Since 1947, India and Pakistan have been locked in conflict over Kashmir, a majority-Muslim region in the northernmost part of India. The mountainous, 86,000-square-mile territory was once a princely state. Now, it is claimed by both India and Pakistan.
The roots of the conflict lie in the countries’ shared colonial past. From the 17th to the 20th century, Britain ruled most of the Indian subcontinent, first indirectly through the British East India Company, then from 1858 directly through the British crown. Over time, Britain’s power over its colony weakened, and a growing nationalist movement threatened the crown’s slipping rule.
Though it feared civil war between India’s Hindu majority and Muslim minority, Britain faced increasing pressure to grant independence to its colony. After World War II, Parliament decided British rule in India should end by 1948.
Britain had historically had separate electorates for Muslim citizens and reserved some political seats specifically for Muslims; that not only hemmed Muslims into a minority status, but fueled a growing Muslim separatist movement. Mohammad Ali Jinnah, a politician who headed up India’s Muslim League, began demanding a separate nation for India’s Muslim population.
“It is high time that the British Government applied their mind definitely to the division of India and the establishment of Pakistan and Hindustan, which means freedom for both,” Jinnah said in 1945.
As religious riots broke out across British India, leaving tens of thousands dead, British and Indian leaders began to seriously consider a partition of the subcontinent based on religion. On August 14, 1947, the independent, Muslim-majority nation of Pakistan was formed. The Hindu-majority independent nation of India followed the next day.
Under the hasty terms of partition, more than 550 princely states within colonial India that were not directly governed by Britain could decide to join either new nation or remain independent.
At the time, the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, which had a majority Muslim population, was governed by maharaja Hari Singh, a Hindu. Unlike most of the princely states which aligned themselves with one nation or the other, Singh wanted independence for Kashmir. To avert pressure to join either new nation, the maharaja signed a standstill agreement with Pakistan that allowed citizens of Kashmir to continue trade and travel with the new country. India did not sign a similar standstill agreement with the princely state.
As partition-related violence raged across the two new nations, the government of Pakistan pressured Kashmir to join it. Pro-Pakistani rebels, funded by Pakistan, took over much of western Kashmir, and in September 1947, Pashtun tribesmen streamed over the border from Pakistan into Kashmir. Singh asked for India’s help in staving off the invasion, but India responded that, in order to gain military assistance, Kashmir would have to accede to India, thus becoming part of the new country.
Singh agreed and signed the Instrument of Accession, the document that aligned Kashmir with the Dominion of India, in October 1947. Kashmir was later given special status within the Indian constitution—a status which guaranteed that Kashmir would have independence over everything but communications, foreign affairs, and defense. This special status was revoked by the Indian government in August 2019.
The maharaja's fateful decision to align Kashmir with India ushered in decades of conflict in the contested region, including two wars and a longstanding insurgency.
Editor's Note: This story has been updated to reflect the current political situation in Kashmir.
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The sovereign states of India and Pakistan came to a loggerhead almost from the inception of their creation and independence. The traditional analysis of this veritable civil war—the inhabitants of these two neighboring states constituted a single political nation as subjects of the British Empire prior to 1947—has focused on three themes: communalism, colonialism, and nationalism.1 While all three have contributed to the conflictual relationship between the two countries, none of them, singly, can provide its definitive cause. This essay seeks to provide a succinct analysis of the origins and odyssey of this conflict and suggest some speculation as to its future resolution.
