The India-Pakistan Crisis Reveals Shifting Geopolitical Realities

Lindsay: An attack on April 22nd in Indian-administered Kashmir ignited the most serious fighting between India and Pakistan in more than 50 years. Although a ceasefire announced on May 10th seems to be holding, many questions remain about the possibility of escalation between these two nuclear-armed countries. Here to help us unpack what’s at stake are two longtime experts in South Asian security affairs.

Josh White is a professor of practice at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution. He previously served at the White House as senior advisor and director for South Asian Affairs at the National Security Council, and he’s had roles at the Stimson Center and in the office of the Secretary of Defense and has spent an extensive time in Asia. He also has a new book coming out called Vigilante Islamists: Religious Parties and Anti-State Violence in Pakistan.

Amit Ahuja is an associate professor of political science at the University of California in Santa Barbara. His research focuses on the processes of inclusion and exclusion in multi-ethnic societies, especially in the context of ethnic parties and movements and military organizations.

Josh and Amit, welcome to Talking Policy.

Amit: Thank you so much, Lindsay. It’s such a pleasure and it’s such a pleasure to be here with Josh.

Josh: Great to be here.

Lindsay: So why have India and Pakistan come so close to war, and why over Kashmir? Amit, why don’t you start?

Amit: Well, Kashmir, in between India and Pakistan, has been a contested territory for the longest time. In fact, the story, if you want to take it from the beginning, starts at the time of the partition of India when Colonial Britain leaves India. At that time, you know, as India’s divided, there are princely states in India, which are asked to choose between these two countries.

The partition is carried out on religious lines. Pakistan is envisaged as a country for Muslims, and Pakistan has a claim on Kashmir because it sees this as a Muslim majority area. And the hope at that time was that the prince or the king in Jammu and Kashmir would opt for Pakistan. That does not happen, he holds out, and the tribes from regions that fall in Pakistan at that time invade the state of Jammu and Kashmir. The prince, who’s been confused about what to do, turns to India for military help. India intervenes, and some of these invaders are driven out at that time. Some part of that territory of Jammu and Kashmir stays with Pakistan, most of it is still with India.

And at that time, a decision is made that there will be ceasefire, there will be a plebiscite. The plebiscite does not happen, you know, for various reasons. And both these countries continue to claim the entirety of the state of Jammu and Kashmir. There have been different wars over a period of time, and that’s the nature of the conflict there.

For the last few decades, India has fought an insurgency in its part of Kashmir. And what has happened there is that that insurgency has been brought under control for the most part. Violence has come down gradually, and even though we see a conflict today, if you look at the graph in terms of just the number of deaths—both military, civilian and insurgent deaths—that graph has been coming down over the last decade and a half or so.

Lindsay: Yeah, so both countries claim Kashmir as part of their territory. Each country administers parts of Kashmir. Josh, can you give us a sense of some of the factors in more recent years that created the conditions for this most recent, very dangerous, conflict between the two countries?

What has happened recently that sparked this?

Josh: Amit gave a terrific summary of the long and deep dispute over this territory. But I just want to underscore for our listeners here who may be looking at Kashmir as very similar to other territorial disputes around the world. They think about Ukraine, they think about Taiwan, they think about others. There are similarities, but there’s something particular in this case, in which Kashmir is also seen as the physical representation of an ideological dispute over whether Pakistan had to exist in the first place, right? Because if Muslims are happily living in the state of India, which is a Hindu majority state, it calls into question whether the partition project—the need for Pakistan—was real. And so in that sense, there is a physical dispute over land, but there’s also this much deeper ideological dispute that continues to the present day, which makes this deeply held, deeply felt and uniquely volatile.

To your specific question about what’s happened in recent years, there’s been a fundamental problem that India has faced in figuring out how to intelligibly and proportionally respond to periodic attacks in its part of Kashmir, and in other parts of India, that have obvious or implicit links to the Pakistani state. So these are terrorist attacks by groups that Pakistan has either fostered or has allowed to operate, sometimes quite openly, whose primary purpose is to disrupt India. And it has not been easy for India to set upon a strategy that has some chance of deterring these groups from attacking India, some chance of deterring Pakistan support for these groups, and also meets India’s own political needs.

