The risk of all-out war between India and Pakistan rose on Thursday, despite diplomatic attempts to de-escalate the conflict between the two nuclear-armed countries.
On Wednesday, India said it carried out strikes on Pakistan in retaliation for a terrorist attack that killed 26 civilians in Kashmir last month. Pakistan said its forces shot down Indian aircraft. Overnight into Thursday, heavy shelling and strikes were reported on each side of the border.
The two nations have fought numerous wars, with the disputed area of Kashmir as a prime flashpoint, since 1947, when Britain divided India, its former colony, into India and Pakistan.
Here is what to know about attempts to resolve the conflict, Wednesday’s strikes, the attack in Kashmir, and the longstanding tensions between India and Pakistan.
What’s the latest in the fighting?
The Indian government said on Thursday that it had thwarted Pakistani attempts to unleash drones and missiles at Indian military targets in more than a dozen cities and towns, many of them home to air force bases.
India said it had responded by striking Pakistan’s air defense systems and radars close to the city of Lahore — the kind of blow that often causes a military conflict to intensify, analysts said.
Pakistan accused India of continuing what it called illegal aggression and said its forces had shot down more than two dozen Indian drones that entered Pakistan’s airspace.
In the rapidly developing situation, the claims from both sides could not be independently verified.
On Wednesday, the Indian government said its forces had struck nine sites in Pakistan and on Pakistan’s side of the disputed Kashmir region.
Pakistani military officials said that more than 20 people had been killed and dozens injured after six places were hit on the Pakistani side of Kashmir and in Punjab Province. Residents of the Indian side of Kashmir said at least 10 people had been killed in shelling from the Pakistani side since India carried out its strikes.
A spokesman for the Pakistani Army said that five other places had also come under attack, leaving at least eight people dead and 35 wounded.
The targeted locations included Bahawalpur, in Punjab Province, Pakistan, the site of a religious seminary associated with Jaish-e-Mohammad, another Pakistan-based militant group; Kotli and Bagh in Pakistan-administered Kashmir; and Shakargarh and Muridke in Punjab. Lashkar-e-Taiba is believed to have a presence in Muridke.
The Pakistani military said that Indian planes did not enter Pakistan’s airspace while conducting the attacks.
What are the efforts to stop the fighting?
Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke with leaders from both countries on Thursday and emphasized the need for “immediate de-escalation,” according to State Department accounts of the calls.
There were a flurry of diplomatic meetings in New Delhi and Islamabad on Thursday. Top diplomats from Iran and Saudi Arabia, crucial regional players who have close ties to both of the warring countries, were in New Delhi for meetings.
The diplomatic push was centered around the hope that the heaviest military engagement could be contained to the actions on early Wednesday. Both sides could plausibly claim victory, as India struck deeper into Pakistan than it had at any point in recent decades, and Pakistan downed several Indian planes.
Diplomats and analysts expressed some hope that the day’s events might offer the two sides an offramp. The question now is whether Pakistan will decide that it must answer India’s strikes in Punjab, the Pakistani heartland, with an attack of its own on Indian soil.
What happened in the Kashmir attack?
On April 22, 26 people in the Baisaran Valley in Kashmir were killed by militants who approached and shot them. Another 17 were injured.
Except for one local Kashmiri man, a government tally of the dead showed that all were Hindu tourists. Accounts from the injured and survivors suggested many were targeted after they were asked about their religion. The attack, which occurred near Pahalgam, a town in the southern part of Indian-administered Kashmir, was one of the worst on Indian civilians in decades.
A group calling itself the Resistance Front emerged on social media to take responsibility. Indian officials privately say the group is a proxy for Lashkar-e-Taiba, a terrorist organization based in Pakistan.
In Kashmir, Indian security forces have begun a sweeping clampdown, arresting thousands of people.
What is Operation Sindoor?
India picked the name “Operation Sindoor” for its military action.
Sindoor, or vermilion powder, is a traditional marker of the marital status of Hindu women. Married women wear it either in the parting of their hair or on their foreheads, and they wipe it off if they become widowed. During the April 22 terrorist attack, many women lost their husbands, who were targeted because they were Hindu.
The Indian government’s choice of the name Operation Sindoor signaled its intention to avenge the widowed women.
“Operation Sindoor” also signals to right-wing Hindu groups — many of which favor more traditionally defined gender roles — that the Hindu nationalist government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi is listening to their demands for vengeance.
But some feminists have criticized the use of the word sindoor.
Hindu nationalism is predominantly driven by a male view of the world, said V. Geetha, a feminist historian who writes about gender, caste and class. “Women figure in it as objects to be protected or as mother figures goading their men to prove their heroism,” Ms. Geetha said.
What are the origins of the dispute?
The roots of the Kashmir conflict trace back to the 1947 partition of British India, which led to the creation of a predominantly Hindu India and a predominantly Muslim Pakistan.
In October of that year, the Hindu monarch of the Muslim-majority princely state of Kashmir acceded to India, but Pakistan laid claim to the territory and sought to take it by military force. A U.N.-brokered agreement in 1949 established a cease-fire line, dividing Kashmir.
After wars in 1965 and 1971, the cease-fire line became the Line of Control, with India possessing about two-thirds of Kashmir and Pakistan the rest. But the dispute remains unresolved.
Here is a timeline of the decades of tensions between India and Pakistan over Kashmir.
Has Pakistan supported militancy in Kashmir?
An insurgency in the Indian-administered part of Kashmir began in the 1980s, primarily driven by local grievances, with Pakistan eventually supporting some groups, experts say.
Among the Kashmir-focused insurgent groups that emerged, some supported independence for the region, while others wanted the Indian side of Kashmir to be taken over by Pakistan.
In the 1990s, Pakistan provided training and other support to several militant groups operating in Kashmir and within Pakistan. This involvement was later acknowledged by several senior Pakistani officials, including the former military ruler Pervez Musharraf. The spike in insurgency in the 1990s forced an exodus of Kashmir’s minority Hindus, a large number of them leaving for New Delhi and other cities after facing targeted attacks.
The insurgency began to ease around 2002, as Pakistan banned Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad, another major militant group, although Lashkar-e-Taiba continued to operate under aliases. A cease-fire was declared and a peace process with India was initiated, a shift that some observers linked to pressure by the United States after its post-9/11 intervention in Afghanistan.
The peace process collapsed after attacks in Mumbai, India, in 2008, which killed 166 people and were attributed to Lashkar-e-Taiba.
What is Kashmir’s status now?
Since war last broke out in 1999, Kashmir has remained one of the most militarized places in the world. India and Pakistan have come to the brink of war several times, including in 2019, when a suicide bombing in Kashmir killed at least 40 Indian soldiers.
In 2019, the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi revoked a part of the Indian constitution that had given semi-autonomy to the state of Jammu and Kashmir. The move, to fully integrate Jammu and Kashmir, as India’s portion of the region is known, was part of his Hindu nationalist agenda.
Pakistan condemned India’s moves. But violent unrest has broken out in the part of Kashmir controlled by Pakistan, too. Protests there have reflected a general feeling of dissatisfaction with Pakistani rule.
Direct rule by India dampened the outbreaks of violence in the portion of Kashmir it controlled. Voting also resumed last year. But discontent with Mr. Modi’s party, particularly for how heavily it polices the lives of Kashmiris, remains.
Mujib Mashal is the South Asia bureau chief for The Times, helping to lead coverage of India and the diverse region around it, including Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bhutan.
Anupreeta Das covers India and South Asia for The Times. She is based in New Delhi.
Pragati K.B. is a reporter for The Times based in New Delhi, covering news from across India.
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