Theories abound surrounding the division of the subcontinent along religious lines. While official Pakistani historiography highlights the so-called “two nation” theory—the Hindus and the Muslims are two distinct communities or nations, each needing its own polity—nationalist historians of India blame colonial politics for the partition.2 A history of modern South Asia, published a decade ago, seeks to look beyond the politico-religious categorizations into “the contradictions and structural peculiarities of Indian society and politics of late colonial India” with a view to probing the pressures and politics behind the decision to partition British India into two adversarial nations.3
The late Pakistani intellectual Hamza Alavi argued that “virtually every significant religious group in Undivided India, indeed the entire Muslim religious establishment,” opposed the Pakistan movement of the Muslim League (1906).4 Even some Muslim intellectuals and political activists wrote and strove for modernization and reformation of the Muslims, calling for ijtihad (the jihad of the mind), with little patience for the ranting mullahs or the idea of an Islamic or Muslim state.5
However, communalism, an imprecise and ambiguous term that in South Asia can encompass both sectarian and cultural conflicts between Hindus and Muslims, did function as an important factor behind the idea of Muslim nationhood. Such an idea took hold of a class of English educated upper class Muslims (ashraf or mujahir) employed in the expanding colonial government, the so-called Muslim “salariat,” of the Punjab, the UP (United Provinces renamed Uttar Pradesh after independence), Bengal, and Sind.6 They sought sanctuary and security in the ranking colonial service that was alarmingly shrinking for the natives following the Great Mutiny of 1857.
Even the seminary educated, anti-colonial, priestly caste of the Sunni Hanafi school of Islamic jurisprudence in the UP, considered themselves Indian nationalists rather than upholders of an Islamic or Muslim state. The Muslims, like other religious groups, were bound and loyal to the nation of their birth. As a distinguished historian argues, “however profound the distinction between Hindus and Muslims may have been, the common ‘Hindi’ sentiment . . . incorporated the ‘Hindus’ and the ‘Muslims’ as the communities constituting the Hindian empire of Akbar (r. 1556–1606) and his successors.”7 This sentiment inspired the Great Mutiny of 1857 in which the Hindu and Muslim sepoys rebelled against their common enemy, the British East India Company.
Admittedly, some Hindus of late colonial India appeared to harbor a communal consciousness or even the two-nation theory. The celebrated novelist and intellectual, Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, equated Hindu consciousness with nation building. Even though later in life Bankim refined his stand on communal harmony, he continued to consider the Muslims as haters of Hindu gods.8
In his critique of Bankim’s celebrated lyric Bandemataram (Hail Motherland, also Mother Goddess), Soumitra De observes that the Mother Goddess imagery alienated the Muslims, who regarded it as idolatrous.9 Even Bankim’s admirer, Aurobindo Ghosh, shrewdly observed that the Hindu formed the base and center of the Indian nationality of his day.10
Long before Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s notoriously misunderstood “Two Nations Theory” (January 19, 1940) that argued for equality among the Indian Muslims and Hindus, Vinayak D. Savarkar, the founding father of the Hindu Mahasabha (formed in 1915 as a Hindu counterpart of the Muslim League founded in 1906), articulated the same concept in his article “Hindutwa” in 1923. The next year another leader of the Hindu Mahasabha, Lala Lajpat Rai, wrote in The Tribune about “a clear partition of India into a Muslim India and a non-Muslim India.”11
Such ethnic and communal consciousness found an echo in the racial vision of Herbert H. Risley, ethnographer, commissioner for the 1901 census, and author of The People of India.12 He highlighted the efficacy of the Hindu caste system with a view toward advising the government against imposing modernity on the caste-ridden Indian society that was basically apolitical and apathetic to change. Risley’s racial vision helped the construction of caste identities and communalism in India. In a 1903 letter to the governments of Bengal, Assam, the Central Provinces, and Madras Risley, as home secretary, proposed Bengal’s partition into two provinces—Eastern Bengal, and Assam and Bengal.
