India vs Pakistan: Four Wars, a Nuclear Standoff, and a Cycle of Terror

On 15 August 1947, one country became two. The partition of British India into India and Pakistan was supposed to ease tensions and allow the much-maligned peoples of the subcontinent — whether Hindu, Sikh, Muslim, or Christian — to live in peace, free from persecution. The reality could not have been further from that promise.

The largest single partition of a populous land the world had ever seen lit the fuse on a powder keg that detonated almost immediately. Ethnic violence raged on both sides of the newly drawn border. Between 14 and 18 million people are thought to have moved from India to Pakistan or in the opposite direction, and excess mortality recorded during that dark period puts the number killed at over one million.

The bloodshed did not stop in 1947. In the decades since, the two nations have fought four separate wars and traded countless cross-border skirmishes that continue to take lives. Deep suspicion runs between them and, in many cases, outright hatred — sentiments hardened not only by open warfare but by repeated accusations that each side funds or directs terrorist attacks on the other.

This is the story of how partition seeded a rivalry that has spanned more than three-quarters of a century, escalated into the only war ever fought between two nuclear-armed states, and mutated into a long, covert campaign of gunmen, car bombs, and recrimination that shows no sign of ending.

A Bloody Partition

The partition led to one of the largest mass migrations in history, accompanied by horrific communal violence and a humanitarian crisis on a scale that still has not been repeated. The now-infamous Radcliffe Line had divided British India — in theory, with the majority-Muslim areas to the west and the majority-Hindu regions to the east. In reality, it was never that simple.

The subcontinent had been under colonial rule, but many of its smaller states were effectively run as their own mini-monarchies, known as the Princely States. The process of all these states joining either India or Pakistan was not concluded until 1949. That patchwork of competing loyalties, hurried borders, and unresolved allegiances ensured that independence arrived not as a clean break but as a contested, violent reordering of an entire region.

One of the most contentious holdouts was Jammu and Kashmir, a state with a majority-Muslim population but a Hindu ruler who initially chose neither India nor Pakistan — a situation the British, along with almost everyone else, considered utterly unacceptable. Tensions rose quickly, and war became inevitable.

The First Kashmir War

The conflict began in earnest in October 1947, when tribal militias from Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province, supported by elements of the Pakistani military, invaded Kashmir in an effort to annex the territory. The invasion saw rapid advances and was marked by significant violence, particularly against the Hindu and Sikh minorities of the region.

Faced with an overwhelming force and the prospect of losing control over his kingdom, Maharaja Hari Singh sought military assistance from India. India agreed to intervene on the condition that Kashmir accede once the job was done. Hari Singh signed the Instrument of Accession on 26 October 1947, legally integrating Kashmir into India. The very next day, Indian forces were airlifted into Srinagar, the capital of Kashmir, marking the beginning of active military engagement between the two new states.

The war was fought on multiple fronts, but the most significant battles took place around Srinagar, Poonch, and Uri. Indian forces managed to halt the advance of the tribal militias and the Pakistani military in several vital areas, securing Srinagar and pushing the invaders back in other parts of the princely state.

The war officially ended on 1 January 1949, when a UN-brokered ceasefire came into effect. The ceasefire line — eventually known as the Line of Control — divided Kashmir into Pakistan-administered areas, referred to as Azad Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan, and the Indian region of Jammu and Kashmir. The resolution satisfied neither party, and the seeds of further conflict were already sown.

Operation Gibraltar and the 1965 War

In August 1965, Pakistani army troops from the Azad Kashmir Regular Force, disguised as locals, crept across the Line of Control into Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir. This covert operation — named after the historic Islamic conquest of Gibraltar — marked the beginning of the second Indo-Pakistani war. Its aim was to infiltrate forces into the region to carry out sabotage, attacking military installations and communication lines and spreading propaganda, in the hope of inciting an insurgency among the Muslim population against Indian rule and, ultimately, the region’s accession to Pakistan.

Pakistani planners believed the predominantly Muslim local population would rise in support of the infiltrators, producing a widespread uprising that would compel India to relinquish control over the territory. The operation, however, did not unfold as anticipated. The expected uprising failed to materialise, owing to the unexpectedly high loyalty of a significant portion of the Kashmiri populace to the Indian government, effective counter-insurgency measures by Indian security forces, and a lack of coordination among the infiltrating units.

