LOCATION Kashmir, Indian Subcontinent
NEAREST POPULATION HUB Islamabad, Pakistan/ Srinagar, India
SECRECY OVERVIEW Access restricted: UN-regulated dividing line between India and Pakistan.
When the British gave up control of India in 1947, the country was divided into two independent states along broadly religious lines: Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan. As a result of the vagaries of politics, Kashmir became the focus of a bitter border dispute that has rumbled on for almost seven decades with little prospect of resolution. In the meantime, the area is a virtual no-go area for outsiders.
With the end of British rule over India in the aftermath of the Second World War, each state within India was given the choice of becoming part of the new India or acceding to Pakistan. With a predominantly Muslim population, it was widely assumed that Jammu and Kashmir would choose the latter option. However, when the state’s Hindu Maharajah, Hari Singh, hesitated, the territory was subject to incursions from Pakistan. The Maharajah appealed to the British for military assistance, which was granted in return for a promise to accede to India. Jammu and Kashmir thus became the only Indian state with a Muslim majority, making a bitter armed struggle all but inevitable.
The United Nations oversaw a ceasefire between the two sides and demanded a plebiscite on the state’s future, but this was never carried out. The stage was set for a prolonged tug-of-war between India and Pakistan, culminating in further all-out military offensives in 1965, 1971 and 1999, with many more minor outbreaks of violence in between.
India has maintained control of southern Kashmir, which it rules as the state of Jammu and Kashmir and which contains two-thirds of the population (about 9 million people). Pakistan, meanwhile, administers the northern part of the territory as the Gilgit-Baltistan and Azad Kashmir provinces, with a combined population of about 3 million. Neither side recognizes the other’s jurisdiction. To complicate matters further, China lays claim to Aksai Chin and the Trans-Karakoram Tract in the northeast of the region. India and China clashed over this area in 1962.
Today, the Line of Control stretches for 734 kilometers (456 miles) through dense forests, over imposing mountains and across other rugged terrain. Though not an internationally recognized border, it serves as the de facto frontier between India and Pakistan, and its origins go back to the Ceasefire Line established by the United Nations after the fighting of 1947–8 (though slightly tweaked under the terms of the 1972 Simla Agreement that ended renewed hostilities).
The Line of Control was set up in the hope that it would be respected until a long-term solution could be found. While the UN maintains an observer presence along the Line, India does not recognize its jurisdiction, although it does tolerate its presence. One of the few areas of agreement between India and Pakistan is that any long-term resolution must be a bilateral settlement, achieved without further international intervention.
Despite the negotiations that went on when the Line was originally drawn up, differences in interpretation continue to lead to skirmishes. When tensions were at their highest, up to 80,000 troops amassed along its course, sometimes encamped on mountainsides less than 100 meters (330 ft) apart. An already delicate situation has grown yet more complex with the emergence of an armed separatist movement among Muslims on the Indian side, who want to be part of neither state.
HAIR TRIGGER A band of armed militants at a base on the Pakistani side of the Line of Control in 1999. The dispute is not simply between those wanting to be part of India or Pakistan, but includes other groups demanding autonomy and the further complication of Chinese interests in the region.
In the 1990s, India began construction of a barrier on its side of the Line, designed, it said, to stem the flow of arms to militants on the Indian side and to prevent incursions from the Pakistani side. Completed in 2004, the barrier consists of two rows of heavily alarmed barbed-wire fencing, varying in height from 2.5 to 4 meters (8–13 ft), with the land in between laced with mines. Pakistan argues that the barrier breaches various bilateral and international agreements, and that the border should remain undemarcated. Islamabad also claims that mines have maimed and killed a large number of civilians going about legitimate daily business. India, meanwhile, says that Pakistani incursions were reduced by 80 percent within a year of the barrier’s completion.
The result of this ongoing stalemate is an area that is effectively closed off to the outside world and kept in stasis. The economy is wretched, and has little prospect of securing significant investment while Indian, Pakistani and separatist forces continue to slug it out. It has been estimated that in the worst periods of fighting, the territory has suffered as many as 400,000 rounds of shelling in a month. Indo-Pakistani relations in the new century have hardly been warm and, with both nations boasting nuclear arsenals, the stakes surrounding Kashmir have never been higher. As with the majority of modern wars, it is the civilian population that pays the heaviest price, forced to live in a virtual no-man’s-land.
1 UNEASY PEACE An Indian soldier surveys the scene along the Line of Control at Baraf Post, some 165 kilometers (100 miles) north of Srinagar. Even in quiet times, an uneasy tension prevails along the disputed border, heightened by the knowledge that both India and Pakistan have nuclear arsenals.