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India’s Unfinished Business with War and Peace
Saba Naqvi
The past can hold clues to an uncertain future. Indira Gandhi was hailed for India’s decisive victory in the 1971 war with Pakistan, leading to the birth of Bangladesh. She had seemed invincible then, but in that victory also lay the seeds of her destruction. The Congress became a party built around a “Supreme Leader”, which eventually turned out to be bad for its health, and the cost of war jolted the economy as inflation went through the roof. In a few years, there were mass movements against Indira Gandhi, and by June-end in 1975, she had imposed the Emergency. In 1987, her son Rajiv Gandhi would send Indian forces to help the Sri Lankan state in its war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). That decision was widely considered a historical blunder, and Rajiv died in a suicide bombing attack by the LTTE in 1991.
During the tenure of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, India’s first Prime Minister from the BJP, there were genuine efforts to forge a legacy of peace. Instead, he faced the brief Kargil War of 1999, triggered by Pakistani incursions into Indian territory. It was India’s first televised war, and the courage of the soldiers who reclaimed Kargil’s peaks became the stuff of lore. Vajpayee’s own image shone, and the National Democratic Alliance led by him secured a majority in the election that followed, eventually becoming the first coalition to complete a full term.
The Vajpayee years also saw the largest military mobilisation on the India-Pakistan border since 1971. This came after the attack on the Indian Parliament in December 2001. Operation Parakram lasted 10 months and claimed the lives of nearly 800 soldiers in accidents and mine-clearing operations, without actual combat (527 soldiers had died in combat at Kargil).
It was at this time that Narendra Modi became Chief Minister of Gujarat. Operation Parakram began two months into his first term, and it was against this backdrop that the Gujarat riots of 2002 took place. During the communally charged election campaign that Modi led, he repeatedly invoked “Mian Musharraf” (the Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharraf), often while pointing toward Muslim villages and neighbourhoods—dog-whistling to equate Muslims with Pakistan, and thereby with enemies of the nation. It was, therefore, significant that Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif attended Modi’s first swearing-in as Prime Minister on May 26, 2014. At Rashtrapati Bhavan that hot summer evening, I knew I was witnessing history in the making with Modi’s ascent. The presence of Sharif was a significant side story that day. Although different from Vajpayee, Modi may have briefly explored walking in the BJP veteran’s path; so much so that, in 2015, he made an unexpected, unscheduled visit to Pakistan to greet Sharif on his birthday, December 25, which, coincidentally, was also Vajpayee’s birthday.
First Uri, then Pulwama
But all goodwill was gone the following year when militants attacked an Air Force base in Pathankot in Punjab in January. Later that year, 19 Indian soldiers were killed, mostly while sleeping in their tents, by encroachers at Uri, at the Indian Army brigade headquarters near the Line of Control in Baramulla, Kashmir. Indian commandos hit back by crossing the LoC, later claiming to have destroyed several terrorist launch pads. This was the first of what the BJP began to refer to as “surgical strikes”.
The next one came in 2019, after the Pulwama terror attack that killed 40 Central Reserve Police Force personnel. A surgical strike followed in Balakot across the border, and the nation rallied around the leader. It was also an election year, and Modi won his second term as Prime Minister, with his party’s vote share increasing to 37.36 per cent, its highest ever.
The question now is, what will follow the merciless killing of 25 Hindu tourists in Kashmir Valley? First, there is the legacy concern as two big policy decisions of the Modi regime—demonetisation and the removal of the special status of Jammu and Kashmir—have failed to control terrorism despite loud claims to the contrary. What is more, the security sweeps in the Kashmir Valley after the Pahalgam attack suggested the involvement of local facilitators even though the plot was hatched in Pakistan. Voices have been raised over the intelligence failure, which falls under the Centre’s purview.
The India-Pakistan-Kashmir triangle
For all the tall claims of normalcy, the Pahalgam incident is a reminder that nothing is resolved in the India-Pakistan-Kashmir triangle. It is just another bloody chapter. Ideologically, the RSS-BJP Hindutva fantasy includes Akhand Bharat, or a reunified subcontinent, and unfurling the saffron flag in Islamabad. The two-nation theory, that Hindus and Muslims are separate nations, underpins the existence of Pakistan and was recently restated by that country’s army chief, General Asim Munir, in a widely circulated and controversial speech. But the argument that Hindus and Muslims were distinct national identities was also made by V.D. Savarkar, the ideologue of the Hindu Right, in 1937, three years before Muhammad Ali Jinnah articulated it in the Lahore session of the Muslim League where the resolution calling for the creation of Pakistan was moved.
