The context of the conflict between India and Pakistan in Kashmir, two nuclear powers in tension since 1947

A latent conflict since 1947

The conflict has been going on for more than seventy years. division of British India in 1947 in two states, Pakistan and India, the Maharaja who reigned Kashmir has decided that this predominantly Muslim territory would be part of India, which led to the first armed clash between the two nations.

On January 1, 1949, the The UN traced an armistice line under his supervision and divided the territory of Kashmir into two sectors, pending a referendum to find a final solution.

The partition included the region of Azad Kashmir (with 13,297 square kilometers in the north under Pakistani administration) and that of Jammu and Kashmir (206,703 square kilometers in the south under Indian control).

Thereafter, India 's annexationist policy and guerrilla action of Pakistani Muslims provoked the Second World War in 1965.

The war began in early August of the same year when several thousand Pakistani insurgents have entered Indian Kashmir during the so-called Gibraltar operation in order to provoke a popular rebellion.

The India responded by invading the international border in the vicinity of the city of Lahore.

The conflict lasted 17 days and ended after the intervention of the United Nations. and about 8,000 victims, mainly Pakistanis.

India and Pakistan are considered the victors of this conflict, even though historians believe that the war ended without a clear winner.

The difficult relations between these neighbors have intensified further in 1971, when the third war broke out between the two countries, although in this case not for Kashmir, but as India's support to the independence movement in East Pakistan, born of the defeat of Islamabad, a new nation: Bangladesh.

Dialogues without peace agreements

In 1972, Pakistan and India signed a peace agreement in the Indian city of Shimla in which the Pakistanis have ratified the line of control separating Kashmir on 720 kilometers, which Islamabad has denied later.

In addition to the direct conflict between the two states, In the late 1980s, an armed independence movement declared in Indian Kashmir, killing at least 40,000 people. nearly 14,000 of them are civilians, according to data from the Indian government.

Human rights organizations in the region are raising the death toll in 75,000 in addition to criticizing the many abuses of Indian troops, such as enforced disappearances or the excessive use of force against citizen demonstrations.

Meanwhile, in In May 1999, tensions between India and Pakistan further increased after the incursion of the Pakistani army into the Kargil region. trigger a military response that lasted two months and ended with the decline of Pakistan.

The two countries signed in November 2003, for the first time in 56 years, a stop firing through the Kashmir division.

Three years later, in September 2006, the two governments agreed in Havana to resume the peace process.

Conversations to improve their relationship were suspended in 2008., after several bombings in Mumbai, that the Indian government blamed on a terrorist group based in Pakistan, which resumed in 2010.

A last decade in the grip of clashes

Both countries maintain dialogue, so far unsuccessful, hampered by serious attacks, some of them committed during the last decade.

In November In 2008, a series of terrorist attacks against various targets in the city of Mumbai, in the west of India, including two hotels and a train station, which killed 166 people.

India has repeatedly accused Pakistan of supporting "cross-border terrorism" and to authorize and sponsor the operation on its territory of terrorist groups aimed at attacking Indian targets and fueling demonstrations with a separatist spirit among the population of Kashmir.

Since then, there has also been a resurgence of violence in Kashmir after years of some calm, while in July 2016, the death of a known terrorist of the separatist group Hizb-ul-Mujahideen (HM) killed by Indian security forces unleashed a kind of intifada in Kashmir that killed between 140 and 180 and more than 10,000 wounded.

The bomb attack on Pakistan Tuesday by the Indian Air Force follows the same sequence as the events that occurred in September 2016.

India then launched "surgical attacks" on the line of control and killed several soldiers from the neighboring country, eleven days after the attack by allegedly Pakistani insurgents against an Indian military base that allegedly killed 18 soldiers.

The bombardment of Indian fighters was today the New Delhi's response to the February 14 attack, the worst attack against the Indian security forces since the beginning of the Kashmiri violence in 1989.

In this attack, perpetrated with a vehicle loaded with explosives against a police convoy, 42 Indian agents died.