Will Kashmir Stop India's Rise?

Sumit Ganguly

From Foreign Affairs, July/August 2006

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Summary:  India's growing economic and diplomatic prominence is unlikely to be derailed by its territorial dispute with Pakistan over Kashmir. But given the risk that the Kashmir issue could spark a nuclear war, it is in India's best interest that it be resolved. Washington should use its influence with Islamabad to broker an agreement and thereby cement its growing strategic partnership with New Delhi.

SUMIT GANGULY is Rabindranath Tagore Chair of Indian Cultures and Civilizations and Professor of Political Science at Indiana University in Bloomington.

BREAKING AWAY

Over the past several years, India's economic growth, diplomatic influence, and overall prestige have increased sharply. The country's new international profile adds a fresh dimension to its ongoing clash with Pakistan over Kashmir. So far, the conflict has not hindered India's rise. But the prospects that the two sides will reach a settlement on their own are dim.

Although it is unlikely that the issue will frustrate India's ambitions to emerge as an Asian -- and a global -- power, periodic crises over the state will distract India's leaders, and tensions with Pakistan could spark yet another war. The United States can, and should, play a role in facilitating an end to the conflict by prodding both sides to reach an accord. Doing so will require that Washington change its stance toward both India and Pakistan, but the potential rewards -- peace on the subcontinent and a solid strategic partnership between Washington and New Delhi -- are well worth the effort.

The dispute over Kashmir has dogged relations between India and Pakistan since the states were created by the partition of British India in 1947. The two countries have fought three wars (in 1947-48, 1965, and 1999) over the issue and related matters; twice (in 1990 and 2001-2) they nearly resorted to the use of nuclear weapons. Intense international concern has prompted multilateral efforts to broker a formal conclusion to the dispute. Yet neither war nor negotiation has brought the issue any closer to a resolution, and there has been no significant change in the territory's status since the two sides first exchanged shots nearly 60 years ago. (India controls approximately two-thirds of the original state, and Pakistan administers most of the remainder. In 1963, Pakistan ceded a small tract of its territorial claim in northern Kashmir to China, thereby enabling China to build a road to connect the provinces of Tibet and Xinjiang).

The conflict grew out of competing projects of nation building. New Delhi insisted on holding on to Kashmir in order to demonstrate that the province could thrive in a secular state. (India's position was aided by the Hindu monarch of Kashmir, who hastily agreed to join India in 1947 in the hope of forestalling an uprising and a Pakistani-backed incursion.) The government in Islamabad, in contrast, believed that Kashmir, whose population is mostly Muslim, belonged in Pakistan, the putative homeland of the Muslims of South Asia. Although each side's rationale for its commitment has long since either collapsed (the case in Pakistan after the secession of Bangladesh in Pakistan's 1971 civil war) or frayed (the case in India following the rise of virulent Hindu nationalism there), the two governments have refused to moderate their claims.

The dispute cooled for a time after Islamabad's decisive defeat in the 1971 Indo-Pakistani war (touched off not by Kashmir but by the Pakistani civil war) and the subsequent emergence of Indian superiority in conventional arms. Between 1971 and 1989, Pakistani leaders paid only lip service to the ...

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