We saw, under the previous political party that governed India, a strategy under which the leadership, for the most part, chose not to respond with military action to these kind of provocations. And when Prime Minister Modi came into power, he decided upon a different approach. And we saw this most notably beginning in 2016, where after a significant attack in India, he undertook what his government called “surgical strikes” by special operations forces and others across the border and demonstrated a more assertive, more militarized response to what had become, in their view, just an intolerable pattern of provocations coming from Pakistan in the form of militant and terrorist groups.

And that, at the core of it, is the problem that India is trying to address in this recent crisis. Responding to Pakistan, generating some measure of deterrence, but also showing to the Indian public that the Indian government will demonstrate resolve, and will defend itself against these attacks.

Lindsay: Yeah. I want to ask just one follow-up question about the context of this most recent conflict. Indian-administered Kashmir had been semi-autonomous since 1949. Amit, you gave us a history of this region, had a separate constitution, a separate flag, special property rights. But in 2019, Prime Minister Modi suspended Article 370 of the Constitution that had granted this limited autonomy. There are suggestions that this kind of suspension of autonomy, [and] the severe security crackdown that has followed, is part of the context out of which this most recent conflict has emerged.

Can you put in context, why this tightening up of control by the Modi government?

Amit: Sure. So yeah, you’re absolutely right. When the Indian constitution is being framed, Kashmir was granted and was recognized as a state with special status. Now if you look at the range federal arrangement in India, different states have had different kinds of accommodations that were built in. So in that regard, Kashmir was not so different, but its accommodations were more comprehensive.

Over a period of time, different governments took away some of the powers that Kashmir enjoyed, some of those accommodations. So that erosion has been gradual. The reason given for that is that India was seeking greater integration of Kashmir with the Indian Union.

Now, especially after the insurgency breaks out in the late 1980s, and then the violence is controlled by sort of the mid-2000s, there is a desire to accelerate this process. And one way that the Modi government thought it would want to do this is by fulfilling a promise that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had been making in its manifestos from the very beginning, which is to take away the special status of Jammu and Kashmir. So [in] 2019, a parliamentary resolution is passed, and that special status is taken away. What was interesting at that point was that the support for that act did not just come from the BJP, but was actually drawn from across parties.

So that was Article 370 that goes away in 2019. And after that, Jammu Kashmir lost its status as a state. That particular decision, where Jammu and Kashmir, which is seen as a disputed territory by Pakistan, its status was changed, and that was very frustrating to Pakistan. The government in Pakistan at that time, launched a very strong protest, and so that has been a cause of some agitation on the Pakistani side.

From the Indian perspective, the idea was that, “Look, we do not want to see Jammu and Kashmir, at least the territory that’s held in India, as a disputed territory anymore. It is off the table when it comes to a conversation between the two countries.” So there was an attempt at moving that goalpost.

Josh: Let me just add a brief point here.

I think it’s very important for our listeners to understand that throughout the 1990s, there was an insurgency taking place in the Indian part of Kashmir, which had some indigenous elements to it and had some significant militant elements that were sponsored, supported, funded, and armed by Pakistan.

The kinds of attacks that we’ve been seeing in Indian Kashmir over the last few years, the ones that have triggered these crises between India and Pakistan, are largely different, and they’re taking place in a changed context in which these are attacks against Indian paramilitary forces, Indian military forces, or in the most recent case, a massacre of civilians.

These are being carried out by groups that appear to have links to Pakistan. And so from an Indian perspective, of course there is a history of insurgency. Of course they blame most of that history on Pakistan. But what we are seeing here in the recent context is not a set of indigenous uprisings with shadowy links to Pakistan, but it is a set of attacks that have relatively clear origins in Pakistan, carried out by groups that Pakistan has not reigned in.

Lindsay: This was as dangerous a conflict between the two countries in decades. It escalated very quickly. Vice President JD Vance told Fox News that the situation between India and Pakistan initially was, quote, “none of our business.” And yet it seemed that the U.S. played a significant role in brokering the now sort of fragile ceasefire that is in place.

Why did the U.S. get involved? Josh, I’ll throw this question over to you. Can you give our listeners a sense of what the nature of the U.S. relationship has been with each of these two rivals?

