The Long-Standing Kashmir Conflict
Entire wars have been fought over land wedged between three nuclear powers. Kashmir is disputed territory in the Himalayas. It's nestled between India, Pakistan, and China. It's split in two by a so-called line of control, and its people for the last 80 years have been trapped in a continual cycle of conflict.
"The war which is raging between India and Pakistan tonight."
India and Pakistan have already fought two wars over this mountainous region.
Young Kashmiris are now actively protesting, taunting Indian security forces who are responding with tear gas and pellet guns. And now that cycle of conflict is once again on the upswing. The White House is scrambling to deescalate a potentially treacherous conflict.
Two weeks ago, gunmen killed more than two dozen people—almost all of them Indian citizens—in a tourist town on the Indian side of disputed territory. A terror attack shattered the peace and tranquility of Kashmir after gunmen killed 26 people.
India accused Pakistan of being behind the attack, and so, two weeks later, it hit back.
India has fired missiles into Pakistan in a deadly escalation between the nuclear armed neighbors.
Another night of intense shelling between the two countries. Pakistan says it shot down 12 drones overnight. Both nations have accused each other of using drones and missiles to target their respective military installations.
The international worry now is that this latest escalation will boil over, that it will aggravate a longstanding wound between the two countries in what is one of the most complex and sensitive geopolitical disputes we know of.
Roots of the Conflict – History and Identity
Let’s try to understand it. As far as civilizations go, India and Pakistan share thousands of years of history, but as modern nation states, they're pretty new.
Pakistan was carved out of British India as a separate Muslim homeland only after the Second World War in 1947. India itself would gain independence just one day later. But almost immediately, the two countries would go to war.
This was the first India-Pakistan war over Kashmir which began in October 1947. Both the newly created countries of India and Pakistan saw Kashmir as central to their legitimation as independent nations.
Yes, Kashmir was fought over nearly as soon as India and Pakistan were formed. Both countries claim it in whole. India's claim stems from the fact that Kashmir's Hindu ruler at the time 80 years ago made the choice to join India—albeit under incredibly difficult circumstances. But their claim is essentially a legal one.
Pakistan's claim is grounded in the fact that Kashmir is majority Muslim—in fact, the only part of India where most people are Muslim. Their argument is that many residents don't want to be part of India.
When India and Pakistan came into being, they had two different religious majorities. Pakistan later declared itself an Islamic republic. But India, on paper, remained a secular republic—and their argument was that giving this territory to Pakistan on the basis of religious identity wouldn't challenge India's existence as a secular state.
So Kashmir has been the boiling point. What came out of this conflict was a United Nations document. This is from 1949, signed by both India and Pakistan. It established a ceasefire line, which would later be known as the Line of Control.
Today, that line separates the roughly 2/3 of Kashmir administered by India—called Jammu and Kashmir—from the remaining third administered by Pakistan—called Azad Kashmir. Remembering though that both countries lay claim to the whole thing, and so this region is even today one of the most heavily militarized in the world.
However, over a period of several decades now, the part of Kashmir administered by India has seen resistance—armed insurgency. The troops and paramilitary police come under regular attack from guerrillas seeking secession from India, and then perhaps union with Pakistan or perhaps outright independence.
"Any intruder coming from Pakistan side is to be challenged to stop. If he doesn't stop, he is to be shot at."
India has long accused Pakistan of backing those militants—a claim which Pakistan has at various times broadly denied.
It's a very complex conflict, because at some moments in that history, these are homegrown movements for secession in Kashmir. So a claim that there are simply proxies of Pakistan is not quite correct. But it is also the case, of course, that in many of those cases, some elements of those groups—which are Kashmiri—do receive material support from Pakistan. It could be arms, it could be training, it could be funding of various kinds.
Pakistan has supported—and even one can say sponsored—insurgency. But the ground for that has been laid by Indian misrule and policies which have led to a widespread feeling of alienation and oppression among the people.
Recent Escalation – From Autonomy to Airstrikes
So you can start to understand what makes this dispute so bitter. But what we haven't yet explained is what makes this latest string of escalations so shocking.
That story started about 6 years ago.