India’s response was swift and fierce. Forces swarmed into Kashmir, stalling Pakistan’s operation while also launching a full-scale offensive across the international border into Pakistani Punjab, in what became known as Operation Grand Slam. Intense fighting erupted both in Kashmir and along the India-Pakistan border, but again there were few positive outcomes for either side. The war ended with a United Nations-mediated ceasefire on 23 September 1965 and was formally concluded with the signing of the Tashkent Agreement in January 1966.

Bangladesh Emerges

When the subcontinent split, one glaring anomaly was East Pakistan. While the bulk of the new nation lay west of India, one small section sat more than 1,600 kilometres (1,000 miles) away on the other side of the country — a geographic arrangement that was, at best, going to be difficult to sustain.

By 1971, the Bangladeshi independence movement was gathering pace, with plenty of support from around the world. The refusal of the Pakistani military regime — then headed by General Yahya Khan, alongside West Pakistan’s political establishment — to transfer power to Sheikh Mujibur Rahman led to widespread protests and civil disobedience in East Pakistan. In response, on the night of 25 March 1971, the Pakistani military launched Operation Searchlight, a brutal crackdown aimed at quelling the independence movement. It led to the arrest of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and the indiscriminate killing of civilians, students, intellectuals, and political activists, sparking a full-scale war for independence.

The atrocities that followed — mass killings, rapes, and the displacement of millions — drew international condemnation and produced a significant refugee crisis, with millions of Bengalis fleeing to neighbouring India. The conflict intensified in December 1971, when India officially entered the war in support of the independence movement following a pre-emptive air strike by Pakistan on Indian airbases. The Indo-Pakistani War of 1971 lasted just 13 days, one of the shortest wars in history, but it was decisive. It culminated in the Pakistani military’s surrender in Dhaka on 16 December 1971, creating Bangladesh as an independent nation.

This may have looked like just another chapter in the back-and-forth between India and Pakistan, but what happened in East Pakistan was almost unfathomable. The minimum number killed during the genocide that swept the region was 300,000, with an upper figure of 3 million. Soldiers or militia members raped between 200,000 and 400,000 Bengali women, and more than 30 million people were displaced. In raw numbers, what occurred in what would become Bangladesh was far worse than the much more widely discussed Rwandan genocide.

The Nuclear Club and Kargil

With such a chaotic half-century of conflict behind them, it is no surprise that huge animosity remains between the two nations. In 1999, tensions exploded once again during the Kargil Conflict, when Pakistani soldiers and militants infiltrated the Kargil district in Indian-administered Kashmir. The conflict caused extensive military and civilian casualties and ended, like the others, with India regaining control of the territory.

One enormous difference set Kargil apart from the three wars before it: Pakistan and India were now members of the nuclear weapon club. Both nations had begun their nuclear programmes in the 1970s, but usable weapons did not arrive until the mid-to-late 1990s. The Kargil Conflict therefore represented the first and only time two countries possessing nuclear weapons have gone to war. It heightened nerves around the world, as decades of hatred bubbled to the surface in the presence of weapons capable of killing millions in seconds.

Terrorism Replaces Open War

It has now been a quarter-century since India and Pakistan last went head to head in large-scale open conflict, but that does not mean the fighting has stopped. Instead, it has become more covert, often striking directly at the citizens of either country rather than at the military. Terrorism — both state-sponsored and non-state — has become a significant tool for asserting political agendas and destabilising the region. Gunmen storming facilities, car bombs, train derailments, kidnappings, and mass shootings make for a long and bloody list, and the bad blood runs deep.

The shift to covert warfare has made attribution harder and accountability rarer. Attacks are claimed, denied, and counter-claimed across the border, each one feeding the next round of recrimination. What follows is a record of some of the deadliest incidents on both sides — and the competing narratives of blame that surround them.

Attacks on India

There is a long list of terrorist attacks on Indian soil for which Pakistani-based militants were thought to be responsible. In 2000, an attack on the Red Fort in Delhi killed three. In 2001, a car bomb detonated outside the Jammu and Kashmir State Legislative Assembly complex in Srinagar, killing 38. Two months later, in December 2001, a group of armed militants attacked the Indian Parliament in New Delhi, leaving nine people dead, including security personnel.