Josh: The United States has long been the default crisis broker between India and Pakistan when conflict has broken out, and there are several reasons for this. Some of them have deep historical roots, but the United States helps to manage some of the asymmetries that exist between the two countries. Pakistan is a state that is dominated by its military leadership. India, by contrast, is a state with a strong—if not overly intrusive—civilian control over the military.

So even the civil military structures of these two states can get in the way of them having robust lines of communication in the crisis, and the United States, as a country that has had on-again, off-again relationships with both countries, has served as the crisis broker. And that means that in the course of a crisis, India is signaling to Pakistan with its words and sometimes with its missiles. Pakistan is signaling to India with its statements and with its artillery, but both sides are also constantly signaling to the United States, trying to catch the attention of Washington and trying to spur certain kinds of intervention by Washington that they believe will be helpful to their cause.

Pakistan in particular tries to get the U.S. government to bring both India and Pakistan together to talk about what they consider to be deeper issues regarding Kashmir. India, for its part, tries to get Washington to pressure Pakistan through financial and other means to make more fundamental choices about rejecting its tolerance of terrorist groups operating on its soil. And then both sides are very attentive to the kinds of language that the United States uses in the course of a crisis. We saw in, in this case, Secretary Rubio in announcing the ceasefire spoke about bringing both parties together on a broad range of issues in a neutral location. That kind of language was in fact quite upsetting to the Indian side and welcomed by the Pakistani side.

Both sides also know what kind of signals Washington cares about. When Pakistan, in this crisis, convened its National Command Authority—which is the apex decision body notionally chaired by the Prime Minister, but in practice chaired by the Chief of Army staff, that oversees nuclear weapons among other things—that was a signal that was meant not only for India, but for Washington as a precursor to tee up U.S. intervention in this crisis.

I’ll say one other thing, which is that the trajectory of the U.S. relationship with India and Pakistan, respectively, really matters in cases in which the United States is functioning as a crisis broker. The United States has significantly deepened its defense, technology, and economic relationship with India over the last 20 years. And it has, by contrast, significantly diminished its engagement with Pakistan, particularly after the fall of Kabul to the Taliban. And so the United States has less leverage with Pakistan than it used to, and it doesn’t function quite as effectively as a third-party crisis broker in times of tension, because it is seen as more directly aligned with Indian discourse and Indian interests.

Lindsay: Amit, I’m curious about your views on this, especially on what you think about the changing nature of the relationship, especially with the new Trump administration. What do you think that the U.S. relationship to India and Pakistan will look like moving ahead over the next year?

Amit: I think, you know, in some ways they are changing, in some ways they’re still the same. I think what Josh said is absolutely correct, that U.S. conversations with both sides now has been a feature of these conflicts, especially if you go back to 1999 when President Clinton intervened and had a pretty prominent role in arranging for a ceasefire. Similarly, in 2019, the U.S. was involved during the first Trump administration. The same thing has happened now.

Now where the Indian sensitivities lie, is that they would want this conversation to be less public, but at the same time, they appreciate the U.S. conversation with Pakistan especially in these moments.

So the way I think this will go forward is that those sensitivities will remain. I think India will have to adjust to how the second Trump administration works. If this relationship and these conversations are a little bit more public, then how to manage them is something India would just have to work with. At the same time, the U.S. opening channels with Pakistan, especially when there is very little conversation happening between India and Pakistan, may actually open some doors, and incentivize a conversation, even if it’s a back-channel conversation between these countries.

So in that regard, the one thing which is very clear is, because escalation can happen very swiftly, having functional operational back channels is really important.

Lindsay: Yeah. Let’s talk about China. China’s a bordering state. It controls part of East Kashmir, it’s a longstanding defense supplier to Pakistan, has a complex relationship with both countries. How does China factor into this rivalry between India and Pakistan, and how has it been involved in this latest round of hostilities?

Josh: China has a very deep relationship with Pakistan that goes back decades. China helped Pakistan develop its nuclear capabilities. It has deep defense ties, including co-production of key systems. It has installed, with Pakistan, a set of redundant fiber optic lines, and it’s made billions of dollars of economic investment through the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, which is a signature part of the broader Belt and Road investment effort.