Savarkar, however, sought Hindu domination in an undivided land, while Jinnah sought a separate nation. The BJP and RSS may pay lip service to the idea of India’s secular Constitution, but they seek to bend society, law, street power, and electoral campaigns for a majoritarian state, a de facto Hindu Rashtra against Muslim Pakistan. The bloodbath in Pahalgam does indeed increase anti-Muslim feelings across India, and in the week after the incident, around 20 incidents of hate crimes were reported. As the ruling party, the BJP seeks polarisation but not complete anarchy or civil war, but that is hard to calibrate.
At this time when emotions are fraught and TV anchors are thumping the table demanding a final solution, what can realistically happen? It is hard to predict: the first surgical strike took place 11 days after the attack on the military base at Uri, while the Balakot operation came 12 days after the Pulwama attack. As I was writing this piece, military exchanges on the LoC were escalating, and India had cancelled all visas and suspended the Indus Water Treaty.
Meanwhile, as part of the televised ritual on Indian news channels, some anchors and security analysts are demanding that India behave like Israel and demolish Pakistan, ignoring the fact that Palestine is not a nuclear-armed state as Pakistan is and, indeed, not a state at all but a territory monitored by Israel. Besides, the war in Gaza has taken a heavy toll on Israel, with a contraction in its GDP, a notable increase in emigration, and the psychological trauma of living in a state of constant war. A Pakistani Minister has, meanwhile, said that his country has 130 nuclear warheads aimed at India.
India these days looks relatively stable though the world is in turmoil following the re-election of US President Donald Trump and his upending of the rules-based order. An outright war with Pakistan, which is actually in a mess, would only indirectly pit us against China, one of the world’s largest economies. China has strategic investments in the Belt and Road corridor that runs through Pakistan and is also committed to defending the latter.
The day after the Pahalgam strike, the Prime Minister addressed a public meeting in Bihar where he suddenly switched from Hindi to English to say that India would “identify, track, and punish every terrorist”: “We will pursue them to the ends of the earth.” War rhetoric is different from real war. Yet, given the BJP leadership’s commitment to optics, some sort of controlled military action is certainly on the table.
(Saba Naqvi is a Delhi-based journalist and author of four books who writes on politics and identity issues. Courtesy: Frontline magazine, a fortnightly English language magazine published by The Hindu Group of publications headquartered in Chennai, India.)
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The Questions after Pahalgam are Not New—What’s New is the Refusal to Learn
Radha Kumar
The horrific mass murder of tourists in Kashmir’s Pahalgam has given rise to a number of questions: Was there an intelligence failure? Or was it a security lapse? Was it planned by Pakistan-based terrorist groups and supported by Pakistan’s chaotic deep state? Or did the former act on their own, in tandem with Kashmiri volunteers? These questions will, I hope, be answered as investigators dig deeper.
Some answers are already partially available. There was intelligence about an attack being planned but no information about where, when or on whom. Whether more precise intelligence could have been obtained is debatable since no country has a strong track record of getting counterterrorism intelligence right all or even most of the time. Whether the intelligence was sufficient for the Home Ministry to act on is a separate question and one that deserves serious attention. Clearly, the ministry overlooked the threat that might be posed by an unguarded Baisaran meadow, insofar as it did not seek to reinstate the Central Reserve Police Force post that was removed in January 2025.
That this omission occurred when Home Minister Amit Shah had conducted two reviews of security in Kashmir, the second only days before the Pahalgam attack, also raises questions of the ministry’s competence. Even allowing for the startling admission that officials thought the meadow was closed to tourists, there were security steps that could have been taken, such as a general advisory to residents and tourists to stay away or stay at home. It is difficult, therefore, to avoid the conclusion that our authorities hold our own people’s lives cheap.
The next set of questions revolve around how the Narendra Modi administration should or is going to react. Clearly, the measures announced by officials, such as putting the Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance or revoking visas, are preliminary, but what will follow is still a matter of speculation. Most security experts believe it will involve some form of military action, but they also stress that military action should be part of a calibrated and long-term strategic plan, not a one-off response such as the cross-Line of Control surgical strikes or targeted attack on Balakot. Many would also agree that the harassment of Kashmiris and other Indian Muslims in the aftermath of Pahalgam—most of it in BJP-ruled States—is not only appalling in itself but also runs the risk of furthering the terrorists’ goal of polarising Indian Hindus and Muslims and exacerbating India’s security vulnerabilities.
