On Indian Independence Day (15th August), as flags rise against the humid August sky, the shadow of an old quarrel stretches across the subcontinent. The months since the April 2025 Pahalgam massacre and May’s Operation Sindoor have been thick with déjà vu: cross-border violence, claims and counterclaims of credit for de-escalation, and the unprecedented suspension of the Indus Waters Treaty.
The U.S. President’s assertion of mediation has revived an argument as old as Simla. This essay moves between the present moment and the long memory of India–Pakistan relations, asking whether managed coexistence without the emotional attachment of bloodlines may yet be wrestled from the weight of history.
On the fifteenth of August, the Indian capital city of New Delhi wakes early. There is a way the light falls on Delhi this morning—flat and slightly hazy—that makes the Red Fort’s sandstone seem older, more brittle. From its ramparts, the annual Independence Day ritual unspools.
Beneath the brass and the bunting, there runs a quieter script: the one that links this anniversary not only to 1947, but to the seventy-eight years of uneasy dialogue, outright war, and wary truce that have bound and separated India and Pakistan.
If the conversation between the two were a currency, it would be minted in grievance. Hatred has been our shared language—cheap to produce, easy to trade, and ruinous to all who deal in it. There is no peace dividend in it, no prosperity, only the steady erosion of trust. Yet the quarrel persists, partly because it is useful: a tool for rallying domestic sentiment, a shield against inconvenient introspection.
History offers examples of other endings. France and Germany, whose landscapes were tilled with one another’s blood for a century, found a way to stand together at the heart of Europe. But that transformation demanded leaders willing to gamble political survival and publics tired enough of mourning to risk a different future. In South Asia, fatigue has yet to outpace the seductions of animosity.
Not a Side Note
For India, the terrorist overhang in Kashmir—and with it, the relationship with Pakistan—is not a side note. It is the stone in the shoe of its great-power stride. Pakistan is no equal in GDP or arsenal, yet it commands a disproportionate share of India’s diplomatic bandwidth, drains resources into a permanent military readiness, and offers strategic leverage to Beijing. Great powers can live with adversaries, but not if those adversaries define their horizons.
Moments have existed when the pattern might have shifted. The Tashkent Agreement in 1965, Simla in 1972—each ended a war but left the peace half-built. The 1998 nuclear tests reduced the odds of an all-out conflict even as they emboldened proxy war.
The Lahore Declaration of 1999 was followed within months by Kargil. Between 2004 and 2007, a quiet backchannel drew the faint outline of a demilitarized, softer border in Kashmir, only to dissolve with the political fortunes of its architects.
In April this year, gunfire once again carried across the mountains. Above Pahalgam’s Baisaran meadow—lush in the season when tourists come for pony rides and photographs—gunmen opened fire on unarmed civilians, killing twenty-six. It was the worst such attack in the Valley since 2008, and it tore at more than lives; it struck the carefully tended narrative by the Indian government of normalcy in the region.
Operation Sindoor was launched by India against terror camps situated on Pakistan’s side of the Line of Control, followed in May. Unlike the punitive raids of the past, these strikes were precise, time-bound, and conducted against targets in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied territory.
The exchange of fire was brief. Both militaries, it seemed, were willing to step back before the ladder of escalation could be climbed too far. The ceasefire, though strained, held.
There was, inevitably, the question of who brokered the calm. In Washington, the U.S. President claimed the role of mediator. In New Delhi, the claim was dismissed with speed. India has, since Simla in 1972 and Lahore in 1999, insisted that the path to settlement runs only through bilateral corridors. Public mediation not only risks internationalising the dispute; it hands Pakistan a political trophy and muddies the clarity of deterrence.
Yet the reality is more elastic: discreet third-party ‘good offices’—message passing in moments of tension, verification of ceasefire adherence, funding for humanitarian channels—have their uses, so long as they remain offstage.
If the mediation dispute was familiar, the suspension of the Indus Waters Treaty was not. Signed in 1960 under the auspices of the World Bank, the treaty divided the rivers of the Indus basin: the eastern three for India, the western three for Pakistan, with limited Indian rights to the latter. It endured wars and coups, serving as proof that even in hostility, a shared resource could be managed.
That compact is now in abeyance. In the weeks after Pahalgam, India announced the suspension, citing national security. By June, the Home Minister had declared it would never be restored. Pakistan, whose agriculture and power supply depend overwhelmingly on the basin, saw an existential threat.
When the Permanent Court of Arbitration ruled in August that India must comply with treaty provisions in its dam designs, New Delhi refused its jurisdiction outright—folding water into the larger rejection of third-party arbitration.
Weaponisation of Water
The weaponization of water is risk-driven politics. It deprives both countries of one of the few functional agreements they still share. It risks feeding Pakistan’s strategic desperation and undermines a precedent that might one day be needed to settle other disputes.
A more pragmatic alternative might be a partial thaw—flood-data sharing, coordination of dam releases—monitored, perhaps, by a neutral party accepted by both sides, without reopening the larger political question.
Managed coexistence, in this light, is less a vision than a discipline. It is keeping the guns quiet with verifiable mechanisms. It is creating narrow corridors for trade, health care, and religious pilgrimage—channels that function even when speeches sour. It is ensuring that after an attack, senior military and civilian channels remain open for thirty days, buying time for tempers to cool. It is ring-fencing the practical from the political.
Such arrangements will never inspire the poetry of reconciliation. They are scaffolds, meant to carry the load of bad days without collapsing. They acknowledge that the India–Pakistan quarrel will not be wished away, but also that it need not consume every other aspect of the relationship.
As this Independence Day recedes into the evening, the Red Fort quiets. In the Valley of Kashmir, security forces remain on alert; on the LoC, the ceasefire still holds. The rivers run, though their future is uncertain. The force, if it is to be with us, will not arrive in a single triumph but in the slow accumulation of these unglamorous structures. The choice, as ever, is whether to keep building them—or to wait for history to make the decision for us.
In the end, the subcontinent’s story is not only one of wars fought or treaties signed, but of what endures in the spaces between crises. The silences along the LoC, the daily crossings at Kartarpur, the unremarkable exchange of hydrological data—these are the fragile filaments from which any future settlement will have to be woven. In their absence, the flags will keep rising each August under skies heavy with the same old quarrel.
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