China does worry about escalation between India and Pakistan. I have been part of a series of Track II unofficial dialogues with Chinese scholars of South Asia for many years. It’s a small community, but they do share many of the same concerns that the United States shares about the potential for escalation between two nuclear-armed rivals.

That said, China plays a very quiet role in crises of this kind. We do have reason to believe that China very closely watches Indian missile alerts and mobilizations, and we shouldn’t be surprised if, in the course of these crises, China relays that information to Pakistan. Sometimes that might be helpful if they see things correctly, sometimes it might be unhelpful. But we can suspect that they play that role.

What’s interesting here is that the U.S.-China discussion on India-Pakistan issues is very difficult to even get to the first stage of a conversation, in part because China worries that this will be seen as selling out its partner Pakistan. But in part there’s a longstanding pattern here, and I experienced this when I was in government: whenever the United States reaches out to China about an issue related to India-Pakistan escalation, I’m not going to say the precise response, but the vibe we get back from China is, “Happy to help, but what do we get in return?”

It is seen on the Chinese side as something that is a U.S. request that is to be considered in the context of a transactional negotiation rather than a shared view of escalation risks by great powers. That conversation is particularly hard now in the current environment with contested trade issues and geopolitical context in East Asia. So I think that we may see, over time, China developing a more visible role in these kind of crises, but it’s been relatively subdued.

Lindsay: Other countries have played various roles in the region as well, including as diplomatic partners, military suppliers, crisis managers. Who is the cast of international characters, and how is the nature of their involvement changing?

Josh: It really is a cast of characters. I would begin with the U.K., which has played an important but secondary role as a crisis broker over the last few decades. The U.K. has particularly good ties to the Indian military and to Pakistani political elites because of the prominence of the Pakistani diaspora in the U.K. And this actually complements quite nicely the depth of U.S. ties to Indian political leaders, and to the Pakistani army. The United States still has a major training program for Pakistani military officers in the United States. This has been a fairly useful tag team in the past. I know that when I was at the White House, we had rather extensive consultations with our counterparts from the U.K. in advance of crises to think about how we might coordinate in the event of a crisis. I will say that since the U.K. “Brexited” itself, it has seen its influence diminish on the global stage and also in this particular context of India-Pakistan crises.

We also have the Gulf states, particularly the Saudis and the Emiratis, who have historically had relatively close ties with the Pakistani military and with various Pakistani political parties, but have begun to pivot in recent years to see India as a more appealing partner, in large part because of the size of India’s market, India’s demand for energy. So I would expect that we would see greater involvement by the Saudis and the Emiratis in future India-Pakistan conflicts, both shooting conflicts and other kinds of disputes.

And so what you end up with here is an increasingly polarized environment where on the one hand you have, if you will, in India’s corner, more or less: the United States, the U.K., increasingly the Saudis and the Emiratis, France, which is a major supplier of defense equipment to India. And on the other side, you have, if you will, in Pakistan’s corner, China of course, but also Turkey, which has been a significant supplier of UAVs to Pakistan in recent years. That oversimplifies the dynamic to some extent, but I do think it’s important to capture the increased polarization in the partnerships that are associated with the India-Pakistan conflict.

Lindsay: Yeah, that’s interesting.

What role are domestic politics in both countries playing in this deterioration of relationships between the two countries? Amit, you were on the podcast a couple years ago to talk about your book with Devesh Kapur about internal security issues in India. Let me throw this question over to you. Talk to us about how domestic politics are influencing this conflict.

Amit: In a very big way. That’s a simple, straightforward answer because, at the end of the day, this is a country in India, especially the Modi government, is very sensitive to how this impacts their politics. How does it impact their electoral performance? That’s how they got into office. That’s what sustains their power. So the domestic audience is a very important part of this story. The position they have taken, in terms of their response to terrorist attacks and this conflict with Pakistan, in some ways sets them up for very high audience costs. Because they’ve made these claims, which is that there’ll be a strong response to any sort of terrorist attack that emanates out of Pakistan, and if they don’t deliver on them, then they have questions to answer.

