December 1988: Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi stand together during the start of the fourth SAARC Summit meeting in Islamabad, Pakistan. [photo: Richard Ellis/ Alamy Stock]
The brutal terrorist attack on 22 April 2025 in Pahalgam was reminiscent of the 1995 attack in the same beauty spot in the valley of Kashmir, where a little known militant group, Al Faran, kidnapped five western tourists. A Norwegian, Hans Christian Ostro, was beheaded, the others never found, presumed dead. The attack was also a reminder of just how long Jammu and Kashmir has been a flashpoint of hostility between India and Pakistan; since partition in 1947 its status has never been agreed, Pakistan administering one-third, India two-thirds of the state, de facto divided by a ‘line of control’ demarcating the ceasefire line where the two countries stopped fighting in their first war in 1947-49.
From the Indian perspective this latest attack was yet another example of what successive Indian governments have claimed is ‘cross-border terrorism’ and also of Pakistan’s unwillingness to control the anti-India militant groups, which they believe have safe haven in Pakistani territory. From Pakistan’s perspective, while condemning the terrorist attack, the government maintains that its role in Jammu and Kashmir has been that of a concerned neighbour, supporting the Kashmiris in their struggle for their ‘right of self determination’, as promised when the two countries agreed to a plebiscite, endorsed by the United Nations in 1948-49. Their support, following the start of the insurgency against Indian legitimacy in 1989, they maintain, has only ever been ‘moral and diplomatic’.
But neither side is blameless. Pakistan’s recent assertion by the Chief of Army Staff that Kashmir was its ‘jugular’ vein, emphasising once again the ‘two nation’ theory, was illustrative of Pakistan’s longstanding territorial claim of the state, quite apart from concern for the plight of fellow Muslims. India’s actions in Jammu and Kashmir, most notably the unilateral abrogation of Article 370 of the Indian Constitution, which safeguarded the last vestiges of autonomy, the downgrading of the state to two Union territories and attempts at demographic changes, have done nothing to endear the inhabitants of Kashmir to accepting Indian sovereignty.
Although during their hostile history there have been attempts at peaceful co-existence, these have inevitably been halted either by overt war or acts of terrorism, none of which have either helped the Kashmiris or resolved the issue. The 1999 Kargil incursion by Pakistani troops across the line of control was seen as a betrayal of trust following the Lahore declaration, when both prime ministers had agreed to intensify diplomatic efforts to resolve the Kashmir issue; the attack on the Delhi parliament in December 2001 again brought the two countries close to war; this was followed by the horrific attack in Mumbai in 2008 when, for 3 days, terrorists rampaged through several Mumbai hotels, killing and injuring over 300; then came Pathankot in 2016, when 12 were killed, Pulwama in 2019 when 40 plus the suicide bomber were killed after which, for the first time since the 1971 war (leading to the secession and independence of Bangladesh), India took retaliatory measures across the international frontier by striking alleged terrorist camps in Balakot. On this occasion, both sides pulled back when, having shot down an Indian plane, the Pakistani authorities returned the pilot unharmed.
After the latest attack in Pahalgam, instead of waiting for the perpetrators to be found and brought to justice, the Indian government yet again pointed the finger at Pakistan, firstly putting into ‘abeyance’ the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty (which had withstood earlier wars) of itself an extremely hostile (at least one commentator has said ‘immoral’) action and then initiating military strikes across the international frontier, to which Pakistan retaliated. After four days both again pulled back, a ceasefire, triumphantly tweeted by US President Trump.
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Prime Minister Modi has now warned that the next act of terrorism will be considered as an act of war; but what will be achieved by another armed conflict? The risks are colossal, with neighbouring China openly supporting Pakistan and wishing to safeguard its own economic interests in Gilgit-Baltistan and the route south to Gwadar and the Persian Gulf.
In the climate of hatred and jingoistic rhetoric, both India and Pakistan are a long way from the ‘dawn of a new era’ proclaimed by Benazir Bhutto when Rajiv Gandhi visited Islamabad in 1988. Instead their relationship is now defined by dislike of ‘the other’ which permeates inward in terms of India’s increasing discrimination against its own Muslims not only in Jammu and Kashmir but throughout the country. Instead of building on the national unity created in the aftermath of Pahalgam, when the terrorist attack was condemned by all including the Kashmiri and other Muslim communities, the Indian government chose again to malign them.
Bitterness between the two countries has now become almost endemic. Yet, until India and Pakistan – both members of the Commonwealth – determine to resolve their differences over Jammu and Kashmir, now de facto divided for over half as long as it was ever a unified whole and the root cause of their enmity, their perilous relationship will remain. To make any agreement effective they will have to involve the inhabitants of Jammu and Kashmir, mindful that there will always be extremist elements wanting to de-rail their dialogue. What the past weeks have demonstrated is that until genuine peace is established, the cycle of violence will continue, the troubled relationship always liable, as one Kashmiri said to me long ago, to have another volcanic eruption.
Victoria Schofield is the author of Kashmir in the Crossfire (1996) and Kashmir in Conflict (2000, 2003, 2010, 2021). She is a member of The Round Table’s Editorial Board.
