Are India and Pakistan at risk of war?

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Tensions between India and Pakistan intensified Wednesday, May 8, after India’s military launched strikes against the neighboring country in response to an attack in Indian-administered Kashmir last month (April 22) that killed 26 tourists, heightening fears of war between the nuclear-armed rivals.

Pakistani officials said the (May 8) strikes killed at least 21 civilians, including two children.

The strikes have set the region on edge and shattered the fragile ceasefire that has largely held since 2021. Analysts are warning of escalation in the decades-long conflict that has riven the South Asian subcontinent over the Muslim-majority region of Kashmir, parts of which are controlled by India and Pakistan, though the area is claimed in full by both countries.

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Wednesday’s aerial assault is on a far bigger scale than in 2019, when India struck a single, remote Pakistani site in response to a suicide bombing that killed more than 40 Indian soldiers in Kashmir.

The international community, including the Trump administration, has urged New Delhi and Islamabad to de-escalate.

How did the latest conflict begin?

The sharp rise in tensions follows a deadly April 22 attack on tourists near the town of Pahalgam in Indian-administered Kashmir.

Gunmen armed with rifles killed 25 Indians and one Nepalese citizen. More than a dozen others were injured. The attack was the deadliest against civilians since the 2008 Mumbai attacks by the Pakistani-based militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba that killed 166 people.

India has long accused Pakistan of fomenting separatist violence in Kashmir. Indian Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri said Wednesday that India had found evidence linking the militants in the Pahalgam attack to Pakistan.

An armed insurgency – either seeking independence or favoring accession to Pakistan – has continued for more than 3 decades in the region.

The government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi revoked Kashmir’s semiautonomous status in August 2019 and instituted a crackdown, including imposing the world’s longest internet shutdown in a democracy. Promising development and investment, New Delhi had touted a return to relative peace, citing the surge of tourists to the region, a narrative upended by the deadly attack last month.

Where did India strike in Pakistan?

India’s armed forces said in a statement that it had targeted nine sites in Pakistan, describing the attacks as “non-escalatory in nature.”

According to the Pakistani military, 24 “impacts” were reported across six locations: Ahmedpur East, Muridke and Sialkot in Pakistan and Kotli, Bagh and Muzaffarabad in Pakistani-administered Kashmir.

Pakistan’s leaders condemned the strikes as an act of war, with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif saying his country had the right to “give a befitting reply.”

Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry, Pakistan’s chief military spokesman, told local media on Wednesday that Pakistan had shot down five Indian warplanes, including French-made Rafales.

Pakistani officials released a video showing smoke rising from apparent wreckage that officials claimed was one of the downed planes. The claims could not be independently verified, and the Indian government had no immediate response.

Background of conflict

Tensions over Kashmir date back to 1947, when the British-ruled Indian subcontinent was partitioned into the independent nations of Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan.

The mountainous region spans about 85,800 square miles of the subcontinent between India, Pakistan and China, and its status has been a sore point for the three nations for decades. Various agreements have led to the current governance arrangements, but each nation has competing claims of sovereignty over Kashmir, or parts of it.

Conflicts in which the area was a central issue broke out between India and Pakistan in 1947, 1965 and 1999 and between India and China in 1962, with flare-ups of violence and saber rattling along the militarized borders continuing to the present day.

(India and Pakistan also went to war in 1971 when the Indian military became involved in a civil war in East Pakistan. The conflict eventually resulted in East Pakistan becoming the independent nation of Bangladesh.)

Before partition, the area was a Muslim-majority princely state called Jammu and Kashmir that was under British rule. Afterward, despite his initial plans for its independence, the state’s Hindu monarch agreed to join India as he faced an internal rebellion and attacks from tribes in Pakistan.

Direct conflict erupted between the Indian and Pakistani armed forces, until the United Nations oversaw a ceasefire that split the state into a northwest section administered by Pakistan and the larger section administered by India. The unofficial border between the two is called the Line of Control.

An eastern section of Kashmir has remained under Chinese control since a brief war with India in 1962.

What nuclear weapons do India and Pakistan have?

India and Pakistan are nuclear-armed nations, a factor that adds to global alarm whenever there are escalations in their dispute over Kashmir.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) estimates that Pakistan and India each possess about 170 nuclear warheads.

The role of nuclear weapons in India’s military doctrine – which had earlier been focused on deterring Pakistan – appears in recent years to have shifted to countering China, with a growing emphasis on longer-range weapons, according to a 2024 SIPRI report.

That same year, SIPRI said Pakistan’s growing stockpile of fissile material and development of new delivery systems suggests its nuclear arsenal is likely to keep expanding over the next decade.

Neither country is a signatory to the U.N. Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.

Why did India call its strikes ‘Operation Sindoor’?

Sindoor is the Hindi word for the powdered vermilion pigment that married Hindu women wear on their foreheads and hair. The Indian army posted a photo of the powder on X, with a post saying justice had been “served” for the militant attack in Pahalgam.

Indian media have described the choice of the name as a tribute to the women who lost their husbands in the attack.

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