The Modi administration appears to be aware of this risk. The demolitions of houses of suspected terrorists have been halted, and some BJP and RSS leaders are speaking a new language of unity. At the same time, however, they accuse opposition parties and independent commentators of playing into Pakistani hands when they ask vital questions about security lapses. FIRs have been filed against two popular social media figures, both women, for doing so. Attempts to suppress discussion on key security issues are not only signs of psychological insecurity, they also undermine the drive for reform, indeed distract from it.
None of the questions that are being asked is new; many were asked by the BJP itself when in opposition. It may, therefore, be worth revisiting how they have been handled in the past. Undoubtedly, the greatest progress in tackling cross-border terrorism was made during Manmohan Singh’s administration after the 2008 Mumbai attacks, which matched the 9/11 attack in the US in scale, if not technology, and were marked by intelligence failures (unlike Pahalgam, which had intel reports) as well as security lapses (like Pahalgam).
As in Pahalgam, the terrorists that took control of Mumbai’s Taj Mahal Palace hotel segregated Hindus from non-Hindus and killed the former one by one. It is testimony to their incompetence that they also killed members of other faiths. The Singh administration was under considerable pressure to retaliate militarily, especially from the BJP. Knowing that the capability weaknesses exposed by the 1999 Kargil War had still not been plugged, it chose a multipronged approach instead: it engaged in a joint investigation with the Asif Zardari administration, and at the same time put pressure on Pakistan through the intergovernmental anti-terrorist funding Financial Action Task Force (FATF). It also ensured that there were no revenge attacks on Indian Muslims, especially Kashmiris.
Considerable progress was made on all three tracks. The Zardari administration, under military pressure, initially resisted the call for an investigation of the trail in Pakistan, then suggested an international enquiry, and eventually agreed to a joint investigation.
An energetic Pakistani media and dedicated investigators and prosecutors on both sides put together conclusive evidence of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba’s involvement in training, equipping, planning, and financing the Mumbai attacks, with roots that extended to the US’ David Headley and Canada’s Tahawwur Rana (extradited to India 12 days before the Pahalgam attack).
The Zardari administration insisted on prosecuting those arrested in Pakistan rather than extraditing them to India; the Singh administration agreed, knowing that might be the only way to achieve a prosecution. Progress on the case was agonisingly slow. The first Pakistani prosecutor, who was by then also investigating Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, was shot in 2013, and the second refused to appear after his security cover was withdrawn in 2016.
We will never know how close, if at all, they came to unearthing elements of state support for the terrorists, but what happened to them not only raises suspicions but also indicates just how high the stakes were, and maybe still are. The case was relegated to a permanent back burner, but continuing FATF pressure did lead to some reforms, including indirect and limited justice. For the first time, the international community recognised cross-border attacks in Kashmir and other parts of India as terrorist acts and sought to sanction the supportive environment in Pakistan. Pakistan was put on the FATF’s Grey List in 2008, restricting the country’s access to international financial institutions and negatively impacting foreign investment; it was removed from the list in 2009, put back between 2012 and 2015 and again between 2018 and 2022. Ten years after 26/11, the Lashkar-e-Taiba’s Hafiz Saeed was arrested in 2019 and sentenced to 78 years in prison by an anti-terrorism court. Successive Pakistani administrations undermined the court’s order by keeping Saeed under house arrest rather than in prison.
No Indian government had sought to invoke the FATF or use other international instruments against terrorist financing until Singh did. Yet, it yielded greater dividends than any other Indian initiative. Singh transformed the working of the Indus Waters Treaty too. Instead of dodging arbitration of complaints under the treaty, he welcomed it. As a result, a series of rulings in India’s favour ensued.
Most important of all, he resisted efforts to communalise the aftermath of the Mumbai attacks without penalising opposition parties such as the BJP for questioning security lapses. His efforts at security reforms saw the establishment of the National Investigation Agency, now investigating the Pahalgam attack, and the institution of a multi-tier security grid in Jammu and Kashmir, with improved intelligence and police and army cooperation. His efforts at peacebuilding in Kashmir, comprising dialogue and protection of human and political rights, saw terrorist attacks and resultant fatalities fall to their lowest since the insurgency began in 1989.
Are there lessons to be drawn from Singh’s policies? Pakistan has offered to cooperate with an international investigation, knowing perhaps that India is unlikely to accept one. Is it worth considering Pakistan’s offer? Any international investigators will in any case be dependent on their Indian and Pakistani counterparts, given ignorance of language, terrain, and the organisational evolution of cross-border terrorist groups. What then would be their value addition?
