders. Since 1947, India and Pakistan have engaged in multiple military confrontations over Kashmir. The two sides have faced off in two wars and numerous smaller exchanges of violence. As of 2022, the situation remains a point of significant concern to the international community, both for humanitarian reasons and because India and Pakistan are both armed with nuclear weapons. A March 2021 assessment of the situation published by the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation noted a pattern of rising tensions between the two nations over Kashmir. The tension escalated significantly in 2019 after a Pakistan-aligned suicide bomber carried out a deadly attack on Indian paramilitary forces in Kashmir. The incident prompted India to publicly reconsider its stated “no first use” nuclear weapons policy.

Overview

Rooted in the Kashmir region’s colonial past, the present-day conflict between India and Pakistan began to evolve during the seventeenth century. During the colonial era, Great Britain controlled most of the South Asian subcontinent. Britain controlled the modern-day nations of India and Pakistan as well as the Kashmir region, creating a colonial state known as British India. Britain first exercised authority over British India through the British East India Company, a powerful and wealthy corporation founded in 1600. In 1858, colonial control of British India passed from the company directly to the British crown, establishing direct governmental rule. Rising nationalism among the region’s citizens gained increasing momentum after this transfer of colonial power. This transfer was complicated by internal religious tensions between adherents of the Hindu and Muslim faiths.

Following the end of World War II (1939–1945), the British Parliament addressed the rising pressure on the country’s government to resolve the increasingly tense independence issue in British India. Some observers believed Britain should maintain its governing presence to prevent a civil war between the Hindu and Muslim factions of the region. However, Britain ultimately committed to end its rule of the region. Great Britain formally adopted a plan to transition British India to independence by 1948.

The structure of British colonial governance of India introduced immediate complications, yielding tragic results. In a bid to ease religious tensions, Britain had established colonial electorates specifically for Muslim citizens of British India. The strategy guaranteed representation to local Muslims, but it also had the effect of confining them to permanent political minority status. Britain’s commitment to ending its colonial rule of British India stoked rising separatist sentiment among the region’s Muslim citizens, igniting calls to establish a separate Muslim state. The resultant internal conflict erupted into rioting along religious lines, which led to an episode of mass violence known as the 1946 Calcutta Massacres, which have also been called the Great Calcutta Killings. The Calcutta Massacres took place from August 16–19, 1946, with a Muslim uprising resulting in the deaths of thousands of Hindus. Estimates of the casualty total range from more than 4,000 to 10,000 deaths and 15,000 injuries.

In the aftermath of the Calcutta Massacres, British and local authorities agreed to develop a plan to establish separate independent states along religious lines in the Indian subcontinent. Pakistan was established as a Muslim-majority country on August 14, 1947, and Hindu-majority India became a sovereign state one day later. At the time, the Indian subcontinent also contained more than 550 polities known as princely states. The princely states were not subject to direct British governing authority, and most of them elected to become part of either India or Pakistan following the establishment of the two new independent countries. However, the large princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, also known simply as Kashmir, had designs on establishing its own independence. Though Kashmir had a Muslim-majority population, its ruler Hari Singh was Hindu. Seeking to deflect external pressure to align with one of India or Pakistan, Singh established an agreement allowing the citizens of Kashmir to travel between and trade with Pakistan. However, Singh did not conclude a similar pact with India.

In spite of its agreement with Singh, Pakistan continued to pressure Kashmir to join it. Singh continued to resist, prompting Pakistan to fund an insurgent group that staged an invasion of Kashmir in September 1947. Insurgents brought much of western Kashmir under Pakistan’s control, prompting Singh to petition India for military assistance to fend off the invasion. India agreed, on the condition that Kashmir become part of India. Singh consented to the plan, signing an accord known as the Instrument of Accession in October 1947.

Pakistan considered the Instrument of Accession and unacceptable development, leading to a major military conflict between the two newly formed countries. Known as the First Kashmir War, or the India-Pakistan War of 1947–1948, the intense conflict resulted in tens of thousands of combatant deaths. India asked the United Nations (UN) to intervene, and the UN suggested a referendum among the citizens of Kashmir to determine whether the state would join India or Pakistan. As of 2022, that referendum has never be held. After an initial failure to deescalate military tensions in Kashmir, India and Pakistan agreed to a ceasefire in August 1949 and Kashmir was partitioned. Part of the region came under the purview of Pakistan, while the India-administered region entered India’s constitution with special status as an independent state with sovereignty over all affairs excluding foreign relations, communications, and military defense.