Risley’s letter, published in the India Gazette, provoked widespread public discussion and protests throughout Bengal.13 It became clear to the intellectuals and the nationalists of Calcutta that the scheme for the partition of Bengal aimed to consolidate and separate the Bengali Muslims in Eastern Bengal, and to amalgamate the Bengali Hindus and the inhabitants of Bihar to the west and Orissa to the south, in the newly proposed Bengal. Risley’s unspoken motive became transparent in the explanation provided by the British Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, who carried into effect the Partition of Bengal in 1905. Curzon explained to his superiors in London that he wanted to dethrone Calcutta “from its place as the centre of successful intrigue” against the British rule.14 Risley supported the Muslim League formed in 1906, and was instrumental in the award of separate electorates for Muslims in the 1909 Indian Council Act. “It was this award of separate electorates in 1909,” writes Nicholas Dirks, “that set the stage for the demand of Pakistan and the eventual partition of the subcontinent.”15
From the partition of Bengal to the partition of the subcontinent, the years 1905 to 1947 witnessed colonial repression of the nationalist demands of the Indians, as well as the tragic triumph of the hydra-headed communalism that splintered and weakened the nationalist struggle.16 Thus, India and Pakistan locked horns from the instance of their birth that was preceded by large scale communal bloodshed and followed by massive migrations and the resultant colossal refugee problems.17 The bone of Indo-Pakistani contentions is of course the erstwhile princely state of Kashmir, part of which was forcibly incorporated into the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and part into the Republic of India. Thus Kashmir remains the prize coveted by Pakistan since 1947. As “the fear of Hindu domination . . . engendered the first seeds of the demand for Pakistan” in the 1940s, almost six decades later, the superior military and economic power of India has “now translated into fears regarding the Indian threat to Pakistan’s survival.”18 What follows is a critical review of the veritable civil war between the two countries whose peoples once belonged to the same polity—the British Indian empire.
Under the scheme of partition provided by the Indian Independence Act of 1947, Kashmir—one of the 550 princely states of British India and ruled by the Hindu Maharaja Hari Singh, and geographically as well as strategically situated between India and Pakistan—was given the option to accede to either country. On October 22, 1947, the Muslim inhabitants of northern Kashmir, clamoring for Azad Kashmir (Free Kashmir) and joined by the tribals from the North-West Frontier sent by Pakistan, agitated against the possible accession to India. The Maharaja sought asylum in India and, reportedly, signed the Instrument of Accession on October 27. Subsequently, the military forces of Pakistan and India were deployed on both sides of the international border for a showdown, though no war was formally declared by either state. This was the context for the First Kashmir War during the fall and early winter of 1947.
On January 17, 1948, the United Nations Security Council established the UN Commission for India and Pakistan (UNCIP) to mediate the dispute. It proposed ceasefire, demilitarization, and plebiscite on January 5, 1949. In April, the Security Council enlarged the membership of UNCIP, and on July 27, India and Pakistan signed the Karachi Agreement, which established a ceasefire line (CFL) along the international India-Pakistan border—a 700 kilometer line from Chammb in the south to Ladakh at map reference point NJ 9842—to be supervised by the UN Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan (UNMOGIP).19 A part of Kashmir bordering Pakistan (including the hilly northern region) covering an area of more than five thousand square miles and encompassing nearly one million people came to be known as Azad Jammu and Kashmir, with its capital at Muzaffarabad, under the indirect rule by Pakistan. On March 10, 1951, UNCIP was terminated by the Security Council, though UNMOGIP continued its task of military observation.
The defeat of the Indian army by China during the 1962 Sino-Indian border conflict was seen by Pakistan as a window of opportunity to achieve their aim to recover territory by force during the period when India had become demoralized. This military calculation of Pakistan’s president Field Marshal Ayub Khan appeared to be realizable in the context of serious sectarian disturbances in Kashmir, especially between 1962 and 1964, when the region’s Muslim population felt growing resentment of Indian control.
Pakistan’s military began a probe in a disputed border zone with India—the Rann of Kutch, a 10,000 square mile salt marsh between the Gulf of Kutch and the Indus River basin. Several border skirmishes in the Rann escalated into a veritable war—the second Indo-Pak war—in April 1965, but came to a close on June 30, thanks to British intervention and the formation, under the aegis of the UN, of an arbitral tribunal (December 14, 1965) that three years later would award some 350 square miles of the land to Pakistan.