Now there are some things which are again worth noting. If you think about foreign policy matters in India, that domestic cost actually has expanded for the following reason. Foreign policy and military policy used to be discussed among the urban elite for the longest time. That’s no longer the case. In my own field research, I find that even in rural India today, a foreign policy is discussed, and a lot of the mobilization that’s happening by the Hindu-nationalist BJP has taken these matters to its electoral campaigns, even in rural India. That’s one aspect of it.

The other aspect is that in urban areas, again, this was very much a male domain. Today, even women talk about foreign policy and military policy issues, so when we think about domestic cost, that domestic cost is actually expanded because the audience for the consumption of these policies has also expanded.

So, you know, getting this policy wrong has huge, substantial electoral consequences, because at the end of the day, the Modi government or any sitting government has to go back to the electorate during the elections, and there they will be judged on their policy pronouncements and their actions, and how they have managed their foreign policy.

Lindsay: Yeah. Both Pakistan and India became declared nuclear powers in 1998. How close did these states come to nuclear conflict in this latest round of hostilities? And how close are they still, again, given how very, very quickly things can escalate?

Amit: It’s very difficult to answer the question in terms of how close they came. Josh pointed out that the Pakistan military did trigger the process of convening the body that decides on nuclear use. One aspect of India-Pakistan military skirmishes, especially after they tested their bombs, has been that Pakistan, being the weaker side, has talked about the use of nuclear weapons every time tensions have risen or there has been a skirmish.

And that’s no surprise there. But if you go back to the crisis in 2019, and you go back to the accounts that have come out from the American side, they say that there was that threat of moving up on the escalatory ladder, with nuclear weapons being in play.

And similarly, this time, that’s what we’ve been told. But in actuality, how close we were, that’s difficult to say. But the two countries have bombs, they have delivery systems that are reliable, that are able to deliver these bombs on targets. So that stress remains.

The warning systems are there, but frankly, they will not come into play because of just how close the cities are to each other, on the two sides. So yeah, there is no two ways about the fact that in terms of a potential nuclear crisis, it’s a very dangerous situation when these two countries have a military conflict.

Lindsay: Yeah, Josh, over to you. What is your sense about the dangers, the nuclear situation and how it’s played out this time around, versus how it’s played out in previous armed confrontations between the two countries?

Josh: Well, Amit—as I would expect—is being a very careful and deliberate scholar, and is careful to say, correctly I think, that we just don’t know how close both sides were to contemplating nuclear use. It’s probably fair to say that we were not on the verge of seeing nuclear use, but it’s also worth taking a step back and considering that nowhere else in the world do we have two nuclear-capable rivals who engage in this kind of conventional military exchange. One of whom, Pakistan, has been very clear that it does not subscribe to a no-first-use doctrine—that is, it reserves the right to use nuclear weapons first—and has developed low-yield tactical nuclear weapons with an operational plan as to how it would use them. This is a volatile environment, and you can say we were a long ways off, but you can also zoom out and say, nowhere else in the world do we have this confluence of factors that lead to risk.

For those of us who think about military escalation, one of the key questions is: under what circumstances and by what pathways could you imagine India and Pakistan moving from conventional—that is, non-nuclear military exchanges—to a nuclear exchange? And this is a complicated question with a complicated answer, but to simplify it, you could think about a few things.

You can think about an Indian ground incursion or ground assault. Even a shallow one into Pakistan could, on account of Pakistan’s geography, make the Pakistani military leadership feel like they were existentially threatened. You could imagine a naval blockade or naval strikes that raised serious questions about Pakistan’s ability to sustain a military campaign or guarantee its sovereignty. Or you could imagine a scenario where there is an increasing tempo of reciprocal missile barrages, one country against the other, that are targeting each other’s air defense networks. Countries—militaries—get very, very nervous when their air defense networks are targeted, because they begin to fear that this could be an attempt by their adversary to soften them up for something more serious.

And in this context, we began to see this reciprocal missile barrage dynamic targeting air defenses. Now, some of this is still opaque. There’s a lot that’s still unclear. It is clear that both sides were targeting air defense networks and that the Indian strikes in particular reached rather deep into Pakistan, including Rawalpindi, which is the military headquarters for the country, not too far from the capital. And that this pattern that we saw, both of using new technologies, drones, but also of cruise missiles, and then both sides fairly casually conflating “drones” and “missiles,” even in their public statements. I think it raises significant concerns about this as a pathway that could at some point lead to contemplation of nuclear use as a way to draw the conflict to a close.

