You can’t actually see the Great Wall of China from space but the border dividing India from Pakistan is unmistakable. For over 1,900 miles, from the shores of the Arabian Sea to the icy mountain peaks of Kashmir, a line intended to divide Hindus from Muslims is visibly etched onto the surface of the globe. The jagged border was hastily drawn by a British judge when the Indian subcontinent won its independence from Britain in August 1947 but was divided into a Hindu-majority India and a Muslim-majority Pakistan.
In the weeks that followed, millions of Hindus and Sikhs fled from the regions newly designated as Pakistan into India, while millions of Muslims left their ancestral homes in India and moved in the opposite direction—to what they hoped would be a safe haven in Pakistan. Some 15 million people were rendered refugees, and between one and two million were killed in the violence that accompanied the Partition.
The trauma of the Partition continues to define South Asian attitudes toward past, present, and future. Today, layers of fencing, accompanied by 150,000 floodlights, thermal sensors and landmines have turned the border between India and Pakistan into a veritable Iron Curtain. The edgy, militarized border renders Indians and Pakistanis, who had lived together in overlapping communities before the Partition, almost completely inaccessible to one another.
One of its most disastrous legacies of the Partition is the dispute over the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, which erupted into a war between India and Pakistan soon after independence and left Kashmir divided between the two countries after a ceasefire. Three more wars, political intrigues, nuclear weaponization, decades of insurgency and counter-insurgency in Kashmir exacted a great human toll and unleashed passions and prejudices which have contributed to excessive dominance of the military in Pakistan, and have helped intensify religious nationalism in India.
A massacre in arcadia
On April 22, terrorists attacked a group of Indian tourists in a pristine meadow in the Kashmiri town of Pahalgam and murdered 26 people—the largest killing of Indian civilians in years. India quickly blamed Pakistan and Indian politicians, television networks and civilians all clamored for revenge.
The massacre in Kashmir came after a fraught decade for the two countries. Since 2014, India has witnessed a significant political transformation with the rise of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and his emphasis on muscular nationalism and Hindu majoritarianism. At the same time, Pakistan was weakened by several economic and political crises, and the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 reduced Islamabad’s importance to Washington.
After New Delhi revoked the semi-autonomous status of Indian-administered-Kashmir in August 2019 and brought it under direct rule, diplomatic, political, economic, and cultural ties with Pakistan all but disappeared. A tense peace followed, maintained by heavy military and police presence, as most Kashmiris withdrew from separatist politics and militancy. India, focused on positioning itself as a global power, largely ignored a struggling Pakistan.
Prime Minister Modi responded to the attack by changing India’s military doctrine to consider a terrorist attack in India as an act of war: Indian planes struck deep inside Pakistan, even hitting a military air base close to the headquarters of its Strategic Plans Division responsible for overseeing its nuclear weapons. Fears of India and Pakistan being a mistake away from nuclear war rose as the two countries hit each other’s military infrastructure with airstrikes and swarms of drones.
The history of hostility and violence gave the conflict an aura of inevitability. “I am very close to India, and I am very close to Pakistan, and they have had that fight for a thousand years in Kashmir,” President Donald Trump remarked.
A forgotten history of cooperation
Despite the ceasefire holding, even the most modest cultural and diplomatic exchanges between India and Pakistan have now vanished. South Asia’s two nuclear armed neighbors are now more dangerously cut off from one another than the United States and the Soviet Union were during the Cold War.
Yet Indo-Pak relations haven’t always been defined by hostility alone. After a ceasefire brokered by the United Nations divided Kashmir between the two countries, they reconciled surprisingly quickly. Recently declassified intelligence files reveal that throughout the 1950s, India and Pakistan cooperated, shared intelligence, and even considered a military alliance.
Indian and Pakistani intelligence services began collaborating in April 1949 to prevent a communist takeover in Burma, which both countries feared would encourage similar revolutions on their own soil. The operation “must be kept completely secret,” Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, warned his ambassador in Burma. Indian and Pakistani agents worked together to smuggle military equipment worth millions of dollars to the Burmese military into Rangoon, saving the state from total collapse.
