Lieutenant-Colonel Inderjit Singh had tried to stall his incredulous headquarters when the orders came in to attack, claiming 13 December 1971 was an inauspicious date. The excuse had been manufactured on the fly, but it turned out to be prophetic. From an old mule shed on the mountain, ill-prepared soldiers desperately clawed their way up the path toward the summit at Daruchhian, their progress marked by blood-stained clods of earth. Five officers, seven junior commissioned officers, and 18 other soldiers were killed—with another 74 missing in action—before commanders called off the attack.
Last week, bitter fighting erupted again around that 1971 battleground. Troops positioned at the Indian Army posts—Nangi Tekri, Jungle Tekri and Bump, all captured in hand-to-hand combat during the lead-up to the battle at Darucchian—opened fire across the Line of Control in the most serious incident since a ceasefire was put in place in 2021.
There is no clarity on exactly what happened. The Army rolled back its early claim that there had been an intrusion across the Line of Control but asserted that its troops had responded appropriately to a provocation. For its part, the Pakistan Army stated that it began a patrol on its side of the Line, which was hit by the accidental explosion of an old landmine, killing Lance-Naik Muhammad Naseer.
Like so often in the past, India and Pakistan might just be walking toward another crisis on the LOC, oblivious of their missteps and misjudgments of the path.
For weeks now, tensions have been mounting in the region as jihadists from Pakistan-occupied Kashmir have pushed their way past the LOC. Two Indian soldiers were killed near Akhnoor last month by an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) believed to have been planted on their patrol route by a jihadist unit. Islamabad, for its part, has alleged that the Indian Army has been planting IEDs targeting its soldiers and said two of its soldiers have been injured in gunfire.
Even violence in Kashmir has dipped, with killings last year falling to the lowest levels seen since 2012, Islamabad’s tone is hardening. “Three wars have been fought for Kashmir, and if ten more need to be fought, we will fight,” declared Pakistan’s army chief General Asim Munir at a Kashmir solidarity event in February. Last month, Indian diplomatic sources say, General Munir also told a closed-door session of Pakistan’s Parliamentary Committee on National Security that India was fuelling violence in Balochistan.
From Kargil to crisis management
Lessons on the need to maintain peace on the LOC were learned by both India and Pakistan under the shadow of nuclear weapons. Following the two countries’ nuclear weapons tests in 1998, then-Army chief General Pervez Musharraf went to war in Kargil. General Musharraf believed—rightly, it turned out—that India would be deterred by the risk of a nuclear war from widening the conflict. Even though he lost in Kargil, he continued to ratchet up the pain. From 1999 to 2003, India lost a staggering 2,125 security force personnel in jihadist attacks—four times the number killed in Kargil.
The Jaish-e-Muhammad attack on Parliament in 2001 convinced Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee that he needed to use coercive means to contain the threat. Vajpayee ordered the Army to position itself for war, leading to what has been described as the most significant military mobilisation since World War II. Then, in 2003, PM Vajpayee seemed to reverse course, announcing New Delhi was unilaterally “opening the door for talks”.
Even though experts have argued the 2001-2002 stand-off failed to secure its aims because of Pakistan’s nuclear deterrence—a proposition borne out of continued violence in Kashmir—the story is more complex. India did appear to blink first but General Musharraf’s advisors had concluded that the crisis was bleeding Pakistan more than it was hurting New Delhi.
Lieutenant-General Moinuddin Haider, General Musharraf’s interior minister, told the scholar George Perkovich that he had explained to his boss: “Mr President, your economic plan will not work; people will not invest if you don’t get rid of extremists.” The President, albeit reluctantly, listened, violence data from Kashmir shows. Fatalities fell year-on-year as the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate quietly choked off jihadist clients like the Jaish and Lashkar-e-Taiba.
Unsigned notes revealed in 2009 show that secret envoys working for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and General Musharraf came close to a final-status deal on Kashmir. The negotiations, begun under Prime Minister Vajpayee by then-R&AW chief CD Sahay and ISI director Lieutenant-General Ehsan-ul-Haq, envisaged the LOC being turned into a border, with a high degree of freedom of movement and autonomy on both sides.
