In the Indian subcontinent, the people have always paid the price for the ambitions, failures, and miscalculations of their rulers. Once again, history repeats itself. On April 22, 2025, terror struck the idyllic town of Pahalgam, Kashmir. Twenty-six lives—among them tourists, workers, and ordinary citizens—were extinguished in an instant, victims of a proxy war they neither started nor endorsed. The perpetrators, identified as members of The Resistance Front—a Lashkar-e-Taiba offshoot—were traced back to Pakistan’s terror networks. Yet as the two states reacted with predictable fury, it is the ordinary people on both sides of the Radcliffe Line who are left grappling with the consequences.
For the people of India and Pakistan, there is little consolation in diplomatic posturing or military preparedness. They yearn not for slogans of revenge or threats of water wars, but for dignity, stability, and the ability to dream beyond their borders. Kashmir, that beautiful, battered land, had begun to hope again. It had glimpsed a fragile normalcy. Now, fear impends larger than ever.
At a time when global recession looms and economies teeter under cascading crises, can the subcontinent afford another cycle of retaliation and ruin? Can we imagine a different path where diplomacy, not destruction, defines the will of our people?
Kashmir’s Broken Dream
Before the attack, Kashmir was cautiously stepping into a brighter chapter. The region’s economy was rebounding. The Union Territory’s real GSDP for 2024–25 was projected to grow at 7.06%, with per capita incomes rising, year-on-year increase. Tourism, long considered Kashmir’s economic mainstay, had witnessed a renaissance. In 2024, 2.36 crore tourists, including 65,000 foreigners, visited, reinforcing a sector that contributed up to 8% of the region’s GSDP.
Houseboat owners, hoteliers, handicraft vendors, tour guides – many of whom had once abandoned hope – were rebuilding their lives. A new generation of entrepreneurs, nurtured in a fledgling start-up ecosystem, saw in Kashmir not a battlefield but a business opportunity.
The April attack has devastated this delicate resurgence. Up to 90% of tourist bookings were cancelled in the immediate aftermath. Infrastructure projects linked to tourism now face suspension. Bank loan defaults are expected to surge. Even ancillary sectors like horticulture and transport have felt the tremors. This was not merely an attack on people; it was an assault on the idea that Kashmir could belong to peace rather than conflict. It targeted not soldiers or symbols of the state, but tourists—symbols of hope, exchange, and normalcy.
The Dangerous Turn: Suspending the Indus Waters Treaty
India’s reaction was swift and unprecedented. In a move overloaded with symbolism and strategic risk, New Delhi announced the suspension of the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT)—a treaty that had survived wars, diplomatic breakdowns, and nuclear crises since 1960.
The IWT, brokered by the World Bank after years of bitter negotiation, was a rare diplomatic triumph: an agreement that recognized the rivers not as weapons but as shared lifelines. By assigning the eastern rivers (Ravi, Beas, Sutlej) to India and the western rivers (Indus, Jhelum, Chenab) to Pakistan, the Treaty sought to prevent water from becoming a casus belli.
Yet now, in the raw aftermath of terror, the IWT itself has become collateral damage.
Strategically, India’s move sends a strong signal. It indicates New Delhi’s willingness to leverage non-military instruments of pressure, particularly at a time when its infrastructure projects on the western rivers have matured.
But legally, the suspension stands on fragile ground. Under international law, particularly the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (1969) and the UN Watercourses Convention (1997), unilateral abrogation of water-sharing agreements is severely restricted. Absent a “fundamental breach” or a radical change in circumstances, treaties are meant to be honoured.
Moreover, morally, the suspension of a treaty governing rivers—lifelines that nourish 90% of Pakistan’s agriculture and a quarter of its economy—punishes not the militants but the millions of farmers, labourers, and families who depend on the Indus Basin.
Weaponizing water in a climate-vulnerable, food-insecure region may offer tactical gains. But it risks legitimizing an international precedent that India itself might rue in future transboundary disputes with China, Bangladesh, or Nepal.