A second conflict over control of Kashmir—known as the Second Kashmir War or the India-Pakistan War of 1965—then broke out between India and Pakistan. The Second Kashmir War came as the result of rising tensions over boundary disputes. Pakistan had responded to the disputes by attempting to take the entirety of Kashmir and absorb it into Pakistan. India responded with fierce military resistance, prompting the UN to intervene in a bid to broker a solution. The United States and United Kingdom halted their arms sales to both countries, defusing the intensity of the military conflict. In September 1965, both sides agreed to a ceasefire and the Soviet Union stepped in to serve as a third-party mediator to resolve the accompanying territorial disputes. In January 1966, India and Pakistan both agreed to abandon their claims to disputed regions of Kashmir and demilitarize the contested area.

Despite the ceasefire, India and Pakistan continued to quarrel over Kashmir. In 1974, India conducted its first nuclear weapons tests and later joined the limited ranks of the world’s nuclear-armed powers. Pakistan did the same in 1998, marking a period of increasing tension between the neighboring countries and sparking a brief 1999 limited conflict known as the Kargil War between India and Pakistan-backed insurgent forces in Kashmir. The Kargil War followed from the February 1999 signing of the Lahore Declaration, which committed India and Pakistan to a peaceful resolution of the Kashmir conflict. However, India later discovered that Pakistan had secretly deployed troops to India-controlled regions of Kashmir with the apparent intent of goading India into a war. The short but fierce Kargil War ended in August 1999 with Pakistan’s withdrawal from the Kashmir territory it had occupied, marking a victory for India.

Further Insights

While much of the focus has centered on India and Pakistan in the conflict over control Kashmir, China has also been involved in territorial disputes with India over sections of Kashmir in the India-China border region. Periodic outbursts of limited violence along the India-China border in Kashmir escalated into a brief war between the two countries in 1962. The war ended with China taking a portion of eastern Kashmir from India. Border disputes between India and China have persisted ever since, with limited fighting between the Indian and Chinese militaries breaking out in Gogra-Hot Springs, the Galwan Valley, and other disputed and strategically consequential areas of Kashmir. In 2020, both sides suffered military fatalities before open hostilities gave way to a series of bilateral talks to resolve the issue. In September 2022, after sixteen negotiation sessions, both India and China withdrew their military forces from the border area in a significant step toward resolving the ongoing territorial clashes.

The 2020 India-China border skirmishes followed from India’s abrupt 2019 decision to strip Kashmir of its special status within India’s constitution. Militants have long staged periodic uprisings against India in the Kashmir territory’s India-administered regions, with India accusing Pakistan of stoking the tensions by providing material support to separatist insurgents in Kashmir. Pakistan denies these claims. A notable incident took place in 2016, when Burhan Wani, a leader figure in an Islamist insurgent group fighting Indian rule in Kashmir, was killed in a battle with Indian forces. Wani had built a large and passionate following on social media, and his death sparked political unrest and mass-scale protests throughout Indian-administered regions of Kashmir.

In its official party platform leading up to India’s 2019 general election, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) pledged to terminate Kashmir’s special status by revoking Article 370, the constitutional clause that enshrined it. A deadly suicide bombing attack perpetrated by a Kashmiri insurgent—allegedly with Pakistan’s support—killed more than forty Indian military servicemembers in a February 2019 incident that observers have cited as a contributing factor to the BJP’s policy motion. The BJP followed through on the pledge upon winning power in the 2019 election. Critics have contended the move was a thinly veiled and calculated effort to allow citizens of mainland India to move into and buy property in Kashmir. This was something Kashmir had previously blocked by invoking its right to internal self-governance. Proponents of this viewpoint also hold that India is actively aiming to shift Kashmir’s demographic makeup in its favor. Kashmir is the only part of India with a Muslim-majority population, with Muslims making up about 60 percent of its population at the time of Article 370’s revocation.

China began mobilizing troops along disputed areas of the India-China border in the Kashmir region shortly after India revoked Article 370. Chinese government officials cast doubt on the validity of India’s constitutional move, calling it illegal. India responded by stating the matter was a domestic affair and implying that Chinese interference would be unwelcome. The subsequent fighting between India and China over Kashmir territory was the deadliest such incident since 1967. Notably, neither side fired a shot during the short-lived conflict, in keeping with an established bilateral pledge not to engage with firearms. Media sources speculate that much of the fighting involved hand-to-hand combat, possibly with makeshift weapons.

Viewpoints

Pakistan has long supported the cause of Kashmir separatists seeking to extract the territory from India’s control. Government officials in Pakistan insist that the only support it has given insurgents against India’s ruling presence in Kashmir have been diplomatic. However, officials in India widely believe that Pakistan has a long history of providing Kashmir-based militants with multiple forms of direct material support, including military aid. For much of the twentieth century, Pakistan’s policy on Kashmir followed from the conflicts that defined the 1947 births of modern Pakistan and India. Its viewpoint was built on the premise that Hindu-majority India lacks the moral authority to govern Muslim-majority Kashmir, instead contending that Kashmir should join Muslim-majority Pakistan or become independent.

