The winter snows will soon arrive but Kashmir is close to ignition. After a summer of violent clashes between protesters and Indian security forces that left dozens dead and thousands wounded, this week’s unclaimed attack on a military base close to the de facto border with Pakistan raised fears the two nuclear rivals could come to blows over the Himalayan region they have disputed since the partition of British India in 1947.
The danger of an immediate conflagration has subsided but Islamabad and New Delhi remain at loggerheads and the incident has rendered the moribund peace process thoroughly lifeless. Just last December a rapprochement appeared to be underway when Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif invited Narendra Modi, his Indian counterpart, to his grand-daughter’s wedding. Such overtures are now a distant memory.
“There is no peace process. It has disintegrated,” said Shashank Joshi, senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a security and defence think-tank based in London. “The relationship was at a low ebb anyway and the attack has made it far worse.”
Early on Sunday morning four heavily-armed men stormed the large military base at Uri, just six kilometres from the Line of Control that divides Kashmir into a western portion controlled by Pakistan and a larger eastern part administered by India. Seventeen soldiers were killed in the battle, along with all four attackers, making it one of the deadliest raids the region has seen during 25 years of insurgency. Another soldier later died from his injuries.
Indian officials said initial evidence pointed to Jaish-e-Mohammed, an extremist group that aims to unite Kashmir under its own brand of Shariah law. Officially banned by Pakistan in 2002 after a shooting at the Indian Parliament a year earlier, Jaish has operated with relative impunity ever since, as the Wall Street Journal discovered earlier this year when it found militants roaming freely around their headquarters in the city of Bahawalpur.
When India blamed Jaish for a similar attack on an airbase in Pathankot, Punjab, this January, Mr. Modi’s government chose not to rise to the provocation. It showed no such restraint this week as Home Minister Rajnath Singh branded Pakistan a “terrorist state” that should be “identified and isolated as such”. Mr. Modi, who has accused Pakistan of stirring the Kashmiri protests and delivered a broadside against Mr. Sharif in his recent Independence Day address, assured Indians “that those behind this despicable attack will not go unpunished”.
Compounding the pressure on the prime minister to retaliate, Lieutenant General Ranbir Singh said weapons used by the attackers bore Pakistani markings. Islamabad strenuously denied this, describing the allegations as “baseless and irresponsible” and accusing India of pedalling a “hostile narrative”, but most observers think some degree of Pakistani involvement highly likely.
Although he stresses that there is no definitive evidence, Mr. Joshi takes New Delhi’s accusations “extremely seriously” given Pakistan’s record of nurturing jihadi groups as proxy forces, even as it has cracked down on militant outfits at home in recent years. “Historically it’s plausible not just that Pakistani groups were involved but ones with links to the Pakistani intelligence services,” he said.
Myra MacDonald, a former Reuters journalist who has written two books on Indian-Pakistani relations, thinks the “relative sophistication” of the raid and its proximity to the Line of Control suggest the attackers came from Pakistan. “Local Kashmiri militants probably don't have the capability to mount that kind of assault nowadays and in any case would have no reason to go all the way to the LoC [Line of Control] to attack Indian security forces.”
She added that several factors make direct army involvement highly plausible, though hard to prove. Not only does the security establishment have a long history of ordering such attacks, “it also has a motive - believing it might give a fillip to the latest wave of protests inside the Kashmir Valley”. Information about troop movements at the camp may have been provided by the Pakistan Army, which is able to observe the Uri camp closely because of the surrounding topography.
“If this is the case - and we should wait for further details from the Indian investigation - then we are not talking just about jihadis slipping undetected across the LoC, but about them being actively abetted by the Pakistan Army,” Ms. MacDonald concluded. “Since Pakistan knew that another big attack in India after Pathankot was likely to trigger an Indian response, I don't think that kind of decision would be taken at the level of relatively junior officers - it would have to have been authorised much, much higher up the chain of command.”
