India and Pakistan launched a series of lethal missile attacks against one another last week. Fighting broke out after New Delhi blamed Islamabad for a jihadist assault in Kashmir last month, in which 26 non-Muslim tourists were killed. A ceasefire was announced by US president Donald Trump this week, which was welcome news after reports the administration received ‘alarming intelligence’ regarding a possible escalation in the conflict.
When the ceasefire was declared, both sides were able to celebrate a victory from the skirmishes – India for eliminating scores of terrorists, and Pakistan for downing Indian jets and defending its territory. The world celebrated the ceasefire, too. What could have been a catastrophic war between two nuclear powers has been, at least temporarily, averted. Yet even as fighting has subsided, one certain outcome of these clashes is that the world will pay more attention to the troubled region of Kashmir.
Kashmir, which is claimed by both India and Pakistan, was the battleground for much of last week. Early reports suggest that as many as 50 Kashmiri civilians died as a result of shelling across the line of control, which was established after the 1971 India-Pakistan war. Since 1947, the Muslim-majority region has been the casus belli of four wars (excluding last week’s clashes). The dispute has caused countless suffering and lives lost.
Last month’s attack on non-Muslim tourists was an eerie reenactment of the violence that plagued Kashmir in the early 1990s, when Islamist attacks caused the mass exodus of the region’s Hindu population. India has always held Pakistan responsible for the bloodshed, claiming that Islamic groups are harboured, or at least ignored, by Pakistan’s powerful military.
Kashmir has since become one of the most heavily militarised regions on Earth, with as many as an estimated 750,000 Indian troops alone regularly deployed there at any one time. Indian forces have been accused of serious human-rights violations, from the use of excessive force against protesters to enforced disappearances.
Much like the conflict between Israel and Palestine, the hostility between India and Pakistan over Kashmir appears to be intractable. Both countries claim a religious, ethnic and historical ‘right’ to the territory – a surefire recipe for conflict. Trump, however, appears to be undaunted by these challenges.
Announcing the ceasefire on Saturday, the US president said he would ‘work with both’ India and Pakistan ‘to see if, after a thousand years, a solution can be arrived at, concerning Kashmir’. Clearly, Trump believes he can replicate the ‘deal of the century’ he claimed to have negotiated for Israel and Palestine in 2020. We all know how that turned out. Yet Kashmir, if anything, poses an even bigger challenge.
The parallels between Israel and Palestine don’t end there. An obvious hurdle to any prospective peace is that jihadists in Kashmir, much like Hamas in Gaza, have little interest in striking a ‘deal’, whether with Trump or anyone else. Like Hamas, The Resistance Front (TRF), which claimed responsibility for last month’s attack, couches its jihad as a fight against ‘colonialism’. TRF has carried out numerous attacks exclusively targeting Hindus and Sikhs in Kashmir on the grounds that they are ‘settlers’. Beyond India and Pakistan, the Kashmir conflict has also become a powerful rallying point for Islamists worldwide.
As evidenced by the most recent round of fighting, India won’t relinquish its own claim to Kashmir, either. Under the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a hardline Hindu nationalism known as Hindutva has been resurgent. In 2019, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi revoked what was known as the ‘partial autonomy’ of Kashmir, a move that essentially incorporated the region into the rump of the Indian state. The Hindu origins of Kashmir, the BJP claimed, give India exclusive territorial rights over the region.
With neither Pakistan, India, nor the jihadist cells who operate in Kashmir likely to give an inch, the ceasefire will offer little more than a temporary respite from the conflict. Worse still, with Islamist outsiders taking an increasing interest, the Kashmiri cause has been globalised. Innocent Kashmiris have every reason to fear they could soon become fodder in a much broader conflict.
Kunwar Khuldune Shahid is a writer based in Pakistan.
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