India, Pakistan and the theatre of nationalist violence

Mail & Guardian

12-05-2025

The conflict between India and Pakistan goes back to Partition in 1947. Conflict has flared up regularly in Kashmir since then including in 2019 (above) and now in 2025. Photo:A tentative ceasefire has been declared between India and Pakistan after one of the most intense cross-border escalations in recent years, with both sides claiming victory and the underlying tensions far from resolved. Those tensions run deep into the region's history — back to the very moment of India's birth as an independent postcolonial state, when the British drew borders not to liberate but to exit, quickly and violently. In 1947, the partition of British India tore through Punjab and Bengal, slicing apart villages, families, and centuries of shared life. Cyril Radcliffe, the man assigned to divide the land, had never set foot on the subcontinent. He drew the new boundaries in just five weeks, with no knowledge of the people they would divide.
The Punjab partition on both sides was particularly brutal: more than a million people were killed in pogroms, reprisal attacks and mass forced displacements. Trains arrived full of corpses. Families were severed. Children went missing. Entire villages were razed. The violence was not spontaneous; it was a political catastrophe born of imperial haste and communal mobilisation.
Partition was not simply the creation of two states. It was the violent birth of religious nationalism in South Asia. The demand for Pakistan, led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah and the Muslim League, had initially emerged as a response to the Congress's failure to accommodate Muslim political identity within a united India. But what was tactical soon became existential. And in the process, new majoritarian identities were forged on both sides of the new border. The very idea of India as a secular republic came under attack not only from the Muslim right but from its Hindu counterpart, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) — the organisation from which the BJP would later emerge.
On 30 January 1948, less than six months after Partition, Mohandas Gandhi was assassinated by Nathuram Godse. Godse was a former RSS member and editor of a Hindu nationalist newspaper. He believed Gandhi had betrayed Hindus by pushing for peace with Pakistan and insisting on the rights of Muslims within India. In his own words, he killed Gandhi not out of hatred, but out of political conviction. That assassination was not a footnote to Partition — it was a culmination of the violent ideological rift that had opened up in the region. It revealed that the project of religious nationalism, once unleashed, would not stop at borders or treaties. It would seep into the very imagination of the nation.
The state of Jammu and Kashmir, though majority-Muslim, had a Hindu ruler, Maharaja Hari Singh, who delayed accession until he sought Indian military assistance in the face of an armed incursion by Pashtun clans mobilised from Pakistan's North-West Frontier province. His decision to join India provoked the first war between the two new nations in 1947-48. That war ended with the Line of Control, a jagged military ceasefire line that cuts through Kashmir to this day. It does not follow rivers or mountains — it follows war. It divides lives, languages, kinship networks and histories. The Line of Control remains one of the most militarised borders in the world, a space of bunkers, barbed wire, and surveillance drones. It is the bleeding edge of the unfinished violence of Partition.
What we are seeing now is the reactivation of a partitioned wound, a wound that the rulers of both India and Pakistan exploit and weaponise for their own ends.
In the wake of this year's 22 April attack in Pahalgam, Kashmir — which left 26 civilians dead, most of them Hindu pilgrims — India responded with a military operation named Sindoor. The choice of the name for the operation was not incidental. Sindoor, the red powder applied by Hindu women to mark their marital status, is not just a religious or cultural symbol. It is a deeply gendered marker of purity, belonging and sacrificial duty. To name a military operation Sindoor is to summon not only the language of possession and honour. In a country where women's bodies are often the terrain on which religious identity is violently policed, this choice reveals much about the state's ideological orientation. The Bharatiya Janata Party's deployment of such imagery aligns perfectly with the fascist project of Hindutva, where the Indian nation is imagined as a Hindu motherland under siege from minorities and militarism is framed as devotional duty.
The operation itself involved the bombing of alleged militant camps across the Line of Control. But, as with so many military operations in South Asia, it is not clear what exactly was achieved — except, perhaps, a surge in nationalist fervour on Indian television and the silencing of domestic dissent. In response, Pakistan launched what it called Operation Bunyan-ul-Marsoos, a phrase lifted from the Qur'an meaning 'a wall of solid lead'. The religious framing of Pakistan's retaliation is no less symbolic than India's. It calls forth images of spiritual defence, of a righteous fortress holding back invasion. In both cases, religious metaphor is used to elevate state violence into sacred obligation.