If orders did come from on high, they backfired. The attack has allowed India to tarnish the Kashmiri protesters as terrorists and underlined Islamabad’s increasingly isolated position internationally. “No matter which way you look at the Uri attack, it was a reckless act,” said Tom Hussain, an Islamabad-based security analyst and former TWW editor who notes that even China, Pakistan’s closest ally, expressed shock, while the United Arab Emirates, a former ally, has said it would support retaliatory action from India.
The PM has promised that those behind the Uri terror attack will not go unpunished. That should be the way forward. For one tooth, the complete jaw." - Ram Madhav, BJP general-secretary
Among Pakistani civilians, Mr. Hussain said, there is little support for the attack but rather “confusion and apprehension”. By contrast many Indians, especially supporters and members of the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), are baying for blood. “The mood in India is at its angriest since the 2008 Mumbai attack,” said Mr. Joshi.
But the prime minister's scope to appease this domestic pressure is narrow. Every expert interviewed by TWW thought he would avoid a full-scale military strike given Pakistan's nuclear capabilities and the potential damage to India's economy, one of the few bright spots amid prevailing global gloom. More limited options such as airstrikes on militant camps in Pakistan are also risky, while covert action - for example, supporting separatist rebels in Balochistan - would do nothing to assuage public anger.
“A significant escalation is rather unlikely,” said Richard Ghiasy, a researcher at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). “Although temperatures in the region have risen a bit, neither Pakistan or India has much to gain on this issue by military escalation… At the same time, neither side can afford territorial compromise - this equates to political suicide.” In any case, he added, their disagreement is so profound that neither side will be hugely unnerved by a single attack.
Mr. Modi has little incentive to turn India into an international pariah just as it is winning the diplomatic war against its neighbour. And although he will feel the need to react, public opinion is sufficiently nuanced for his response to be carefully circumscribed, possibly limited to leveraging international allies against Islamabad. Even Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the nationalist group often described as the BJP’s parent organisation, has refrained from dictating the government’s response.
“I am not entirely convinced by the argument that Modi is facing overwhelming public pressure to act,” said Ms. MacDonald, who is also sceptical about the idea that Indian elections are won by taking a tough line on Pakistan. “Of course, his core constituency in the Hindu right would like to see retaliation, but many ordinary voters made him prime minister on his promise of improving the economy.”
If renewed conflict is unlikely, a lasting peace appears even more so. Whereas Mr. Sharif proposed a new peace initiative at last year’s UN General Assembly, this time around he told fellow world leaders India was putting “unacceptable” conditions on dialogue and undertaking an “unprecedented” arms buildup in a speech that caused outrage in the Indian media.
The challenge is forbidding. As a 2004 report by the UK’s House of Commons Library neatly summarised, the two countries have disputed the status of Kashmir since the end of the colonial period, fought multiple wars and developed nuclear weapons for the express purpose of defence against one another. They also routinely exchange artillery and gunfire across the ceasefire line agreed at the end of the last conflict in 2003.
Underlying all this is a question that has plagued attempts to resolve the stalemate for almost seven decades: what country do Kashmiris want to belong to? What little polling has been conducted (a referendum proposed by the UN in 1948 was never held) shows there are no easy answers. On both sides of the de facto border almost everyone dislikes the status quo, but none of the alternatives comes close to commanding overwhelming public support.
The region’s rich diversity means opinion is sharply divided along demographic, cultural and geographical lines. In Indian-held Kashmir most of the majority Muslim population, which resents the heavy-handed security presence as well as human rights abuses and the BJP’s attempts to impose Hindu culture, appear to support independence. Most Hindus, needless to say, are opposed.
When Mr. Modi invited Mr. Sharif to his inauguration in May 2014 it upended expectations that the Hindu nationalist, whose time as chief minister of Gujarat was marred by religious bloodshed, would pursue a bullish course with India’s Muslim neighbour and long-standing enemy. Even after a surge in tensions last summer, the olive branches exchanged in December raised hopes that progress was just around the corner. Since then, however, any semblance of cordiality has evaporated. As long as the Kashmir conundrum goes unresolved, those caught in the middle will continue to suffer.