CU Boulder historian Lucy Chester notes that the recent tensions between the two nations, incited by the April 22 terrorist attack in Kashmir, are the latest in an ongoing cycle
 

When a gunman opened fire April 22 on domestic tourists in Pahalgam, a scenic Himalayan hill station in Indian-administered Kashmir, killing 26 people, the attack ignited days of deadly drone attacks, airstrikes and shelling between India and Pakistan that escalated to a perilous brink last weekend.

A U.S.-brokered ceasefire Saturday evening diffused the mounting violence between the two nuclear-armed nations that increasingly seemed on a trajectory toward war. It was the latest in a string of escalations spanning many decades between India and Pakistan, which invariably led to the question: Why does this keep happening?

CU Boulder historian Lucy Chester notes that the recent conflict between India and Pakistan is part of a broader history that includes not only religion, but water, maps and territorial integrity.

Lucy Chester, an associate professor in the University of Colorado Boulder Department of History and the International Affairs Program, has studied the region and relations between the two nations for many years; her first book, Borders and Conflict in South Asia, explores the drawing of the boundary between India and Pakistan in 1947.

Despite President Donald Trump’s assertion that the origins of the conflict date back a thousand years, “that’s not the case,” Chester says. “I would say it’s mainly about Kashmir, with some additional issues at play this time around that changed the dynamics a bit.”

When more than a century of British colonial rule of India ended in August 1947, the Indian subcontinent was divided into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan—a bloody, devastating event known as Partition. An estimated 15 million people were displaced and an estimated 1 to 2 million died as a result of violence, hunger, suicide or disease.

The first Indo-Pakistani war ignited two months after Partition, in October 1947, over the newly formed Pakistan’s fear that the Hindu maharaja of the princely state of Kashmir and Jammu would align with India. The Indo-Pakistani wars of 1965 and 1971 and the the Kargil War of 1999 followed, as well as other conflicts, standoffs and skirmishes.

Chester addressed these and other issues in a recent conversation with Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine. READ MORE