GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES

The Question That Never Gets Asked About Kashmir

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Charles Glass
Board of Contributors

Aug 23, 2019 | 10:00 GMT

Indian and Pakistani guards take part in a ceremony at their shared border marking the changing of the guard.

Indian Border Security Force personnel (wearing brown) and Pakistani Rangers (wearing black) take part in the Beating Retreat ceremony at the India Pakistan Wagah border post some 35 kilometers from Amritsar, on August 15, 2019. 

(NARINDER NANU/AFP/Getty Images)

Highlights

  • The specter of nuclear war haunts tensions between India and Pakistan, and the disputed territory of Kashmir could provide the spark that lights South Asia’s nuclear fuse.
  • With passions again running high in Kashmir, the stakes for the region and the world could not be higher.
  • Decades ago, the people of Kashmir were promised a plebiscite that never took place. Will they ever be asked what they want?

In 1998, the CIA subjected India to strict surveillance to ensure it was complying with its commitment not to test nuclear weapons. The agency used satellites, communications intercepts and agents to watch the nuclear facility at Pokhran in Rajasthan state. India could not detonate warheads, which would inevitably lead Pakistan to follow suit, without the United States knowing in advance. Or so the United States thought. Washington went into shock on May 11, 1998, when Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee announced that his country had just detonated not one, but five nuclear warheads at Pokhran in a surprise to U.S. analysts. If the CIA is watching India and Pakistan now, it will have to do better than it did in 1998. In 2019, with passions high over India’s abrogation of Kashmir’s legal, if fictitious, autonomy, the outcome would not be waking up to discover one side or the other had tested...

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