Oh hey look.
It’s one of the most dangerous places in the world.
The infamous Line of Control, a heavily guarded 450-mile long border between Pakistan and
India that slices a region known as Kashmir in two.
There is constant tension here...like...at any moment, war could break out...between
countries that have nukes, I might add.
I’m Mr. Beat, and this is the return of State Rivalries...
But this time, for the next two episodes, the Cynical Historian and I are looking at
states outside of the United States.
You know, actual states, or as we Americans call them, countries.
On his channel, he’s tackling a much older rivalry between France and England.
Be sure to watch his video when you're done watching this one.
But I'm looking at Pakistan and India.
Two very powerful Asian countries.
Both have nukes. Back in 1999, the world was scared the two were actually going to use those nukes against each other.
Some folks are scared they might actually use them against each other TODAY.
Holy crap.
But I don't mean to get you scared.
Let’s just go back and learn about the history of India–Pakistan relations.
We will begin this story with the end of British Raj...aka British rule on the Indian subcontinent.
Yep, the British controlled all that.
But in 1947, the British Parliament granted all of it independence.
But it would be tricky.
It created two new dominion states: the Union of India and Dominion of Pakistan.
However, there were over 500 sovereign princely states ruled by local monarchs, as well as
French, Portuguese, and Omani territories on the subcontinent.
The princely states had the option to join India or Pakistan by signing the Instrument
of Accession, or they could remain independent.
So why just these two new states?
Why just India and Pakistan?
Well it was all rooted in what is known as the two-nation theory.
The two-nation theory argued that the main unifying force for Muslims on the Indian subcontinent
was their religion, not their language or ethnicity, and that they should all be together
in one country.
And therefore, Hindus and Muslims were two distinct nations.
The Dominion of Pakistan would mainly be a Muslim state, and the Union of India would
mainly be a Hindu state.
At midnight on August 15th, 1947, India and Pakistan legally came into existence.
Within a period of less than 4 years, at least 14.5 million people migrated on the subcontinent.
Millions of Muslims left everything they had behind to either West Pakistan or East Pakistan,
which later became Bangladesh, and millions of Hindus headed the opposite direction.
It was one of the biggest and most rapid migrations in human history.
And this mass migration wasn’t pretty.
Hundreds of thousands did not make it.
Although Hindus, Muslims, and this other religious group called the Sikhs had got along for the
most part for hundreds of years on the subcontinent, now there was sectarian violence, usually
with Hindus and Sikhs usually on one side and Muslims on the other side.
Cynical Historian: You know, the whole dynamic between Hindus and Muslims in India obviously didn't start in 1947, of course.
Mr. Beat: Uh, sure Cypher. Go ahead.
Cynical Historian: The subcontinent was mostly united under numerous regimes long before the British officially
assumed hegemony in 1858, after a huge rebellion made the British East India Company no longer
allowable by the British government.
Before that, the largest power in the region was the Mughal Empire.
These guys were muslims whose dynasty related back to the Timurid Mongols.
The Mughals were fairly religiously tolerant, even having courts about emphasizing synchronicity
among the various religions.
Akbar the Great even tried to merge Islam, Hinduism, Jainism, Christianity, and Zoroastrianism
into a single religion he called the Divine Faith in the late 16th Century.
People regarded India as one place before the British Raj, and religion was not necessarily
as big as a divide before the British came.
Think about it this way, the Indus River, for which India derives its English name,
is currently almost completely in Pakistan, save for a very contentious region to say
the least.
So where did the tensions between Hindus and Muslims begin, to the point that they supposedly
needed separate countries in 1947?
For one this is a huge point of contention with no answer to be given, and if you want a good analysis
of the various theories on this, the Diplomat has an excellent article on the subject.
Some post colonialist historians blame existing tensions completely on the British.
But for one, Mughal tolerance didn't change pre-existing tensions
and there were internecine conflicts between religions, dating long before their dynasty, and even during their dynasty there was still a bunch of problems.
Plus the British were often only playing a reactionary role
to stuff the locals were doing on their own.
So Pakistani historians tend to emphasize that two-nation model which Mr. Beat already talked about.