On 11 July 2006, 11 separate bombs went off on different trains across Mumbai’s rail network during the afternoon rush, killing 209 people and injuring more than 700. The 2008 Mumbai attacks, a series of coordinated assaults, claimed 166 lives and injured over 300. The attackers, armed with automatic weapons and grenades, targeted multiple locations and held India’s financial capital under a three-day siege. Investigations pointed towards Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistan-based militant group, as the orchestrators, with evidence suggesting support and facilitation by elements within Pakistan.

In early 2016, the Pathankot Air Force Base came under attack by heavily armed gunmen, triggering a prolonged security operation that left seven security personnel and all the attackers dead. The assault was quickly linked to Jaish-e-Mohammed, another group operating from Pakistani territory. The incident derailed diplomatic dialogue that had been gaining momentum, with India insisting on actionable intelligence and concrete measures from Pakistan against the groups responsible.

The Pulwama attack in February 2019 marked another escalation, when a suicide bomber struck a convoy of Indian paramilitary personnel in Jammu and Kashmir, killing 40 soldiers. The attack, again claimed by Jaish-e-Mohammed, sparked widespread outrage in India and calls for punitive action. In response, India conducted an airstrike in Balakot, Pakistan, targeting what it said were terrorist training camps — the first time since the 1971 war that aerial bombings had crossed the Line of Control. The subsequent downing of an Indian aircraft and the capture of its pilot by Pakistani forces escalated the situation further, though the pilot’s quick release was read as a de-escalatory gesture.

Attacks on Pakistan

Just as in India, there is a painfully long list of attacks carried out inside Pakistan, with fingers often pointed back toward India. The insurgency in Balochistan, a province of Pakistan, has been a long-standing conflict in which a series of uprisings and armed struggles has killed many. The region’s discontent stems from demands for autonomy, control over natural resources, cultural and linguistic rights, and economic disparities. Baloch nationalists have often accused the Pakistani government of exploitation and marginalisation, fuelling repeated cycles of insurgency since the area became part of Pakistan in 1948.

Pakistan has repeatedly accused India of supporting the Baloch insurgents, alleging that India’s intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), is involved in funding, arming, and training separatist groups to destabilise the country. In March 2016, Kulbhushan Jadhav, an Indian national, was arrested by Pakistani authorities and charged with espionage and sabotage. The Pakistani military released a video in which Jadhav confessed to being a RAW agent tasked with organising espionage and sabotage in Balochistan and Karachi. India denies that he is a spy, maintaining instead that he is an ex-navy officer whom Pakistan kidnapped.

There are almost too many attacks to count, but in recent years Balochistan has become a deadly place. The most recent large-scale attack came on the eve of the Pakistani election on 7 February 2024, when two IED bombs planted on motorbikes killed more than 30 people in Pishin District and Killa Saifullah. ISIL claimed both attacks, yet that has done little to dissuade those who suspect Indian involvement.

In 2021, a suicide bomber detonated an explosive at a police checkpoint in Lahore, killing four people. The attack was thought to have targeted the house of Hafiz Saeed, founder of a militant Islamist group blamed for the deadly 2008 Mumbai attack. Saeed is already serving a 31-year prison sentence but has never been tried for the Mumbai attacks. After arresting several members of the terrorist cell behind the Lahore bombing, Pakistani authorities said they had uncovered a pay trail leading back to India that funded the cell to the tune of $800,000.

Perpetual Enemies

At this stage, it is difficult to see how these two nations disentangle themselves from this death dive and cycle of recrimination. The rise of China as a regional power and its strategic partnership with Pakistan, the changing dynamics of US involvement in Afghanistan, and India’s ever-closer relationship with Russia have all added new dimensions to an already complex and tortuous relationship.

The India-Pakistan disputes are rooted in deep-seated mistrust, historical grievances, and complicated domestic politics intertwined with international diplomacy. Yet, as in many parts of the world, the hatred is often driven by governments who need a frightened population in order to remain powerful and stay relevant.

Most Indians and Pakistanis are thoroughly tired of this never-ending dispute between two groups who, less than 70 years ago, were one. The problem did not begin in 1947, however. The British knew full well how to play groups against each other, and when independence became a possibility, certain factions were more than happy to stoke the tension and hatred that can still be felt today. This is a narrative of violence and recrimination that is not about to end any time soon.