Rocks and Hard Places: Caught Between Pakistan and India, Kashmiris Hope for Peace

On April 22, gunfire broke out in the idyllic hill station of Pahalgam in Indian-administered Kashmir. When it was over, 26 people, mostly Indian tourists, were dead in the worst terror attack in the region in decades.  

Immediately, India blamed Pakistan for the attack. Two weeks later, India launched strikes at its neighbor. Pakistan, which denied involvement, responded by downing Indian warplanes.  

So began days of tit-for-tat attacks which were most intense along the Line of Control, the de facto border between India and Pakistan in Kashmir, a Muslim-majority region split between the two countries, but which each claims in its entirety.  

The escalating fight between the two nuclear armed countries alarmed leaders around the world. On May 10, a ceasefire took effect as the US stepped in to negotiate a truce and find a “solution” for Kashmir. Analysts say the use of that word is recognition that any truce will eventually break without a permanent solution for the region.  

Meanwhile, those caught in between Pakistan and India say they are bracing for more violence. “It is good that the ceasefire has taken place,” Suleman Sheikh, a 28-year-old resident in Uri in Indian Kashmir, told Al Jazeera. “But I don’t know if it will hold.” 

Still, the explosion of violence is only bringing to the surface what has been shadowing the lives of Kashmiris for decades, ever since an armed rebellion first erupted against the Indian government in the late 1980s.  

In the ensuing years, there had been outbreaks of violence but mostly a tense calm in the region, with Kashmiris complaining of heavy-handed treatment by the Indian government.  

Then, in 2019, the Indian government led by the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) scrapped Jammu and Kashmir’s semi-autonomous status that they had held since Indian independence in 1947, redrew Kashmir’s electoral map, and began a large-scale security crackdown. It deployed 700,000 troops there, imprisoned thousands of people, and shut down the Internet and all phone service for seven months. Journalists, academics, religious figures, human rights activists, politicians, businessmen, and lawyers were harassed or jailed. Some people, meanwhile, were disappeared or killed extrajudicially. 

A year later, India said it defeated the terrorists and that “normalcy” had returned to Kashmir.  

Then it encouraged Indian Hindus to settle there, removing property ownership restrictions on non-Kashmiris and encouraged tourism: “Tourism has replaced terrorism,” went one of the government’s pitches, encouraging Hindu pilgrims, newlyweds, and families to visit.  

The April attack, however, shattered the Indian government’s lie, say analysts. “The narrative that Kashmir has become a ‘normal’ and peaceful region under Indian rule has been a core element of the ruling BJP’s propaganda for years,” wrote Saiba Varma of the University of California, San Diego, in Compact magazine. “Overnight, the attack shattered (that) version of reality.”  

Now some Indians feel betrayed by the government.  

“We didn’t know that a trip to Kashmir could turn out so bad for us,” Aishanya Dwivedi, who survived the attack in which her husband of just two months was killed, told the BBC. “But the government told us that Kashmir is safe.”  

Meanwhile, Indian officials have long dismissed anti-Indian tensions in Indian-controlled Kashmir as the work of Pakistan. But as the Associated Press noted, it was Indian actions in the region that upended life for 7 million Kashmiris and led to those tensions. 

“The prime minister of the world’s largest democracy had clamped down on Kashmir to near-totalitarian levels,” the newswire wrote. “And Narendra Modi’s country reacted with roaring approval.”  

By April 22, Kashmiris had been living in a region of simmering tensions “amid a strange calm enforced by an intensified security crackdown,” it added.  

Now that crackdown is getting even more intense.  

In Kashmir, the Indian government over the past few weeks has demolished the houses of those they deem rebels without due process, raided homes across the region, and detained almost 3,000 people, including journalists, most of whom are being held in preventative detention.  

“What happened in Pahalgam is gruesome, and no sane person would endorse such an act,” a young boy in Guree, where homes have been demolished, referring to the attack, told the Washington Post. “But why punish civilians?”