Whereas the concept of a Greater India or Indosphere emphasizes the synchronicity or
tolerance of Indian culture prior to the Raj.
Whether they were completely separate ethnicities or not, is something that everyone debates about, but the one they can all agree on at least thing everyone seems to agree on, is that
is that the British exacerbated those tensions and accelerated the frictions between Muslims and Hindus by enacting further and
further segregatory laws and thereby imposing a greater and greater divide. The way Hindus and Muslims
navigated those differences caused very different visions of what independence would mean - so
once it came in 1947, partitioning the two religions apart seemed to be the most practical answer.
So as you can see, even the historiography itself is partitioned.
The answer to how much those tensions actually existed is just as much a battleground as Kashmir
is today.
But enough talk about all this ideology stuff. Let's get back to how all this
becomes deadly serious.
Mr. Beat: Thanks Cypher.
You always have to be all smart and stuff like that.
Anyway, It’s estimated as many as 2 million people
were killed after the Partition of India.
It also led to a refugee crisis.
Things were particularly violent in Punjab, a region in India that was the heart of the
largest Sikh community in the world and bordered West Pakistan, and Bengal, a region in India
that bordered East Pakistan.
As predicted, most of the Muslim-majority princely states joined Pakistan, and most
of the Hindu-majority princely states joined India.
However, there was Junagadh, which joined Pakistan since its ruler was Muslim, even
though 80% of the state was Hindu.
After Indian troops came in and some embargoes, eventually it switched to India.
There was also the princely state of Kashmir.
Oh Kashmir.
The king of Kashmir, Hari Singh , was Hindu, but he had a Muslim majority.
Singh wanted Kashmir to remain independent, but Pakistan invaded it.
So Singh asked India for military help, and ended up requesting that Kashmir go ahead
and join India.
Well that led to what became known as the First Kashmir War between Pakistan and India.
After some intense fighting in the region for several months, the United Nations stepped
in and declared a ceasefire.
India ended up gaining control of about two-thirds of Kashmir and Pakistan got a third.
That uh, Line of Control which I mentioned at the beginning of this video, by the way,
split up that territory.
Both Pakistan and India became republics, although India’s government was more secular.
Pakistan’s government became more and more influenced by Islamic laws in the coming decades.
Still, both had constitutions and were representative democracies, although in Pakistan this dude,
Ayub Khan, led a coup and took over the government in 1958, declaring martial law and suspending
the constitution.
But four years later, Khan helped get a new constitution approved that made Pakistan a
presidential form of government instead of a parliamentary one.
Tensions got bad between India and Pakistan again in 1965.
Over which area, you ask?
You guessed it, Kashmir.
Well actually, all over the state of Jammu and Kashmir in India.
In August, Pakistan launched Operation Gibraltar, in which they sent soldiers into the area
disguised as locals to try to rile up Kashmiri Muslims, with the goal of getting them to
revolt against India.
Well it failed and the Pakistan Army got caught.
India responded by attacking West Pakistan, leading to a 17-day war we now call the Indo-Pakistani
War of 1965.
It resulted in thousands of casualties and ended only after the two global superpowers
who hated each other at the time- the Soviet Union and the United States, stepped in to
help negotiate a peace deal.
Meanwhile, East and West Pakistan were growing apart...even though, you know...they technically
were not connected to begin with.
Increasingly, East Pakistan, which was made up of mostly Bengali people, did not feel
represented.
Even though around 56% of the population of the country lived in East Pakistan, West Pakistan
held most of the power.
After a terrible cyclone hit East Pakistan in 1970, West Pakistan was slow to help out.
And later, President Yahya Khan declared martial law and delayed the opening of the national
assembly in order to prevent East Pakistan from getting more representation in government
even though they won big in the general elections of 1970.
And then, things got down right ugly.
The next year, soldiers from West Pakistan, as well as some from the East who were loyal
to the West, slaughtered, sexually assaulted, and simply just terrorized those who had been
pushing for an independent East Pakistan.
Some historians estimate that they eventually killed up to 3 million Bengalis.
As brutal as that civil war was, it did lead to independence.
East Pakistan was now the independent state of Bangladesh.
So what did India have to do with this?
