India–Pakistan: A War with Two Billion Deaths...

Amidst an interminable negotiation over Ukraine, another for the release of an American-Israeli hostage held by Hamas, a third concerning Iran's nuclear programme, a fourth with Yemen's Houthis to halt their attacks on American ships (but not others), and not forgetting the preparation for his first official overseas visit—a $1 trillion trip to Saudi Arabia and the Emirates in mid-May—Donald Trump found time to end the fourth Indo-Pakistani war. “After a night of talks, under the auspices of the United States, I am pleased to announce that India and Pakistan have agreed to an immediate ceasefire... I think this could have been a bad nuclear war; millions could have been killed, so I am very proud of this.”

For once, Trump's self-congratulation is not exaggerated. While China also exerted pressure on its Pakistani ally, urging it "to manage the situation calmly," the Americans—Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance—made numerous calls to the leaders of both countries: Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Pakistani Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif. After four days of bombings—targeting jihadist sites for India and air bases for Pakistan—the strikes ceased, resulting in a draw with no victor or vanquished. Temporarily.

This war's origin lies in the 22 April massacre by a jihadist commando from Pakistan, which killed 26 Hindu tourists in the resort town of Pahalgam in Indian-administered Kashmir. However, this episode is merely the latest in a religious conflict dating back to the 1947 partition of the subcontinent during British decolonisation.

The split between Nehru's Congress Party and Ali Jinnah's Muslim League led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians and 15 million displaced persons. Since then, India and Pakistan have clashed in 1965, again in 1972 (leading to the partition of Bangladesh), and have continuously confronted each other in Kashmir—a Muslim-majority territory itself divided into three parts: Indian and Pakistani in 1947, and Chinese after the 1962 Sino-Indian war and China's conquest of Aksai Chin in the Ladakh region. It is, therefore, a religious war: Pakistan's raison d'être, its DNA, is Islam, while under Modi, India is becoming, despite its 200 million Muslims, a Hindu confessional state.

But it is also a potentially nuclear war. After China in 1964, India in 1974, and Pakistan in 1998, the Indian subcontinent is now fully nuclearised. For New Delhi, the true adversary is China; its nuclear force aims primarily to deter Beijing. Pakistan, for its part, has never ceased exporting its version of Islam to Afghanistan and Kashmir through spectacular Islamic terrorist attacks in Delhi (2001) and Mumbai (2008), and almost continuously in Kashmir since 2019.

Regarding its nuclear arsenal, Pakistan's bomb was conceived as the "first Islamic bomb" and is primarily aimed at India. Caught between terrorism emanating from Pakistan and pressure from Hindu nationalists, Modi responds by intensifying India's military presence in the province, abolishing the territory's autonomous status, and now threatens a water war by blocking the Indus tributaries vital to Pakistani agriculture. Pakistan has warned: "Any attempt to stop or divert the flow of rivers stipulated by the Indus Waters Treaty (1960) will be considered an act of war..."

The problem is that with each escalation, miscalculations are possible on both sides, as confirmed in his memoirs by former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. He reveals that in 2019, the two countries nearly plunged into a nuclear war. If around fifty 15-kiloton weapons (the power of the Hiroshima bomb) were used (India and Pakistan each possess 150 warheads), experts estimate they would immediately cause 45 million casualties. More importantly, the resulting fires, ozone layer destruction, and nuclear winter would lead to 5 to 10 years without summer, a massive temperature drop over 25 years, and the death by famine or disease of two billion human beings...

Pierre Lellouche, VA 14/5/25