One gain could be improved techniques and technologies of evidence-gathering for prosecution; in other words, international investigators could be drawn from justice departments not intelligence agencies. The second question is, would an international enquiry entail international prosecutions, for example under the International Criminal Court’s rubric of crimes against humanity? Neither India nor Pakistan is a signatory. Are they willing to sign now?
Most likely the Pakistan offer is a first salvo, which might end with agreement to a joint investigation. Before dismissing the offer, it is worth recognising the gains India made through the first joint investigation and assessing whether its losses can be guarded against now. Its gains included turning the international spotlight on terrorist sanctuaries in Pakistan, fading international scepticism over Indian allegations that Pakistan was involved in anti-India terrorism. Its losses included the failure of Pakistan to prosecute the guilty. An international role in aid and support might prevent that from happening, though sporadic international attention remains a risk. The FATF did not ensure that Saeed was jailed (rather than kept under house arrest) before removing Pakistan from the Grey List.
Finally, Singh’s policy of cracking down on communal responses, following the rule of law, and espousing peacebuilding in Kashmir, despite ongoing attacks by cross-border armed groups (on a smaller scale, but directed at keeping Kashmir volatile), engaged Kashmiris as stakeholders in peace. For the Modi administration, which has presided over a sharply rising graph of domestic communal actions, this might be most important lesson of all.
[Radha Kumar is the author of Paradise at War: A Political History of Kashmir (Aleph Book Company, 2018 and 2024). Courtesy: Frontline magazine, a fortnightly English language magazine published by The Hindu Group of publications headquartered in Chennai, India.]
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In Wake of Pahalgam, Recalling Nehru’s Advice on Resisting Pakistan’s Provocations
Ramachandra Guha
Surely the most noble of human emotions is to find hope in the midst of tragedy. One of the tourists killed by the terrorists in Pahalgam was N Ramachandran from Kerala. On her return home, his daughter, Arathy Sarath, spoke movingly of the succour she found from two young men in the wake of her suffering.
The Hindu newspaper quoted Sarath as saying: “Musafir and another local driver Sameer were with me all through, including when I stood outside the morgue till 3 am. They treated me like a younger sister. Kashmir has now given me two brothers.”
As reports in other papers confirm, Musafir and Sameer were entirely representative of how Kashmir, as a whole, reacted to the barbarism that claimed so many innocent lives. Several tourists who were at the scene of the attack were shepherded to safety by their Kashmiri guides.
At least one of these guides, like the others a Muslim by faith, was killed by the terrorists. As tourists sought to flee in panic, clerics opened mosques to provide beds for those who did not have hotel bookings. Taxi drivers refused to charge fares for passengers seeking to get to Srinagar airport.
The day after the killings, there was a complete hartal in Kashmir as shops, hotels, schools, colleges all stayed closed to express their sympathy with the victims of the violence. All political parties, whether in power or in the Opposition, took out rallies in condemnation of the terrorists and their backers from across the border.
To this historian, the aftermath of the attack recalled the similarly exemplary behaviour of Kashmiris in the wake of the first-ever attack launched by Pakistan on the Valley, in the immediate aftermath of Independence and Partition. Then, in the late autumn of 1947, amidst the savage bloodletting elsewhere, especially in East and West Punjab, Kashmir was a haven of communal harmony as Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs all stood together in solidarity against the invaders.
There is little question that, by the targeted killings of Hindus, the terrorists hoped to polarise Hindus against Muslims across India. They failed in this aim, at least as far as Kashmir is concerned. Now it is for the rest of us, who live in the other states and Union territories of our country, to similarly rise to the occasion.
The signs so far are unpromising. In Rajasthan, a Bharatiya Janata Party MLA entered a mosque during Friday prayers, shouting “Jai Shri Ram” and placing a “Pakistan Murdabad” sign on the premises. In Assam, the Bharatiya Janata Party chief minister initiated arrests of political rivals whom his administration claimed were “anti-India” and made similar charges on social media as well.
In Madhya Pradesh, a Congress MLA, who happens to be Muslim by faith, was issued death threats. In Gujarat, police rounded up people they claimed were “infiltrators”; among them were several hundred bona fide Indian citizens.
In Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Punjab, Kashmiri students have been forced by right-wing goons to leave their hostels, put on hold their education, and return to the Valley. In Mussoorie, Kashmiri shawl-sellers had to abandon their trade and go back home.