Well they aided the Bengalis as they tried to achieve independence.
And of course, this further hurt India-Pakistan relations.
The Indo-Pakistani War of 1971 saw Indian and Pakistani forces fighting each other on
both the eastern and western fronts.
Still, India decisively won, and their help is a big reason why Bangladesh got its freedom.
As you could imagine, losing Bangladesh was devastating for Pakistan.
However, the Shimla summit after the war was a big step attempting to heal relations.
The 1970s were an interesting decade for both countries.
Pakistan ended up embracing social democracy, economic nationalization and the promotion
of scientific and cultural activities that brought much progress to the country.
India, meanwhile, saw some setbacks with political unrest in places like Bihar and Assam.
But things were relatively quiet between Pakistan and India for a couple decades.
(shouting) That is, until the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Back to Jammu and Kashmir we go.
First of all, they began fighting over a glacier near the Line of Control.
A probably rigged election there in 1987 led to a renewed rise in a separatist movement.
Muslims there were angry, feeling they were not being represented.
Some became radicalized, and turned to violence, forming militant groups and calling for revolt.
They terrorized the Kashmiri Hindus so much that almost all of them ended up leaving the
region.
And Pakistan was giving them support.
In the 1980s, by the way, Pakistan was once again under military rule and becoming less
secular.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, the violence in Jammu and Kashmir got worse.
It became a very tense place.
Things escalated in 1999 in what became known as the Kargil War.
During the previous winter, the Pakistani Army crossed the Line of Control and occupied
high altitude posts on the Indian side of the border.
Well yep this led to fighting and thousands of casualties.
The international community once again stepped in to stop it, and India eventually regained
those posts.
The world was really worried about this conflict.
Why?
Because now the world knew that both Pakistan and India had developed and had been testing
nuclear weapons.
Oh that’s just lovely.
But the good news is, in July 2001 leaders in both countries met at the Agra summit to
talk about reducing how much nuclear weapons each had and to ease tensions in Kashmir.
Since the Agra summit, violence in Kashmir has slowly declined.
The two countries also stopped fighting over that glacier.
Some bus routes and railway lines were built across the India-Pakistan border.
The governments of the two countries have sent aid to each other after natural disasters,
and have had open lines of communication.
Sure, militant groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba have still carried out terrorist attacks,
most notably the 2008 Mumbai attacks, but today their numbers are small and Pakistan’s
government has officially banned them.
And yeah, ok, today the relationship between Pakistan and India is ice cold.
In fact, it’s taken a bit of a turn for the worse this past year.
There are still border skirmishes on the India-Pakistan border.
There are still terrorist attacks on both sides.
India’s military has been more aggressive, making supposed “surgical strikes” on
targets on the Pakistan side of the Line of Control.
Yeah these surgical strikes almost always end up killing civilians.And to Pakistan’s
credit, its government freed an Indian fighter pilot captured after his plane was shot down
over its territory early last year.
India now has federal control over Jammu and Kashmir, and its military has been accused
of persecuting Muslims in the state.
Since last August, India has locked up thousands of Muslims and cut off communication there.
In response, Pakistan has downgraded its diplomatic ties and reduced its trade with India.
According to one 2017 BBC poll, just 11% of Pakistanis view India’s influence as a good
thing, and just 5% of Indians view Pakistan’s influence as a good thing.
How concerned should the world be that Pakistan and India are still not getting along?
Again, I don’t mean to scare you, but we should all be very concerned.
These are two powerful countries, and an all-out war between the two could drag the rest of
the world down with them.
Our goal of world peace is more realistic if we can get peaceful relations between these
two states.
Boy this was a serious episode, wasn't it?
Don’t forget to check out the less scary rivalry between England and France by watching
over on the Cynical Historian’s channel. He just posted the video
and that rivalry is so long, that he ended up making it a two-part episode.
Thanks to Syawish from the channel Al Muqaddimah for helping me with the script for this episode.
He is actually from Pakistan.
Go check out his channel and subscribe.
And finally, are YOU from India or Pakistan?
If so, I want to hear from you.
Let me know in the comments. What do you think about India-Pakistan relations?
Thank you so much for watching!