India and Pakistan are shrouded in the fog of war, which is peopled by phantoms. The 1971 India-Pakistan war, which created Bangladesh, changed the map of South Asia. Three years later, India tested a nuclear bomb, upsetting the world order. Those were exciting times, but many people who bore witness developed a healthy aversion to war, until all other possibilities were exhausted.
Now, the Indian people are exhausted after decades of terrorism. Public grief and disgust at the killings in Pahalgam have made revenge drama inevitable. The nuclear-armed neighbours are now on a familiar spiral of incremental brinkmanship, and the fog shows no signs of lifting. However, a little reality is visible amidst the phantoms of unverified claims and counter-claims.
First, we can see that India and Pakistan are so polarised that it takes an external threat to unite their political parties. This means their politicians are no longer conversant with the civilised art of reaching across the aisle. It was definitely a feature of Indian politics earlier.
Second, India has always excluded foreign brokers and insisted on bilateral talks on Kashmir. However, the scale of the present conflict is inviting intervention. The UK, which has concluded a trade deal with India, says it can help. US President Donald Trump has also offered his services. An international chorus is telling both countries to ground the missiles.
Let us assume that happens, and the current conflict recedes instead of becoming the new normal. What happens next? Are we doomed to revisit this crisis again? Clashes concerning honour are usually cyclical. However, the existence of the European Union shows that imaginative interventions can halt even the longest cycles.
Europe has been at war from classical times. In the modern era, it topped the endurance test for warmaking. It had the Thirty Years’ War and the Hundred Years’ War. Its colonial nations fought offshore wars. It invented and perpetuated world wars—if the Allied Powers, especially France, had not humiliated Germany with the Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War I, Hitler may not have inherited the political capital of German resentment. It is a cautionary lesson for nations which want to squeeze troublesome neighbours too hard.
However, in 1992, just three years after the Berlin Wall collapsed, the European nations, sick of war, forged a treaty at Maastricht which used economic and financial unification to end Europe’s most persistent political problem. The reasoning, which many nations, including India, viewed with scepticism, was that if the fortunes of historically fractious neighbours could be entangled, they would not wage war for fear of harming themselves. It’s an economic version of MAD, mutually assured destruction, the creepy notion on which détente rests. Like MAD, it just worked.
In Europe, the idea of integration was afloat long before Maastricht. For instance, the Jaguar fighter, which remains in service only in India, was conceived in the 1960s as a joint venture between Breguet of France and the British Aircraft Corporation. The Eurofighter Typhoon was also developed jointly by the UK, Germany, Italy and Spain. These ventures date from the Cold War, when nations were very secretive about their capabilities.
In South Asia, a durable people-to-people movement has risen in response to the India-Pakistan rivalry, but unlike in Europe, the vicious cycle remains intact. Indeed, every iteration of the conflict is a little worse, and the current contest turns the page. The Pahalgam killings were suitable for television and social media, and were carefully crafted to push public sentiment in India over the edge. The response, too, was calibrated and packaged, complete with a vermilion logo and women officers addressing a briefing. While two nations clashed earlier, the imagery of a religious identity has been invoked now.
In his first response, US President Donald Trump said that the rivalry in South Asia is decades old. Then, he hiked it to “centuries”. Commentators smirked because India and Pakistan didn’t exist centuries ago, but Trump wasn’t entirely wrong. Pakistan was created on the basis of a religious identity which is centuries old, and on Jinnah’s belief that Hindus and Muslims are fundamentally different.
This belief is open to question, but equally, the record suggests that the story of Hindu-Muslim amity down the ages is not completely factual. However, in the past, they handled differences better. In the school history class, we also learned of Hindu-Muslim matrimonial alliances. Akbar’s strategic marriages have reached the cinema, but Jahangir and Shah Jahan also married elite Hindu women. Maharaja Amar Singh of Mewar married Akbar’s daughter Khanum in a political alliance. Maharaja Chhatrasal Bundela married Persian Ruhani Bai. Their child, Mastani, married Bajirao I, and they have also made it to the movies.
Times, however, have changed. If marriages between elite Indians and Pakistanis had offered a solution, we would have been at peace long ago. Pakistan is not in good financial health, so economic connections on European lines are unthinkable, but geography dictates that we have to get along. After the fog of war clears, we’ll have to think of something for the long term. Since all other options are exhausted, it would have to be a novelty: maybe an external threat which menaces India and Pakistan equally.
Speakeasy
Pratik Kanjilal | Fellow, Henry J Leir Institute of Migration and Human Security, Fletcher School, Tufts University
(Views are personal)
(Tweets @pratik_k)