The bloody terrorist attack carried out by unidentified perpetrators on April 22 in the Indian Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir fits squarely into the broader picture of growing turbulence in the current phase of the “Great Global Game.”
The Kashmir Problem in Context
This is not an expression of the author’s position, but rather an attempt to decode the message that accompanied the attack. And even that interpretation is not without foundation, considering a series of government actions in recent years that have consistently provoked protests from both India’s Muslim community and neighboring Pakistan. These include the August 2019 revocation of Jammu and Kashmir’s special status and its downgrade. About 70% of the population in that region are Muslims. The passage of amendments to the citizenship law, widely perceived by Muslims as discriminatory, also triggered unrest.
Similar consequences followed the adoption, as recently as April this year, of amendments to legislation governing a category of special property (waqf), which until now had been under the control of Muslim communities. This immediately sparked deadly riots in the state of West Bengal.
At the root of it all lies the nearly 80-year legacy of the first Indo-Pakistani war of 1947–1948, after which 60% of the former princely state of Kashmir came under Indian military control. Pakistan has never accepted Kashmir’s accession to India, just as India does not recognize Pakistan’s claim to the remaining part of the territory.
Among the weekly stream of reports about similar “incidents” in Jammu and Kashmir, what sets this particular terrorist attack apart is both the number of victims and the fact that they were random civilians.
It is increasingly common today to hear the view that all the tragedies in Indo-Pakistani relations stem from the very framework of the 1947 Mountbatten Plan for granting independence to what was then British India. In truth, the plan merely formalized a religious split that had already occurred a decade earlier within the once-unified Indian independence movement. Every tragedy that has followed is a direct consequence of that division.
In commentary on the recent attack, some have noted that U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance happened to be in India at the time. This has prompted speculation that the attack was another move in the war allegedly being waged by the “anti-Trump faction based in London,” which used the terrorists as unwitting pawns. But such claims remain in the realm of conjecture and theories about “Anglo-Saxon conspiracies.”
It’s unclear why the authors of such hypotheses are so discontented with the Anglo-Saxons — a rather likeable and self-deprecatingly witty people.
When analyzing global events, it is best to follow the principle of “not multiplying entities unnecessarily.” In this case, locally grounded “entities” are more than sufficient.
Pakistan Faces Its Own Deep Internal Struggles
From the Indian government’s point of view, the most important of these “entities” is Pakistan. Commentators recalled the much larger 2008 Mumbai attack, whose perpetrators arrived by sea from Pakistan.
That attack, along with several other developments in Indo-Pakistani relations, has sparked debate over how much control the Pakistani state exercises over groups fighting for the “liberation of Kashmir.” The Pakistani government openly declares that “the people of Kashmir have the right to self-determination,” citing a series of UN Security Council resolutions from the 1950s that called for a plebiscite in the region.
The deeper problem lies in Pakistan’s own internal fault lines, which are many and threaten the very fabric of its statehood. India is now one of the world’s major players, and anything that happens there quickly enters the global news cycle. But the long-running conflict in Pakistan’s Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provinces — with thousands of casualties — rarely garners international attention. Pakistan often accuses Indian intelligence of direct involvement in that conflict.
In such conditions, Pakistan’s military and intelligence agencies occupy a “special position” within the country’s governance structure, arguably serving as the only real guarantors of its territorial integrity. And the “official authorities” are unlikely to concern themselves with just how closely their intelligence services collaborate with various groups fighting “for the rights of oppressed co-religionists in India.”
It is also worth noting how this “specialness” of Pakistani statehood sometimes works against its own national interests. A clear example was the military leadership’s sabotage of the Lahore Declaration signed in 1999, which had laid out a roadmap for resolving key bilateral issues — including the Kashmir question.
Another Escalation in Indo-Pakistani Relations
In the wake of the recent attack in Indian Kashmir, there is no sign of any intent to improve ties between India and Pakistan. Quite the contrary — things took a sharply negative turn after some members of India’s government declared that “Pakistan will not get a single drop of water now.”
This brings to mind the acute nature of the global “water crisis” in the South Asian subregion — not just in cross-border disputes, but within Pakistan itself, a country of nearly 250 million people. Recently, the proposed construction of a canal in the Punjab province sparked heated debate. Unsurprisingly, Pakistan interpreted India’s threats to cut off water as an outright act of war — between two nuclear powers, no less.
Amid this grim backdrop, one positive development was the expression of solidarity with India by several Muslim-majority countries in the aftermath of the attack. Iran and Saudi Arabia offered to mediate in hopes of defusing a looming crisis. Another constructive gesture came from Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, who called for a “neutral investigation” into the terrorist attack in Indian Kashmir.
To all those affected by this tragedy, we wish strength and sound judgment. They will be essential in navigating the dangerous crossroads that now confront two nuclear-armed nations.
Vladimir Terekhov, expert on the issues of the Asia-Pacific region