Lindsay: Yeah. I want to ask you both one last question, to kind of step way back and reflect kind of on a personal level or maybe a slightly philosophical level. One of the things that I’m sure we all hear a lot, I know I hear it a lot, is that the world is changing dramatically. The world order is changing dramatically. We’re watching history unfold before us. China is rising, we’re going from a unipolar moment to a bipolar moment. The new administration here in the U.S. has been called historic in many ways, for good or for ill.

When I think about the shifts happening globally, it doesn’t feel like things are getting easier to solve. It feels like they’re getting harder and more polarized. I’m curious about, for each of you, given your very long and deep history in this region, and with this particular flashpoint, I kind of want to know just how you’re thinking about it personally.

Where we are right now, 2025, looking out, are you worried about the future? Are you feeling kind of like this is actually maybe an opening for something new? How are you feeling about it all, and what are you going to be watching most attentively as a clue about where we might be headed?

Amit: Yeah, if I had those answers… (laughter)

No, but I think you’re right. We are seeing things shift and change, in real time, in front of our eyes, and it does feel like a more dangerous world. It probably is.

I think we will just have to cope with more uncertainty and learn to live with that. But in terms of conflicts, it’ll be interesting to see, as some of these institutions’ norms that we’ve relied on in the past either weaken or disappear, if new ones can emerge.

Sometimes disorder provides an opening for more creativity. So, you know, I would not just look at all of this and despair. I’d also be looking out for what is emerging out of this. What are the new kinds of arrangements that are emerging that get at some of these problems, assuming that across the world, citizens of most countries are looking for more order, peace, prosperity. As long as those are the goals, one could imagine that there would be a desire to achieve these. Now, how the incentive structures work and what kind of creativity emerges in response to these challenges, that is what I’d be looking out for. But definitely more uncertainty ahead.

Lindsay: Yeah. Josh, over to you.

Josh: Three things come to mind:

First, for the United States, there is a strong and growing impulse—not just in President Trump’s wing of the Republican Party, but I think more broadly—to avoid unnecessary entanglements in places where U.S. military or even diplomatic tools are not well suited to solving problems. We saw the United States engaged for 20 years in Afghanistan to unfortunately very little effect. We’ve seen just in recent days growing frustration with the military options available to deal with the Houthi problem. We may see, in the context of Taiwan and other conflicts, a reevaluation of what the United States can reasonably do, and whether the costs of engagement or intervention in a serious way are worth it. I think that is a conversation that is highlighted by the Trump administration’s public attitude toward this India-Pakistan conflict, but is illustrative of a broader trendline.

Second, and related, we’re going to see India and many other countries begin to double down on self-reliance because of their very understandable concerns that the reliability of the United States as a partner—and in some areas as a global leader—is an open question. We are seeing this by the EU [European Union]. We will see it in different ways in Northeast Asia. But the move towards self-reliance is in part a consequence of the ripple effects from the coronavirus disruption of supply chains. But in part, a consequence of people looking at the United States, and seeing our chaotic politics swing from left to right, and back again and back again, and wonder what this means for their own stability and security.

And finally, for all of us, I think that this crisis should make us think about the importance of continuing to work on nuclear topics. A nuclear detonation somewhere is a rather low probability, but very high consequence event. And it still matters. We should not be inured to the risks of that taking place, whether it’s in the Russia-Ukraine context, or a Korea context, or perhaps most likely in the future India-Pakistan context. The risks are consequential. I would hope that our listeners here would take away from this discussion that even if neither country was at the precipice, that there were some very serious and credible pathways by which a conventional military conflict could tip into consideration of nuclear use. And I think we should all take that seriously as scholars, and people engaged in policy discussion, and look at how it plays out uniquely in different contexts.

Lindsay: Amit Ahuja, Josh White. Thanks for being with us on Talking Policy. This has been a really interesting discussion.

Amit: Thank you for having us.

Josh: Thank you so much.