The relatively weak Indian response and performance in the Battle of the Rann of Kutch encouraged the Pakistani military to settle the Kashmir question on the battlefield. A secret guerrilla operation in the Indian-occupied Kashmir, launched on May 26 and codenamed Operation Gibraltor, escalated into a full-scale battle along the CFL on August 15, but was routed by the Indian forces. Later in the month, the Pakistani army counterattacked the Indian military near Tithwal, Uri-Bedore, and Poonch, followed by an Indian thrust into Azad Kashmir and occupation of a number of Pakistani mountain positions near the Kargil area, including the Haji Pir Pass. However, toward the latter half of September, the battle, especially the tank battle at Sialkot, staggered in a stalemate.
On September 4, 1965, the UN called for a ceasefire and asked the governments of India and Pakistan to cooperate with the task of supervising the observance of the ceasefire. Early in September, the UN Secretary General visited the subcontinent and wrote to the Security Council on September 16 about the sheer difficulty of reaching a peaceful agreement between India and Pakistan because of their insistence on mutually unacceptable conditions. On September 20, after the hostilities spread to the international borders between India and West Pakistan, the Security Council demanded a ceasefire. They increased the number of members of UNMOGIP and established a temporary administrative adjunct of this body, the UN India-Pakistan Observation Mission (UNIPOM), to ensure supervision of the cease-fire and withdrawal of forces of both countries from the Rann of Kutch to Kashmir.
The cease-fire resolutions continued to be violated by both belligerents, and the Security Council met several times from late September through early November 1965. The special UN envoy met with the representatives of India and Pakistan, and on December 26, 1965, the cease-fire was achieved. Following a meeting at Tashkent in the Soviet Union in January 1966, India and Pakistan agreed to withdraw all armed personnel by February 25 to positions existing before the war. The next day, February 26, India and Pakistan withdrew their troops. The UNIPOM was disbanded on March 22.20
Image source: //www.hinduonnet.com/af/india60/stories/2007081560031000.htm.
The Tashkent Conference was followed by a political turmoil in Pakistan. Failure in the 1965 war discredited President Khan, who stepped down and was replaced by Pakistan’s Chief of Army Staff, General Yahya Khan. Meanwhile, a democratic movement had swept both the western and eastern part of the bifurcated state of Pakistan. Bhutto founded the Pakistan People’s Party with a quasi-socialist agenda in 1967 in the midst of postwar economic debacle, exacerbated further by violent student riots, but these did not deter Pakistan’s first democratic election in October 1970. The election resulted in the total victory of the Awami League, the political party of the Bengali-speaking Muslims founded in Dhaka in 1949, in East Pakistan, thereby destroying the dominance of the Pakistan People’s Party. The election also provided an opportunity for the Bengali Muslims of East Pakistan to escalate their long-standing demand for regional autonomy. The subsequent negotiations for power-sharing between East and West Pakistan reached an impasse, whereupon the Yahya government deployed massive military force against the East. On March 1, 1971, after the Martial Law Administrator replaced the civilian governor of East Pakistan and following the adjournment of the meeting of the Constituent Assembly, ethnic riots erupted and many Hindi-speaking Muslims (migrants from the state of Bihar in eastern India) were massacred.
Beginning on March 25, and continuing over the course of the succeeding months, about ten million Bengali Muslim refugees fled to India. This huge population influx became a threat to India’s security and hence Indian intervention in the predicament of East Pakistan. Indian decision-makers also found it expedient to render Pakistan weak by helping the east secede from the west and thus demonstrate the weakness of Islam to cohere as a state. As a scholar commented, “if the bonds of Islam could not ensure national integration then what claim, if any, did Pakistan have to the Muslim-majority state of Kashmir?”21 India signed the Treaty of Peace, Cooperation and Friendship with the Soviet Union on August 9. Assured of Soviet support in and outside of the UN, India finally declared war on December 3.
