by AMMAR ALI JAN
Many Hindu nationalists termed the recent Pahalgam terror attack “our October 7” and now call for Pakistan to be “reduced to rubble.” Even under a tenuous cease-fire, nationalist saber-rattling is colliding with the collapse of international law.
Pakistan and India, two nuclear-armed rivals in South Asia, are once again on the brink of a catastrophe. On Wednesday, India launched missile strikes in nine different districts across Pakistan, killing at least thirty-one civilians, including an eight-year-old, in one of the most dangerous escalations in decades. The incident also witnessed the largest aerial battle in history between the two neighbors, involving 125 fighter jets. On Thursday, India further escalated the aggression by using Israeli manufactured Harop drones in a number of cities in Pakistan, creating panic and anger across the country. After a series of Indian attacks on military installations and civilian sites, Pakistan retaliated on Saturday by attacking military installations in a number of cities in India, resulting in unprecedented tensions between the neighboring countries.
There is today a fragile cease-fire, with violations reported already. This is a perilous conflict — the product of historical contradictions within South Asia but also the intensifying contradictions undergirding the global order.
Frenzied
The immediate prompt for the latest tensions was an attack in Pahalgam in Indian-occupied Kashmir that killed twenty-six tourists, the deadliest terror incident in India since the Mumbai attack in 2008. The Indian government, beholden to its Hindu nationalist base and a hysterical media frenzy, immediately blamed Pakistan and suspended the Indus Water Treaty, a bilateral water-sharing agreement between the two countries signed in 1960. India also rejected Pakistan’s offer for an international investigation into the incident, declaring that the time for investigation and negotiations was over.
What is left out of this belligerent narrative is the decades-long, indeed ongoing, erasure of the Kashmiri people. For over eight decades under the occupation, the neighboring countries have refused to implement United Nations Resolution 47, which calls for a plebiscite to determine the future of the region. In 1989, the mass discontent of Kashmiri people with electoral rigging and state authoritarianism turned into an outright insurgency against the Indian occupation. The Indian military responded to this rebellion with mass arrests, censorship, torture, and the extrajudicial killings of thousands of Kashmiri people, turning Kashmir into one of the most militarized regions in the world. In 2019, Narendra Modi’s government abolished Article 370, which provided special status to Kashmir, a move widely viewed as the forced integration of Kashmir with the mainland. Kashmir was put on lockdown as India’s Hindu far right celebrated “peace” and “normalcy” while exercising brutal repression in the state.
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