Meanwhile, in Kashmir itself, where with its present Union territory status it is the Union government that controls law and order, there has been a wave of arrests and bulldozing of houses in which some or even many Kashmiris altogether innocent of any links to terror are likely to have suffered.
It was also disappointing to see that the prime minister’s first public speech after the tragedy was made in Bihar. That this state is scheduled to have assembly elections in a few months is unlikely to have been a coincidence. In that speech, and later in a Mann ki Baat address, Modi referred to Indians being united in their condemnation of terror regardless of the language they spoke. A more statesmanlike approach would have been to acknowledge and appreciate the pluralism of religion that distinguishes our country as well.
This omission was particularly distressing in light of the admirable conduct of the Kashmiris on the spot, of which the prime minister was surely not unaware. Finally, Modi’s decision to skip the all-party meeting held to discuss the terror attack displayed a dismaying lack of respect for democratic procedure.
The prime minister’s pluralism is selective – it embraces language but not religion. (Other BJP leaders are even more narrow-minded; for them, Hindi is the supreme language of India just as Hinduism is its superior religion.) It was thus refreshing to see that the defence minister, Rajnath Singh, did squarely state that, in the wake of the barbaric attack in Pahalgam, all Indians stood united irrespective of religion.
As with previous terror attacks orchestrated from across the border, this one too poses two distinct sets of tests: one for the Indian state and a second for the Indian people. Unlike newspaper columnists and television anchors based in New Delhi, so ready to offer advice on how and when to go to war, I do not believe I have any views of any originality or worth in this matter. How the Indian state should respond, what precise mix of diplomatic, economic and military measures it should adopt to, as it were, “punish” the Pakistani state for its tacit and overt support for terrorism, is beyond my domain expertise.
However, as a defender of the constitutional values of democracy and pluralism, I do have views on how my fellow citizens should respond.
These broadly coincide with the views of India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. On October 15, 1947 – exactly two months after Partition – Nehru wrote this to the chief ministers of states: “We have a Muslim minority who are so large in numbers that they cannot, even if they want to, go anywhere else. They have got to live in India… Whatever the provocation from Pakistan and whatever the indignities and horrors inflicted on non-Muslims there, we have got to deal with this minority in a civilised manner. We must give them security and the rights of citizens in a democratic State.”
Nehru is a much misunderstood, much vilified, figure in India nowadays. Some of this retrospective criticism is merited; for example, as prime minister, Nehru should have begun to release the state’s stranglehold over the economy by the late 1950s (by which time it had clearly proven counters-productive)‚ and he should not have been so naively trusting about China. On the other hand, we Indians now need his robust, uncompromising defence of religious and linguistic pluralism more than ever more.
Nehru’s enduring relevance in this regard is best illustrated by quoting some remarks made in recent weeks by the chief of the Pakistani army, General Asim Munir. Days before the terror outrage, this man had insisted that Kashmir was the “jugular vein” of Pakistan.
A few days after the butchering of Indian tourists, he told the graduating cadets of the Pakistan Military Academy that “the two-nation theory was based on the fundamental belief that Muslims and Hindus are two separate nations, not one.” He further insisted: “Muslims are distinct from Hindus in all aspects of life – religion, customs, traditions, thinking, and aspirations.”
As is by now well-known, the ideologues of the Hindu Right, such as VD Savarkar, mimicked this sort of thinking entirely. They articulated their own version of the two-nation theory. They too thought Hindus and Muslims separate and distinct in their ways of thinking and being, they too claimed that Hindus and Muslims could not companionably, peaceably and equitably live together in the same political or territorial unit.
Transferred to the situation today, when so many Muslims do in fact live in post-Partition India, the Hindutva ideology insists that they can only do so by subordinating themselves economically, politically, and culturally to the Hindus.
Against this pernicious, polarising way of thinking, Jawaharlal Nehru stood steadfast. When, in the first few months after Partition, the Pakistan state was determined to inflict indignities and horrors against its non-Muslim citizens, Nehru insisted that his government in India would deal with its Muslim minority “in a civilised manner” and “give them security and the rights of citizens in a democratic state”.
Now, as terrorists aided by Pakistan have so brazenly murdered tourists in Kashmir who happen to be both Indian and Hindu, we who care for the future of this Republic, we who cherish and uphold its founding values, must redouble our efforts to treat with dignity and respect, and to consider as full and equal citizens, those Indians who happen to be Muslims by faith.
(Ramachandra Guha is an Indian historian and writer. His latest book is Speaking with Nature: The Origins of Indian Environmentalism. Courtesy: The Telegraph.)