This Indo-Pakistan War (aka Bangladesh War) also involved the two superpowers. The US dispatched massive naval support to Pakistan in the Arabian Sea in the West and in the Bay of Bengal to the East. Consequently, the Soviet Union sent six battleships to the Indian Ocean. For a time it seemed as if the two Cold War rivals would engage in a proxy war. But the crisis passed away following an unconditional surrender of the Pakistani forces to the Indian army in Dhaka on December 16. The following Simla Accord between India and Pakistan (June 28 to July 2, 1972) resulted in the release of 93,000 Pakistani soldiers held by India as Prisoners of War, resumption of diplomatic relations between the two countries, and reiteration of their commitment to desist from the use of force in settling the Kashmir dispute. They also agreed to rename the 1948 CFL as LoC (Line of Control). Pakistan lost its eastern half to the new nation state of Bangladesh on December 16, 1971.
exchanging documents after signing the Lahore Declaration. Image source: //www.tribuneindia.com/2003/20030130/edit.htm.
In the last quarter of the twentieth century, there were a number of regional developments, including Indian government internal crises such as Indira Gandhi’s Emergency rule, the Sikh insurgency, the assassination of Indira, and the declaration of the state of Khalistan. Also, the nuclear race between India and Pakistan, and the rise of Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front-inspired terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir, all aggravated Indo-Pakistan relations.
The LoC remained a point of controversy between the two nations. In 1984, India occupied the commanding heights of the strategic Siachen glacier in Ladakh. Pakistan’s demand that Indian forces withdraw from their positions and accept the boundary as was applicable in 1972 was countered by India’s insistence that Pakistan accept the Saltoro Ridge in the Karakoram range as the line of control. The contentious issue persists.
In April 1990, the Indian government became concerned over the intelligence received in New Delhi on Pakistani troop movements along the LoC in Kashmir. Consequently, the Indian government decided to increase its defense budget and publicize new threats from Pakistan and its strategic ally, the People’s Republic of China. Meanwhile, the Kashmir Valley was rocked by political violence. Pakistan officially accused India of mounting a massive striking force on the Indo-Pakistan borders between Bikaner and Rajasthan and responded to the Indian moves by calling up its military reserves by the end of the month. Fortunately, this brinkmanship was called off by both sides.
This sensible restraint and subsequent attempts at bilateral negotiations in New York notwithstanding, relations between the two countries remained strained throughout the early 1990s and even aggravated in May 1998 when they tested a series of nuclear weapons as a show of force.22 The UN Security Council communiqué of June 4 condemned the nuclear tests, expressed deep concern about the danger to peace and stability in the region, and urged “maximum restraint” and “mutually acceptable solutions that address the root causes of those tensions, including Kashmir.”23 Regrettably, despite the Indo-Pakistan agreement on February 26, 1999 (Lahore Declaration), India test-fired its new long-range Agni missile on April 11, 1999, followed by Pakistan’s medium-range Shaheen missile on April 14 and 15.24
Indo-Pakistan relations deteriorated further during the summer of 1999. The Pakistan-backed Kashmiri militant forces (Hizbul Mujahideen) crossed the LoC and occupied territories on the Indian side of the line. Reportedly, Pakistani forces disguised as local Mujahideen endeavored to sever the Srinagar-Leh highway at Kargil and alter the status of the LoC. Most probably, Pakistan felt emboldened by its nuclear shield to raise the Kashmir issue. General Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan threatened to teach India an unforgettable lesson, and the chief of India’s army warned: “it may not be applicable next year.”25 The Kargil conflict lasted from June 6, when India launched its Operation Vijay, to late July, when 464 militants, 725 Pakistan regular soldiers, and 474 Indian soldiers were killed, and a few thousand were wounded on each side. The Pakistani infiltrators began retreating from Kargil on July 11 and India recaptured the key peaks at Batalik. On July 12, the Pakistani Premier Nawaz Sharif proposed talks with the Indian Premier Atal Behari Vajpayee. Throughout the Kargil conflict, the US government remained steadfastly critical of Pakistan’s provocation, and the determined stance of President Bill Clinton helped bring the otherwise intractable Pakistan government to its senses.