Also read: Pakistan doesn’t have enough troops for 2 fronts. It has to choose between LOC, Balochistan
General Kayani’s new war
However, the rise of General Pervez Ashfaq Kayani as Pakistan’s new army chief in 2008 saw this process unravel. In 2008, the US was reported to have confronted Pakistan’s army with evidence that the ISI was involved in a suicide attack on the Indian diplomatic mission in Kabul. Later that year came the carnage in Mumbai. Former Central Intelligence Agency chief Michael Hayden has recorded he was confident the ISI was involved in the planning and execution of the 2008 Mumbai attacks but failed to compel it to act against the perpetrators.
For all practical purposes, General Kayani had dismantled the peace process that had started in the wake of the 2001-2002 crisis. Violence in Kashmir started to grow again. The LOC grew increasingly volatile as the Pakistan Army opened fire to facilitate infiltrating groups of jihadists. The two armies became locked in a cycle of increasingly brutal raids and counter-attacks, sometimes leading to the beheadings of soldiers.
The killing of 17 Indian soldiers in Uri by the Lashkar-e-Taiba led Prime Minister Narendra Modi to order strikes across the Line of Control—an attack that sought to reimpose deterrence against Pakistan’s use of terrorism, but without locking India into a 2001-2002-like crisis. The damage caused by the strikes was minimal, but New Delhi hoped to show Islamabad it was willing to go to war if terrorism continued to escalate.
ISI commanders were coerced into ending terrorist strikes outside Kashmir but stepped up violence within the state by using Fidayeen suicide attackers. This laid the foundation of three years of terrorism and Line of Control clashes, culminating in India’s bombing of a Jaish-e-Muhammad base in Pulwama.
Bajwa’s long stalemate
Following the 2019 crisis, both sides pulled back from the edge. Like in 2003, R&AW and the ISI prepared the ground for negotiations, with Major-General Isfandiyar Pataudi and R Kumar meeting in secret at a London hotel. Few details have emerged on the negotiations, but their talks prepared the ground for the ceasefire in 2021. Like General Musharraf, General Qamar Javed Bajwa concluded that a crisis with India offered no real benefits to an economically devastated Pakistan and could only escalate into a full-blown war.
The most crucial problem, though, is the absence of a constituency for India-Pakistan peace. As the scholar Christopher Clary has thoughtfully observed, political leaders remain wary of resuming talks. Modi and his cabinet have shown little interest in reopening dialogue. For his part, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif rejected even a limited reopening of trade with India in 2022, saying “genocide is going on there, and Kashmiris have been denied their rights.” Instead, Pakistani policymakers insist that dialogue must include Kashmir—something New Delhi has shot down.
Events on the Line of Control last week, though, make clear that time isn’t on the side of either country. Even the limited terrorist attacks seen on the Indian Army and Hindu residents of Kashmir in 2024 could potentially have led to results that would have compelled New Delhi to strike across the border. The skirmishes on the Line of Control, similarly, can spiral, just like they did in the build-up after 1999, 2008, and 2016.
General Munir’s words suggest he no longer sees a stalemate on the Line of Control as serving Pakistan’s interests. The calibrated use of violence might seem like leverage to him, but his predecessors learned that it’s only a small step from there to plunging the region into crisis.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. His X handle is @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)
Good column but nothing new. The Print is starting to become like a bureaucracy where things, like writing a 1200 word column here, are done because they need to be done because “that has always been the case”.
As a reader spending precious time in the morning, the description of the 1971 incident and the last 2 lines is the real article. The rest is known stuff just filled in to turn in the needed words.
Please correct error. India bombed Balakot not Pulwama- 4th para in’General Kayani’s New War’ section.
One bows to the expertise of the columnist. As a generalist, would only say that this underlines the need for the two countries to be talking to each other. And not in furtive, back channel contacts. A regular, formal dialogue aimed at stabilising the relationship. Precluding the possibility of miscalculation, whether it was Kargil, or the smaller Pulwama – Balakot episode.
A tragic reminder that even instincts dismissed as superstition can echo the heavy cost of war.