Why the India-Pakistan cease-fire could end up burning Washington

The cease-fire between India and Pakistan has held for nearly a week. Pakistan has thanked Donald Trump for mediating a miraculous way out after its most vital military installations were cratered by Indian missile strikes.

India, regarded by a succession of US presidents as an indispensable democratic partner against China, maintains that it halted hostilities in response to direct pleas from Pakistan.

Whatever the truth, this is the terrifying reality: The brief conflict that dragged two nuclear-armed powers to the brink of all-out war has neither resolved nor eliminated the reason that gave rise to it.

The spark for the outbreak of this conflagration was the savage murder of tourists in the Pahalgam valley in Kashmir on April 22.

Masked terrorists carrying guns cornered holidaymakers, demanded to know their religion, and selected non-Muslims for slaughter: 26 men — Hindu and Christian, many of them newlyweds — were shot in the forehead in front of their wives, who were spared to carry the killers’ “message.”

As news of the atrocity spread, Resistance Front, a terror group affiliated with the Pakistani jihadist outfit Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), claimed responsibility.

The LeT is part of the extensive terror network erected by Pakistan’s military-intelligence cabal, which, unable to beat India in conventional war, assembled a series of armed proxies to bleed it in Kashmir.

Pakistan’s murderous quest for Kashmir, over which it has waged multiple wars, is a product of the identity crisis that has plagued the country since its birth.

Hacked out of India as a homeland for the subcontinent’s Muslims in 1947, the rationale behind Pakistan’s invention — that Muslims and Hindus could not coexist in one nation — was immediately invalidated when India refused to become a Hindu state and embraced a secular constitution.

As long as Kashmir, a Muslim-majority region, remains part of a constitutionally secular India, Islamic Pakistan’s sense of itself as the authentic home of India’s Muslims cannot be vindicated.

But the “root cause” of this conflict is not Kashmir. It is Pakistan’s obsession with Kashmir.  Pakistan has waged war after war to wrest Kashmir from India, but the experience of defeat led Islamabad to adopt a policy of training terrorist organizations.

This fixation has not only shed Indian blood. It has also corrupted and crippled Pakistan. Its armed forces, citing an existential threat from “Hindu India,” have long appropriated a major portion of the country’s coffers. 

They foiled the emergence of a normal pattern of governance at home by ousting virtually every civilian government before its term ended.

Days before the April atrocity in Kashmir, Pakistan’s military chief, Asim Munir, renewed the pledge to wrest Kashmir and exhorted the country’s lawmakers to mobilise the young by reminding them that Muslims “are different from the Hindus in every possible aspect of life.”

In any civilized country, such rhetoric would be decried as bigoted. In Pakistan, it is the foundational basis of the state.

Invented to serve as a haven for India’s Muslim faithful, Pakistan has become captive to the delusion that it is the guardian of that faith. Portraying itself as an outpost of Arabia in South Asia, it has even dispatched its pilots to fight Israel during the Arab-Israeli wars.

The people who make up Pakistan were, only some generations ago, mostly lower-caste Hindus who converted — or were forced to convert — to Islam.

For decades, India absorbed Pakistan’s deadly provocations in order not to become distracted from its developmental goals. India’s economy is now 11 times the size of Pakistan’s, and it has lifted 170 million out of poverty over the past decade. Yet India’s capacity to bear the human cost of Pakistan’s dysfunction was never going to be limitless.

And New Delhi’s attitude changed once Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist who campaigned on the promise to retaliate against terror, was elected prime minister in 2014. Modi, despite believing that possession of nuclear weapons should not grant Pakistan impunity, at first poured significant political capital into pursuing peace with Pakistan.

The upshot of these overtures? Two major terrorist attacks against India in 2016.

Boxed in by his pledge to act, Modi ordered military strikes. On May 7, Indian missiles destroyed nine sites housing what New Delhi called “terrorist infrastructure.”

When Pakistani generals, seen mourning at the funerals of men designated terrorists by the United Nations, escalated the conflict, India struck multiple military installations deep inside the country. One of its targets was an airbase 25 kilometres from Pakistan’s military HQ. Soon after this, Pakistan reached out to India with a request for a cease-fire. 

New Delhi insisted that it did not negotiate via the Americans. And Indians who have championed closer ties with the US are shocked by the gratuitous manner in which Donald Trump, eagerly collecting credit for apparently averting nuclear war, has repeatedly equated India, the victim, with Pakistan, the aggressor.

His ignorance of this conflict, which he absurdly claims is a thousand years old, is matched only by his conceit that he can truly resolve it. 

If he continues like this, the chief casualty of this crisis may be a relationship nurtured painstakingly over 25 years by both Republicans and Democrats

Kapil Komireddi is the author of “Malevolent Republic: A Short History of the New India.“