The Kargil odyssey had an unsettling impact on the Pakistan military vis-à-vis the Pakistan government. In the estimation of the late former Premier Benazir Bhutto, “Kargil had been Pakistan’s biggest blunder . . . The Indian government . . . outsmarted, outmaneuvered, and outflanked the Pakistani leadership at every level.”26 The hawkish General Musharraf ended the discredited civilian government of Nawaz Sharif in a coup d’etat on October 14, 1999. He sought to mediate between the Kashmiri militants and separatists and the Indian government, but had little effect. However, with the emergence of Jaish-e-Muhammad, joined by the already active extremist group Lashkar-e-Toiba (and especially following the fall of the Taliban government in Afghanistan in 2001) Pakistan, together with Azad Kashmir and the United Front of Afghanistan, have become the hub of terrorists.27
In fact, on December 13, 2001, just a couple of months following the September 11 carnage in the United States, the Lashkar and Jaish suicide squad attacked the Parliament House in New Delhi killing nine people.28 This incident was followed seven years later with more than ten coordinated shooting and bombing attacks across Mumbai, including the terrible bomb attack on the famous hotel, Taj Mahal Palace and Tower, that lasted from November 26 to 29, killing nearly two hundred people and wounding over three hundred.29 Although both occasions brought India and Pakistan to the brink, sober judgments on the part of the two countries prevailed and open confrontations averted.
As to an assessment of the political, military, and diplomatic behaviors of both countries, India was criticized in 2003 for aspiring to a big power status in South Asia and for “showing [India’s] . . . military prowess through arms purchases, joint military exercises . . . and their economic strength.”30 Nevertheless, since 2001 the Indian government has pursued a forward-looking economic policy. This has resulted in increased domestic prosperity, expanded globalization, and political elites opting for policies of negotiation and diplomacy regarding Pakistan.
Unfortunately, Pakistan’s military regime invested in its military establishments and in training and equipping terrorists in the surrounding regions. Consequently, Pakistan’s economy is in shambles and its jingoism has been a politics of despair. Since September 2008, with an elected democratic government under the presidency of the Pakistan People’s Party leader Asif Ali Zardari, the country has been fighting against the Taliban terrorists, intent on destroying its fledgling civilian government and capturing its nuclear arsenal.31 The time may be ripe to begin the process for a rapprochement between the two neighbors. While Indian use of force has to reckon with domestic political concerns and pressures, Pakistan’s response could prove to be problematic because of its deep connection with militant Islam, its two-nation theory based claims on Kashmir, and reliance of its national identity in an ongoing conflict with India.
1. See David Gilman, “Partition, Pakistan, and South Asian History: In Search of a Narrative,” The Journal of Asian Studies, LVII, 4 (1998), especially 1073–1081.
2. For the two-nation theory, see “The 2-Nation Theory and Partition: A Historical Overview,” online at //india_resource.tripod.com/hist-2nation.html (revised 2009), accessed July 27, 2009.
3. Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002), 165.
4. Hamza Alavi, “Partition of India: Pakistan and Islam,” Pak Tea House, April 22, 2009, online at //pakteahouse.wordpress.com/2009/04/22/partition-of-india-pakistan-and-islam/, accessed July 3, 2009.
5. See Ayesha Jalal, Partisans of Allah: Jihad in South Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), ch. 5.
6. For a definition of the “salariat” see Alavi, “Partition of India.”
7. Rajat Kanta Ray, The Felt Community: Commonalty and Mentality before the Emergence of Indian Nationalism (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003), 22.
8. Narasingha P. Sil, “Bankim Redivivus: An Appraisal,” The Calcutta Historical Journal, XXVII, 1 (2007), 17.
9. Nationalism and Separatism in Bengal: A Study of India’s Partition (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing Pvt. Ltd., 1992), 204.
10. Cited in Tara Chand, History of the Freedom Movement in India, 4 vols. (New Delhi: Publication Division, Government of India, 1972) III, 163.