India’s competing view holds that its governing interests in Kashmir follow directly from the 1947 Instrument of Accession, which India views as a binding legal document that gives it rightful authority over the entire Kashmir region. Commentators note that India’s position on relevant matters have displayed a pattern of shifting depending on the context. When dealing with third-party members of the international community, India has tended to characterize the Kashmir conflict as a bilateral issue between itself and Pakistan. In dealings with Pakistan, India has instead treated the Kashmir conflict as a purely domestic affair and the sole business of India’s government. To the citizens of India and Kashmir, India has emphasized security and antiterrorism concerns as justification for its actions.

Meanwhile, experts on India-Pakistan relations have also opined that a succession of Pakistani politicians have seized on the Kashmir conflict as a tool for gaining support and winning or maintaining political power. From these perspectives, Pakistan has treated Kashmir as an outlet for nationalist sentiment and as a springboard for a wider movement known as pan-Islamism, which broadly seeks to establish and strengthen a power structure uniting the citizens of the world’s Muslim-majority countries. Some observers also claim that Pakistan has displayed a tendency of downplaying and deescalating its conflict with India over Kashmir during periods of relatively favorable India-Pakistan relations. Others note that domestic political and economic turmoil has forced Pakistan to scale back its involvement in the Kashmir conflict during the early 2020s.

The reentry of China into the Kashmir conflict in 2020 created a situation intriguing to geopolitical analysts, who believe it may force India to refocus its entire Kashmir policy around neutralizing potential Chinese aggression. India historically considered China to lack the military capability to act on its territorial claims in Kashmir, but China’s twenty-first-century accession to the ranks of the world’s leading economic and military powers has changed that narrative.

The UN continues to favor a domestic referendum in Kashmir to determine the region’s political future, a position that has not changed since the organization first proposed it as a potential solution in the 1940s. However, the inherent disadvantage to Indian interests posed by Kashmir’s Muslim-majority population continues to make such a vote an undesirable outcome from India’s point of view.

Bibliography

Blakemore, Erin. “The Kashmir Conflict: How Did It Start?” National Geographic, 2 Mar. 2019, www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/kashmir-conflict-how-did-it-start. Accessed 16 Sep. 2022.

Chitre, Manjiri Sachin. “Kargil Vijay Diwas: Here’s All about the India-Pakistan War of 1999.” Hindustan Times, 26 July 2022, www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/kargil-vijay-diwas-here-s-all-about-the-india-pakistan-war-of-1999-and-more-101658804286233.html. Accessed 16 Sep. 2022.

“Fact Sheet: Escalating Tensions Over Kashmir.” Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, Mar. 2021, armscontrolcenter.org/escalating-tensions-over-kashmir/. Accessed 16 Sep. 2022.

“Kashmir: The View From Islamabad.” International Crisis Group, 4 Dec. 2003, www.crisisgroup.org/asia/south-asia/kashmir/kashmir-view-islamabad. Accessed 16 Sep. 2022.

“Kashmir: Why India and Pakistan Fight over It.” BBC News, 8 Aug. 2019, www.bbc.com/news/10537286. Accessed 16 Sep. 2022.

Kumar, Raksha. “For Kashmiris, Resolution to Decades of Conflict Remains Distant Dream.” National Public Radio, 21 Aug. 2022, www.npr.org/2022/05/13/1098730987/india-kashmir-conflict. Accessed 16 Sep. 2022.

Lateef, Samaan. “Domestic Woes Force Pakistan to Put Kashmir on the Back Burner.” Deutsche Welle, 7 Sep. 2022, www.dw.com/en/domestic-woes-force-pakistan-to-put-kashmir-on-the-back-burner/a-63032240. Accessed 16 Sep. 2022.

“The India-Pakistan War of 1965.” Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State, history.state.gov/milestones/1961-1968/india-pakistan-war. Accessed 16 Sep. 2022.

Ul-Haq Sinha, Mohammad Basir. “Legacy of British Colonialism: The ‘Great Calcutta Killings’ of 1946.” Global Research Center for Research on Globalism, 15 Aug. 2017, www.globalresearch.ca/legacy-of-british-colonialism-the-great-calcutta-killings-of-1946/5604231. Accessed 16 Sep. 2022.

Yasir, Samir. “2 Years after Deadly Fistfights, India and China Pull Back from Border.” The New York Times, 9 Sep. 2022, www.nytimes.com/2022/09/09/world/asia/india-china-border.html. Accessed 16 Sep. 2022.