India-Pakistan: Terror, Nukes and Reunion?

Austin Bay on May 7, 2025

In a column written this past February, I listed four unsettled wars "frozen" under a nuclear shadow: 1) India vs. China in the Himalayas. 2) North Korea threatening South Korea and Japan -- speculating South Korea and Japan could have their own nuclear weapons in 72 hours. 4) Israel vs. Iran. Israel's nukes will work. Tehran currently calls Israel a "one bomb state" but has no functional weapon.

Yes, I left out No. 3. Here it is: India vs. Pakistan. Should this war go hot, India will win, but Mumbai and Delhi will have Gaza craters. Islamabad? A radioactive memory -- and the real victor is China.

As I write this column, news breaks. India has fired several missiles targeting "terrorist infrastructure" located in Pakistan's slice of the contested province of Kashmir -- on official maps marked as "Pakistan Administered Kashmir." The Indian government says its missile barrage attack is a justified response to an April 22 attack by Islamist terrorists that killed 26 civilians, most of them tourists -- meaning the terrorists murdered innocent visitors in India's slice of Kashmir.

If the geography seems confusing, it is -- and it's tragic. The disputed territory of Jammu-Kashmir is a leftover from the division of "British" India into "Hindu" India and "Muslim" Pakistan. I apply quotation marks liberally because India still has some 200 million Muslim Indians, and over the last 40 years, I've met several dozen Hindus who fled their homes in what is now Pakistan and settled in Canada and the U.S. instead of New Delhi. "At one time, it was all India," an Indian restauranteur told me. He and his wife fled Karachi (now Pakistan).

Kashmir had a predominantly Muslim population but a Hindu ruler. For 50 years, India and Pakistan have fought over Kashmir. In 1965, they waged a full-scale war over the region. Islamist radicals consider Kashmir to be one of the holiest of holy wars.

So Kashmir remains a battleground between two nuclear-armed states that, for the most part, speak Hindi-Urdu and Inglish.

Inglish is slang for idiomatic subcontinent English. As for Hindi? Urdu? They are really the same language, but one divided by politics exacerbated by religion. They've a lot in common, including cricket, but they kill each other. Serbo-Croat is similar. Serbs are Orthodox Christians who write in Cyrillic. Croats are Catholics who use Latin letters. They're both Slavs, speaking the same language but divided by politics and religion and alphabets. And they often kill each other.

Pakistan and India however possess nuclear weapons. In the world of nukes, a short-range missile strike is a warning shot with a mushroom message. Battlefield missiles can carry small nukes. Pakistan says one of the missiles landed in its eastern Punjab province -- in other words, non-contested territory. If Pakistan's claim is accurate, India's warning shot went beyond contested territory.

Who were the April terrorists? Likely a Pakistani military-backed Muslim terrorist group. Every few years, Muslim terrorists attack Kashmir or Mumbai or New Delhi. The July 11, 2006, attack on Mumbai was particularly heinous. Indian media call the attack 7/11. In retrospect, the mass murder of civilians in the city is more than a bit like the Hamas October 2023 assault on Israel.

The subcontinent nuclear face-off has global twists. China backs Pakistan. Russia supposedly backs India. India, however, makes common cause with Singapore and Australia -- and increasingly participates in military exercises with Japan and the U.S.

Will Kashmir lead to a nuclear war in 2025? I say no, because Pakistan knows India will win and no one sane wants radioactive craters.

Is there a solution?

The post-World War II partition of British India was a blood-drenched mess. Since partition, India has prospered. Pakistan has not.

In retrospect, splitting British India into West Pakistan (now Pakistan), East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and India may have been one of the 20th century's greatest geostrategic errors.

If religion and politics divide them, culture, common sense and common decency unite them. But reuniting India? Political fantasy!

Yet, year by year, Pakistan decays amid corruption, Islamic terrorism and economic rot. India's economic surge has made it a global powerhouse.

I know for a fact that, for two decades, young Pakistanis have been reconsidering partition -- because the bloodletting continues, with only nuclear devastation the end point. So, never say never.

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To find out more about Austin Bay and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

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