One important thing I haven't yet mentioned about Kashmir is that it has always enjoyed a certain degree of autonomy. It's considered special in India. That special status is enshrined in Article 370 of that country's constitution, relating to the state of Jammu and Kashmir—which is what India calls the part of the region it controls.
We can see, for example, how this article expressly limits the power of the Indian government to meddle in Kashmir's affairs. The region was even allowed to have its own constitution—until 2019, when that was taken away.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi stripped the primarily Muslim state of its semi-autonomous status. It not only revoked the autonomy, it abolished the status of Indian Jammu and Kashmir as a constituent state of the Indian Union and further carved up the earth while in a liquidated state into two union territories under direct central rule.
"So it was drastic surgery."
Yes. To put it simply, Narendra Modi rolled back Kashmir's special status. More Indian soldiers moved in. Thousands of Kashmiris were arrested, including political leaders.
Since the 1950s, the Hindu nationalist movement has always been critical of Article 370 because its vision of India was not as a secular country but as a Hindu country—a Hindu nation. So there's been a long-standing desire by the Hindu nationalist movement to remove Article 370, to annul it, to abrogate it from the constitution.
Modi also loosened the rules on who was allowed to buy land in Kashmir. For most of the region's modern history, if you weren't a permanent resident of Jammu and Kashmir, you simply couldn't buy land there. But that changed when the old laws were thrown out, and suddenly there were reports of outsiders buying in—slowly at first, but then ramping up. This reportedly also had an impact on prices.
"Following the abrogation of Article 370, land prices in Jammu and Kashmir have appreciated almost six times."
Land ownership and marriage laws—these were all governed by the province. Now, if you take that away, it means that people from mainland India can come in and change the demography.
So fast forwarding to the attack two weeks ago in April—that was the first major attack on this scale on civilians the region had seen since India revoked its special status.
There was an increased number of tourists from India to Kashmir that took place. It's in that context that we see this attack—targeting civilians so openly—was seen as such a shocking, outrageous act that it really belied the Indian government's argument that the valley would be safe for tourists to visit.
India’s counterattack weeks later was shocking for the extent to which it was not limited to Kashmir. Indian missiles hit Punjab province of Pakistan itself—raising the question: how close to war are these two countries right now?
At least 31 people have died so far following the missile strikes, and they are very much reflective of the rising tensions between the two countries. The world is watching.
India claims to have struck nine sites—both in Pakistan and Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. It says these sites are "terrorist infrastructure," some linked to the April attack.
The Indian army published video of one such strike, set to music under the banner Operation Sindoor. That name means something. Sindoor refers to a red vermilion powder traditionally worn in the hair by married Hindu women. And it has become a powerful symbol now of those Indian women who were widowed in the April attack.
"It refers to avenging the grief of those widows who have had their sindoor wiped brutally from their forehead—because tradition holds that once a woman loses her husband, she becomes a widow. She no longer wears the sindoor."
India claims it did not hit Pakistani military facilities and that its attack was measured, responsible, and non-escalatory—their words.
But Pakistan does not see it that way. It says dozens were killed in India's air strikes—including at least one child—and it questions: This was retaliation for what? We didn’t attack you in the first place.
Pakistan has called the Indian counterattack an unprovoked and blatant act of war that would not go unanswered.
The risks here are obviously clear. There's a risk of further escalation between the two states.
"I think Pakistan will retaliate in some form to the Indian strikes on its territory—which have struck, you know, very hard and deep. That will determine whether the escalatory spiral takes place or not."
There are different dimensions here. There's an India-Pakistan dimension. There's communal relations within India. There's a wider geopolitical contest on these borders that involves China as well. And so that’s why it’s a very delicate moment.
It is true that the world has witnessed conflict between these two countries before. There have been entire wars where many thousands have died each time. Experts tell us: We’re not there yet, but we’re closer than we were two weeks ago.
And it is worth remembering: this is a conflict involving two nuclear-armed nations. And for the time being, it appears to be getting worse.
Source: CBC News. (2025, May 8). Are India and Pakistan at risk of going to war? | About That [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAH0wIdE-kk