Four days of escalating fighting erupted between the rulers of India and Pakistan May 7, threatening full-scale war between the two nuclear-armed powers. Growing out of cross-border shelling in the disputed region of Kashmir, drone and air-launched missile strikes soon began hitting military targets deep inside each other’s territory. After initially declaring the conflict was none of its business, the White House scrambled to broker a ceasefire May 10.
Dozens were killed, including numbers of civilians. Tens of thousands were forced to flee. The governments of India and Pakistan each claimed the outcome as a victory. The armed clash comes as economic and military tensions among capitalist powers worldwide have deepened, amid the growing rivalry and shifting alliances between Washington and Beijing in the Indo-Pacific region.
The fighting began with missile strikes by New Delhi on what it said were terrorist camps in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. This was in response to an Islamist terror attack in Pahalgam in Indian-occupied Kashmir April 22. The five attackers, seeking out Hindu men, shot 26 civilians in cold blood.
Kashmir, in the foothills of the Himalayas, has 17 million people with their own Kashmiri language. Formerly an independent state under British colonial rule, the Indian and Pakistani rulers went to war over it in 1947 cutting it in two. This followed the bloody partition of the Indian subcontinent engineered by London to block a united Indian independence struggle and the possibility of self-determination for Kashmir. Beijing occupies smaller areas in the northeast.
Both New Delhi and Islamabad claim the entire territory. Hundreds of thousands of their troops face off across the “Line of Control,” one of the world’s most militarized regions.
India and Pakistan have gone to war three times over Kashmir. Since 1998, both have been nuclear-armed, each with about 170 nuclear warheads. Any escalating war between the two poses the risk of a devastating conflict.
The Indian government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which came to office in 2014, was reelected in 2019 and 2024. His party, the Indian People’s Party (BJP), envisages India as a Hindu-dominated nation rather than a secular state. Hindus make up 80% of the population.
In 2019 Modi’s government revoked the region’s status as a state and incorporated Jammu and Kashmir as two “union territories” under the direct control of the central Indian government. A massive police and military lockdown was imposed on the population, over two-thirds of whom are Muslim and the remainder mainly Hindus or Sikhs.
Following the April 22 terror attack, New Delhi again flooded Kashmir with troops and police, detaining thousands.
For most of its existence, Islamabad has been a close military ally of Washington. Today, however, most of its military arms and equipment come from neighboring China, as the two have also become major trading partners. Beijing is building a massive road and rail corridor across Pakistan linking western China to the port of Gwadar in the Arabian Sea as part of its Belt and Road Initiative.
Shifting alignments sharpen conflict
India’s rulers maintained friendly relations with Moscow during the Cold War and got most of their military armaments from the Soviet Union. But, as part of shifting alliances in a more turbulent world, over half their military imports now come from the U.S., France and Israel. The U.S. is India’s largest trading partner. Washington seeks to use its Quad alliance with New Delhi, along with the imperialist powers of Australia and Japan, to try to counter Beijing’s influence in the Indo-Pacific.
The rulers in neighboring Bangladesh have also deepened trade and military ties with Beijing. A caretaker government took office last August when, amid widespread protests, the elected government stepped down and its leader fled to India after the military withdrew support. Since then, relations have warmed between Dhaka and Islamabad for the first time since the national liberation war for Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan in 1971, which the Indian rulers actively supported.
The protests in Bangladesh were organized by Islamist student groups and parties, which denounced India and Hindus, accusing them of backing the ousted Awami League government of the past 15 years. Hindus, who make up 8% of the population, say they have faced attacks since.
Islamist-led demonstrations in both Pakistan and Bangladesh protesting Israel’s war against Hamas have attacked India’s ties with Israel. Often these target Hindus and Jews as a common enemy.
The national divisions and religious conflicts on the Indian subcontinent were set up by London’s historic divide-and-rule course. But the rival rulers’ conflicts today are driven by competition among national capitalist classes, fueled by the crisis of the disintegrating imperialist world order as Washington’s domination weakens.
London’s bloody partition of India
The British rulers were forced to leave their colony of India — the crown jewel in their empire — in 1947. Facing a massive struggle by the toilers for independence, they carved up the colony along religious lines — a Hindu-dominated India and a mainly Muslim Pakistan divided into east and west 1,000 miles apart, that became Pakistan and Bangladesh.
London’s course was aided by the Muslim League, a reactionary association of landlords and capitalists that supported British rule. They demanded their own Muslim-ruled territory as independence became inevitable. Whole regions which are large nations in their own right, such as Bengal and Punjab, were split in two as new borders were drawn to create the new gerrymandered countries. Some 15 million people were displaced as refugees and over 1 million were killed as rival ruling-class factions incited religious pogroms to grab more territory.
Despite the division, there are almost as many Muslims in India today as in Pakistan. Only Indonesia has a larger Muslim population.
A referendum in Kashmir to decide the nation’s future that was promised by the new rulers in India and Pakistan in 1948 has never been allowed.
While the British overlords were forced to grant independence, they succeeded, through the partition of the subcontinent, in dealing a blow to the revolutionary struggle of working people there. As a consequence, conditions of life for millions of working people in these countries today remain mired in backwardness.