The Rangoon operation laid the foundation for further collaboration between India and Pakistan. By 1950, a minister in Nehru’s cabinet was speaking of “the very friendly relations between the two governments,” and Prime Minister Nehru spoke of an “Asiatic federation” in the “not very, very distant future,” and a “United Nations of South Asia.”
In The Great Partition, historian Yasmin Khan recounts how in 1950 a joint press conference brought journalists from India and Pakistan together for the first time in three years. Correspondents burst into tears upon seeing their old co-workers again. India’s National Herald newspaper described the Indian and Pakistani journalists spending hours talking, trying to learn about life in places across the border they had known intimately, which had become mysterious and inaccessible. Prime Minister Nehru championed the idea of India and Pakistan finding ways to allow their citizens to meet as often as possible.
India and Pakistan continued to cooperate with one another for well over a decade, convinced that cooperation was the only way to manage the continued flow of refugees across their borders. Indian and Pakistani politicians worked together to resolve questions of refugee rehabilitation, almost implemented a “No War” pact, and even introduced joint India-Pakistan passports.
In 1960, Pakistan’s President Ayyub Khan proposed a military alliance, which didn’t materialize. But in September 1960, India and Pakistan did sign with the World Bank, the landmark Indus Water Treaty, which enshrines their rights to water from the six rivers that flow between the two countries. For more than six decades, the treaty survived the subcontinental wars and discord but has come under significant strain after India suspended its participation in the treaty after the April terrorist attack in Kashmir.
A stark, downward spiral
Relations between India and Pakistan began worsening when Indian forces marched into the Portuguese colony of Goa in December 1961. Many in India saw it as the final act of decolonization, ending four centuries of European rule in the subcontinent. But Pakistan’s President Ayub Khan viewed it as a sign of Indian aggression. In response, he began supporting rebel groups in India’s northeast, prompting India to back separatists within Pakistan. After a brief war in 1965, both countries passed “enemy property” laws, allowing them to confiscate the assets of citizens who maintained property, business interests, or family connections across the border.
Six years later, in 1971, Indian support for Bengali rebels in East Pakistan and its military intervention led to the creation of Eastern Pakistan as the independent nation of Bangladesh. Pakistan retaliated by supporting separatist Sikh militants in Punjab in the 1980s. A popular rebellion against New Delhi erupted in Indian-administered Kashmir in the winter of 1989-1990. Pakistan armed, trained, and funded the Kashmiri militants, and transformed the insurgency by sending in Pakistani Islamist militants. A decade later, President Bill Clinton was referring to Kashmir as “the most dangerous place in the world.”
Fading allure of shared histories and peace
“We stopped a nuclear conflict,” President Trump claimed after the India-Pakistan ceasefire in May. The ceasefire has held but any sense of normalcy has not returned to the relations between the two countries. A period of warm cultural and economic relations and serious efforts at resolving the Kashmir dispute between 2002 and 2012 when India was led by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is a hazy, distant memory now. In those seasons of peace, Indian movie stars lit up Pakistani theatres and Pakistani musicians filled out massive venues in India and bilateral trade would cross billions annually.
Indians and Pakistanis, who remember a life before the Partition, before the borders, are in their nineties and dying fast. They recall a complex picture of loss of home, language, friendships and separated families. Even the earlier generations of soldiers and officers in the Indian and Pakistan militaries had shared histories. Opponents in the first wars between India and Pakistan were comrades who fought side by side in the British Army in the Second World War. They would smuggle cigarettes and letters across the front lines to their old friends.
After India’s victory in the 1971 war, Gavin Young, a correspondent for The Observer, asked an Indian general if he had met the Pakistani general who had surrendered along with his men before Indian forces. “Oh, Yes,” the Indian general replied. “He said he was very happy to see me. We knew each other in college.”
After 78 years, there is still no shared understanding of the profound collective loss the Partition inflicted on the subcontinent. The border has hardened, and ironically, it is now easier for Indians and Pakistanis to meet in Britain. In both countries, Partition has been mythologized in ways that leave little space to mourn what was lost. Today, the shared history of India and Pakistan survives only in fragments—confined to memories, archives, and scattered families—as the two nations follow increasingly different trajectories and imagine futures that leave little room for one another. It is politically easier, after all, to say they were always meant to be enemies.
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