The cycle is as predictable as it is dangerous. Each side performs strength for its own people, invoking blood, soil and god to mask the failures of governance. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, facing unemployment, rural despair and growing global scrutiny of his authoritarianism, finds in conflict the perfect distraction. The Pakistani military, long the most powerful institution in the country, reasserts its role as the guardian of the nation even as economic crisis and political instability threaten to unseat it. In this dance of shadows, it is the people who pay. It is Kashmiri children who flinch at the sound of drones. It is poor and working-class families who bury their dead. It is women, always, who bear the weight and heat of honour-based nationalism on their skin.
To understand how we arrived here, we must return not just to Partition but to the Cold War, to the entrenchment of militant infrastructures funded by states and intelligence agencies across borders. Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group India holds responsible for the Pahalgam attack, was born in a context where Pakistan's military sought strategic depth in Kashmir and where the United States turned a blind eye so long as the fight aligned with its own regional interests. The more recent face of this militancy, The Resistance Front (TRF), emerged after the revocation of Kashmir's special status by India in 2019. The TRF presented itself as a local, secular force but has been widely linked to Lashkar's networks. It was a rebranding, a tactical shift in a long war of proxies. That war has always been waged not just between nations but between ideologies — secularism versus theocracy, democracy versus militarism, but more often, elite nationalism versus popular emancipation.
What is striking about this current moment is not only the violence but the symbolism. That symbolism is a language, and in the Global South, we must learn to read it. When Modi invokes ancient Hindu symbols to justify airstrikes, he is not merely speaking to voters. He is attempting to rewrite the secular fabric of the Indian republic itself, bending history and myth to serve the logic of Hindu supremacy. When Pakistan replies in Quranic verse, it too is using the divine to authorise state power, even as journalists are jailed and dissent is choked. These are not strategies of defence. They are strategies of domination.
Tariq Ali, writing recently in
Counterfire
, reminds us that war between India and Pakistan has always served elite interests and rarely the people's. He notes that in every conflict since 1947, it is the poor who are sacrificed and the powerful who emerge stronger. That analysis remains true today. As military budgets swell, public health collapses. As nuclear rhetoric builds, schools crumble. The people of South Asia deserve better than to be pawns in the nationalist theatre of men who never fight on the front lines.
And beyond the subcontinent, the rest of the Global South should take heed. The India-Pakistan conflict is not a local affair. It is a reminder that borders are often lines carved into the earth with colonial violence, that militarism still shapes the post-colony, and that solidarity among the oppressed is always under threat from nationalist mythologies wielded by rapacious elites. Every rupee spent on war is a rupee not spent on rebuilding public education systems, on confronting the debt regimes imposed by international finance, or on expanding worker-controlled alternatives to extractive economics. Nationalist and religious fervour is an all too effective form of social control. The Global South is not only linked by diplomacy or trade, but by a shared inheritance of violence and a struggle to end it.
The ceasefire now in place is not a sign of peace but of pause. Both India and Pakistan have claimed victory, yet neither has offered a path forward for the people most affected by this crisis — Kashmiris, civilians living near the Line of Control and the working poor across both countries. What has been gained is not resolution, but rearmament. The temporary silencing of missiles will probably give way to louder internal repression, intensified surveillance and renewed investment in militarised nationalism. In the absence of structural change, accountability and demilitarisation, this ceasefire merely resets the cycle. The challenge before the region — and before the Global South more broadly — is not how to manage nationalist conflict, but how to dismantle the political economies that rely on it.
Vashna Jagarnath is a historian, political risk and DEI consultant, labour expert, pan-African and South Asian political analyst and curriculum specialist.