Opinion The new and the old in the most recent India-Pakistan hostilities

Second, much has already been said about how India struck deep inside Pakistani Punjab — for the first time since 1971. Muridke is only 40 kilometres from Lahore and, therefore, close to the Indian border. But Bahawalpur, in southern Punjab, is over 400 kilometres from Lahore and more than 200 kilometres from Bikaner, the nearest Indian city. Even in 1971, the Indian military did not strike south Punjab. Pakistan may say that Muridke and Bahawalpur are merely civilian cities. But as scholars, enough of us have attended conferences in which Muridke and Bahawalpur have been credibly discussed as terror headquarters of Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed. Dissertations have also been written on the integral connections between the Pakistan army and terror groups, on Pakistan’s eastern and western borders. The surprise, of course, is that the terrorists of Pahalgam have not yet been captured. But from a scholarly viewpoint, the larger links between the Pakistan army and terror groups are beyond doubt. Be that as it may, hitting centres of terror deep inside Punjab constitutes a stark difference from earlier practices.

Third, the United States has never been involved in peace-making on both sides. In 1999, the Clinton administration did successfully pressure Pakistan into ending the Kargil invasion, but India was not formally engaged in negotiations. Indeed, right from the end of the first Kashmir war in 1949, India has not accepted Western intervention. The only time India was drawn into external mediation was in 1965-66, when the then Soviet Union underwrote the Tashkent Declaration. A few years after Tashkent, in the 1972 Simla Agreement, India took the position that Kashmir was a bilateral dispute to be bilaterally resolved, which became an enduring Indian policy for five decades. America’s recent intervention shows, first of all, that US intelligence could not rule out frightening nuclear possibilities, breaking America’s initial reluctance to intervene. It also shows that the power imbalance between India and the US is too real to be ignored in realpolitik. That India and the US have come very close is true, but it is not the main point here. Rather, the issue is that the US under President Donald Trump is willing to use its power to achieve what it wants.

Fourth, it is also the first time that intense religious nationalism has simultaneously ruled the summits of the two polities, India and Pakistan. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalism is well known. For the Sangh Parivar, Pakistan is part of what Deendayal Upadhyaya called “Musalman samasya”, or a historical “Muslim problem”. Following the RSS, V D Savarkar post-1922 and Upadhyaya, Modi has often used the term “ek hazaar saal ki ghulami”, meaning that India’s colonisation — and therefore Hindu humiliation — began with the establishment of the Muslim-ruled Delhi Sultanate (1206-1526). This reasoning views Pakistan as the latest reflection of a longstanding Muslim desire to dominate Hindus, a desire that must forcefully be defeated. Having broken Pakistan into two parts in 1971, Indira Gandhi was the last great Indian victor. But her argument was not formulated in Hindu-Muslim terms. Superimposing an argument about Hindu-Muslim antagonism over the India-Pakistan conflict, Modi would like to be a bigger and “purer” winner.

However, what makes the situation especially inflammable is the rise of Asim Munir as the Chief of the Army Staff (COAS) in Pakistan. He is both an Islamist and a believer in the two-nation theory. Scholars use the term “religious nationalism” to describe the original two-nation theory of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, which formed the ideological basis for Pakistan. But Jinnah’s demand was cultural and “modernist”, not religious or “Islamist”. “Islam and Hinduism … are not religions in the strict sense of the word, but they,” said Jinnah, “belong to two different civilisations which are based mainly on conflicting ideas and conceptions”. To the 1940s Jinnah, there was nothing called Indian civilisation. Rather, there was a Hindu civilisation and a Muslim civilisation. Therefore, no “common nationality” was possible.

In a much-analysed speech, delivered on April 17, a week before the Pahalgam terrorist attack, Munir not only forcefully reiterated the two-nation theory, but also gave it a religious meaning. He argued that Pakistan, a Muslim nation, was also conceptualised as a second Medina. The first Medina was the polity established by the Prophet Muhammad in 622 AD; Pakistan would be its contemporary version. This idea is not new. In his book Creating a New Medina, the historian Venkat Dhulipala has argued that in the 1940s, a faction of the clergy in Deoband, otherwise known to be supportive of India, tried to mobilise support among UP Muslims on the basis that Pakistan would be a modern-day Medina.

Though believers in the two-nation theory, army chiefs of Pakistan have historically been like Jinnah, non-religious but ardently committed to Muslims as a nation. General Ziaul Haq was the first Islamist army chief. But while he wielded power, India was ruled by the secular nationalism of the Congress party, not by Hindu nationalism. Munir was recruited during Zia’s 1980s Islamisation of the armed forces.

Munir’s rise to the top means that we now have an Islamist nationalist heading Pakistan’s most powerful institution, its army, and a Hindu nationalist ruling India’s polity. International Relations theory says that such arch-antagonists can be deterred from war by two factors — nuclear weapons and/or intervention by a preponderant external power.

This theory will be tested in the coming weeks and months. For the sake of millions, one can only hope the theory succeeds.

The writer is Sol Goldman professor of International Studies and the Social Sciences at Brown University, where he also directs the Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia at the Watson Institute. Views are personal