Tensions between India and Pakistan significantly escalated last week, with the neighboring countries exchanging fire for several days after India’s missile attack on Pakistan.
While the two countries announced a full and immediate ceasefire on Saturday, experts say dangers in the region remain.
The United States conversed with Indian and Pakistani officials to broker the ceasefire, according to Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
India on Saturday evening accused Pakistan of breaking the ceasefire, saying it is responding to the violations.
The recent attacks came after already rising tensions as India continued to blame Pakistan for a deadly attack in April in the disputed Kashmir region, a claim that Pakistan denies. That militant attack, known as the Pahalgam incident, left 26 people dead in Indian-controlled Kashmir.
“This is just the most recent in a series of conflicts between Pakistan and India,” retired Col. Stephen Ganyard, an ABC News contributor and former State Department official, said. “Ever since the formation of Pakistan in the mid to late ’40s, these two countries have not gotten along.”
With both countries possessing nuclear weapons, the threat of escalation is especially concerning.
“Of any place in the world, the easiest to imagine a nuclear exchange happening is between Pakistan and India,” Ganyard said. “You have these two neighbors with so much hate, so much history and lots and lots of nuclear weapons exchanging live fire.”
Kashmir at center of conflict
The origin of the recent hostilities between Pakistan and India largely dates back to 1947, when they gained their independence from British rule, according to Surupa Gupta, a professor of political science and international affairs at the University of Mary Washington in Virginia.
“When you think about the current conflict, it is really about Kashmir,” Gupta told ABC News.
Sovereign, princely states in the subcontinent were given the option to accede to India or Pakistan at the time of independence, but Kashmir was among several that did not, she said. Its ruler at the time eventually agreed to sign a treaty of accession with India after seeking its support against attacks on the state.
“Pakistan has never really recognized that treaty of accession,” Gupta said. “Pakistan’s argument has always been that Kashmir was, and continues to be, a Muslim-majority region, whereas they see India as a Hindu-majority state. Which it is, but its origin story is as a secular state.”
A war between India and Pakistan erupted over the Himalayan region, and in 1949, the two countries agreed to establish a ceasefire line dividing Kashmir, which is highly militarized and monitored by the United Nations.
Today, India controls the southern half of the Kashmir region and Pakistan controls the northern and western portion, though both lay claim to all of Kashmir. China also controls a part of northeastern Kashmir.
“It’s one of the few places in the world where the geography is very tight, where borders are up against each other, and so the tensions often spill over because they’re still competing for various parts of Kashmir and Jammu,” Ganyard said.
Continuing to fuel the conflict between India and Pakistan are strong nationalist sentiments and religious fervor, Ganyard said.
“These are two countries with very strong religious feelings, and that religion gets injected into the relationship between the two countries,” he said. “So very strong Muslim population and very strong Muslim sentiment within the politics of Pakistan. Prime Minister Modi in India has been a very ardent Hindu nationalist.”
“Throughout humanity, the most horrible, bloodiest kinds of conflicts between human beings tend to be those that have religious fervor behind them. And so that’s part of what makes this so dangerous,” he continued.
Years of hostilities
In the ensuing decades since gaining independence, India and Pakistan have fought several wars and battles, including ones over Kashmir.
In recent years, the conflict has “manifested itself in the form of terrorist attacks on India,” Gupta said, including deadly attacks on military targets in 2016 and 2019 and a siege targeting Mumbai hotels and a railway station in 2008.
Since the late 1980s, “India has accused Pakistan of supporting international Islamist terrorist groups operating inside of Kashmir,” Manjari Chatterjee Miller, a senior fellow for India, Pakistan and South Asia for the Council on Foreign Relations, told ABC News.
Tensions have calmed a bit in recent years, barring occasional clashes along the border areas, Ganyard said.
Tourism in Kashmir has also increased in recent years, helping drive the economy, and there was a “sense of normalcy,” Gupta said.
The April 22 attack near the resort town of Pahalgam targeted Indian tourists, with the civilian attack marking a departure from the more recent military attacks on military, Gupta and Miller said.
India’s missile attack on Tuesday, which it said targeted “terrorist infrastructure” in Pakistan and Pakistan-controlled Jammu and Kashmir, was “very clearly a reaction to the massacre of the 26 tourists,” Ganyard said.
Before the ceasefire was announced, the world was “sort of holding their breath” and “waiting to see if the pressure gets let off a bit,” he said, noting that it’s “in the best interest of both sides not to let this get out of hand.”
Neighboring nuclear powers
Since 1998, both India and Pakistan have nuclear arms, between 160 and 170 weapons each, Ganyard noted.
The two are among a handful of countries that have never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. India has a no-first-use policy for its nuclear weapons, which Pakistan does not, Gupta noted.
“This is why this is so critical. You have this religious fervor that divides the two countries. This anger. You have the nationalist pride of both sides. And then you have these two sides that have nuclear weapons. So very, very, very dangerous cocktail, which is why it’s so concerning that it could get out of control,” Ganyard said.
Another aspect that could escalate conflicts is water. Following the April 22 attack, India suspended a key water treaty with Pakistan regarding the Indus River.
“There have been many people who’ve predicted that the next war would be fought over water,” Ganyard said.
India had not previously suspended that treaty, marking a “departure,” Gupta said.
If India restricts the flow of water to Pakistan, “that could be grounds for war,” Ganyard said.
Both India and Pakistan “have incentives to not escalate, but at the same time the risk of escalation, particularly through miscalculation, is real,” Miller said. “And anytime you have conflict between nuclear-armed neighbors, it’s a serious issue.”
‘Things are never going to be good between these two countries’
Amid concerns of further escalation in its latest conflict, India and Pakistan announced Saturday they had agreed to a full and immediate ceasefire.
In the past, relations between India and Pakistan have de-escalated with the help of back-channel diplomacy and international actors such as the U.S. have talked to both, Gupta said.
“There have been instances where the military commanders have gotten in touch,” she said. “Based on a shared interest in avoiding a full-scale war, both countries have scaled it down.”
The ceasefire talks were mediated by the U.S., with Rubio in a statement commending the leaders of India and Pakistan for “choosing the path of peace.”
The wider issue over Kashmir, though, may not be resolved in the immediate future, Gupta said.
India has previously tried to negotiate a lasting peace with various Pakistani governments, but “the lack of stability in who rules Pakistan is a major factor,” she said, and the efforts have not gone anywhere.
“I think there is always a possibility of resolving conflicts, but it doesn’t seem immediate. It doesn’t seem likely in the short run, in the medium run,” she said. “It would require a lot of effort to do so, a lot of very sincere effort to do so.”
Given the variable stressors, “things are never going to be good between these two countries,” Ganyard said.
“Whether it’s water, whether it’s religion, whether it’s territory, geography — there are so many things that are constantly and going to continue to irritate the relationship between Pakistan and India that the best we can hope for is some sort of very low-scale war, or some sort of very high tension kind of relationship, but not the exchange of nuclear weapons,” he said.
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