11. See A.G. Noorani, “The Partition of India,” Frontline, XVIII, 26 (December 22, 2001–January 4, 2002). See also Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
12. H.H. Risley, The People of India (London: Thacker, 1908).
13. For the text of Risley’s letter, see Nityapriya Ghosh and Ashoke Mohopadhyaya, eds., Partition of Bengal: Significant Signposts (Kolkata: Sahitya Samsad, 2005), 1–16.
14. Cited in Anil C. Banerjee, The New History of Modern India 1707–1947 (1983. Rpt. Calcutta: K.P. Bagchi & Company, 1992), 583.
15. Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 227.
16. See Gyan Prakash, “Secular Nationalism, Hindutwa, and the Minority,” Crisis of Secularism in India, in Anuradha D. Needham and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, eds. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 185, 187.
17. For a history of the partition, see Bose and Jalal, Modern South Asia, ch. 11; Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, From Plassey to Partition: A History of Modern India (Himayatnagar: Orient Longman Private Limited, 2004), ch. 8; Ranbir Vohra, The Making of India: A Historical Survey (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1997), ch. 6.
18. Tapan Raychaudhuri, Perceptions, Emotions, Sensibilities: Essays on India’s Colonial and Post-colonial Experiences (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 234.
19. Beyond Point 9842 lies the Siachen Glacier (75 km x 2-8 km) covering about 10,000 square kilometers in the Karakoram Range beyond which the Indo-Pakistan border is not demarcated.
20. The Indo-Pakistan wars discussed in this section are based partly on Narasingha P. Sil, “India-Pakistan Conflict prompts U.N. Peacekeeping Response” in Great Events from History: The Twentieth Century, 1941–1970 (Pasadena: Salem Press, 2008), 2071–2073.
21. Sumit Ganguly, Conflict Unending: India-Pakistan Tensions Since 1947 (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2001), 52.
22. Ibid, ch. 5 and notes.
23. Press Release/SC 6528 (June 6, 1998) “Security Council Condemns Nuclear Tests by India and Pakistan,” online at //www.un.org/news/press/docs/1998/sc6528.doc.htm, accessed July 26, 2009. India exploded five nuclear weapons at Pokhran in Rajasthan, and Pakistan responded by test firing its new Ghauri intermediate range missile, in addition to further testing the so-called Islamic Bomb in southwestern Baluchistan.
24. By 2002, India would boast sixty operational nuclear weapons and Pakistan, thirty to forty.
25. Rob Johnson, A Region in Turmoil: South Asian Conflicts Since 1947 (London: Reaktion Books, 2005), 107. General Malik of course meant that Pakistan would be so badly damaged the next time that Musharraf ’s promise would be ridiculously redundant.
26. The Asian Age (August 5, 1999), online at //www.jammu-kashmir.com/archives/archives1999/99august05.html, accessed July 5, 2009.
27. For a succinct analysis of how the Indo-Pakistan conflict was intertwined with the Afghan war see Raj Mishra, “Geopolitics and Indo-Pak Conflict,”(lecture, Johns Hopkins University (September 27, 2003), 8–15 at //www.geocities.com/aipsg/geopol1103.html, accessed June 23, 2009.
28. See Purnima Tripathy, “Terror in Parliament House,” Frontline, XVIII, 26 (December 22, 2001–January 4, 2002).
29. See Samrat Sinha, “Major Terrorist Attacks in India (2000–2006): A Profile,” Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies Special Report 27 (July 2006); Salman Masood, “Pakistan Backtracks on Link to Mumbai Attacks,” The New York Times (February 12, 2009).
NARASINGHA P. SIL, Professor of European History at Western Oregon University, studied at Calcutta University and University of Oregon, obtaining his PhD in the history of Tudor England and Early Modern Europe from the latter institution. He has published several monographs and numerous articles and book reviews on English, European, Indian, and African history in presses and journals around the globe.