Pakistan’s Own Mirror: Terror, Baluchistan, and the Price of Policy
It would be intellectually dishonest to ignore Pakistan’s own complicity in the current crisis. For decades, the Pakistani state has harboured militant proxies as instruments of asymmetric warfare. In Kashmir, this strategy has only prolonged suffering, emboldened hardliners on both sides, and locked Pakistan into a vicious cycle of international isolation.
Yet Pakistan, too, suffers under the weight of its own contradictions. In Baluchistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the state faces an insurgency condition eerily similar to Kashmir’s. Local grievances over political marginalization, economic exploitation, and military repression fuel violence.
Islamabad’s refusal to confront its internal rot even as it projects victimhood abroad betrays the people it claims to defend. There, too, farmers, labourers, and women bear the brunt, caught between a militarized state and militant factions.
Terror, whether state-sponsored or insurgent, ultimately devours the very societies that tolerate it. Pakistan, mired in economic freefall, political instability, and international scepticism, is discovering this grim truth at home.
War as a Mirage: The Subcontinent’s Fragile Future
Some in New Delhi’s strategic circles speak of “teaching Pakistan a final lesson.” Some voices in Islamabad warn of “existential threats” and “nuclear options.” This rhetoric belongs to another century.
In 2025, a war between India and Pakistan would not end in borders redrawn or governments toppled. It would end in mutual economic suicide. The subcontinent—already among the most climate-vulnerable and poverty-stricken regions in the world—cannot afford to be bled dry by the fantasies of generals and politicians.
India, a proud democracy with global aspirations, must resist the temptation to mirror Pakistan’s worst instincts. It must remember that its greatest strength lies not in coercion but in credibility.
A democratic India that upholds international law, protects human security, and shows strategic patience will command far greater influence than an India that acts in anger and isolates itself diplomatically.
The impending global recession, exacerbated by Trump’s return to protectionist policies in the United States, only heightens the risks. Already, capital flows are shrinking, global trade is fragmenting, and South Asia faces headwinds on every front. To engage in open conflict now would be to destroy not merely each other, but also the fragile dreams of prosperity that millions on both sides have only recently begun to nurture.
Kashmir: Between Hope and Despair
The answer, for now, remains suspended between hope and despair. The economic data before the April attack offered grounds for cautious optimism. A declining terror graph, booming tourism, and rising investment had begun to stitch the wounds of decades of conflict.
But normalcy is not merely the absence of gunfire. It is the presence of trust, the flourishing of dialogue, the freedom to dissent without fear.
If Kashmir is to heal, India must continue to invest not just in its infrastructure, but in its institutions—schools, courts, newspapers, NGOs—that sustain democratic life. It must resist the temptation to securitize every dissenting voice. It must distinguish between legitimate political grievances and terrorist violence, refusing to conflate the two.
Equally, Pakistan must accept that no solution can be imposed through proxy wars or internationalization efforts. Kashmir’s future lies in dialogue, not diktat. A starting point would be to end the use of terror as a tool of policy—a step that could help Pakistan heal its own internal wounds as well.
A Future Still Possible
The subcontinent’s rivers tell a story older than its wars. They remind us that life flows onward, despite partitions, despite violence, despite betrayal.
The Indus, the Jhelum, the Chenab—they do not recognize the arbitrary lines we drew on maps. They do not distinguish between a Pakistani farmer and an Indian boatman. They flow, indifferent to our hatreds, binding us together in ways our politics refuses to acknowledge.
The tragedy of Pahalgam and the subsequent diplomatic earthquake should not lead us further down the path of mutual destruction. They should remind us of what we stand to lose.
A treaty suspended can be restored. A bridge burned can be rebuilt. A people’s faith, once shattered, is harder to reclaim.
The choice, as always, rests with those who claim to lead. Will they once again make the people pay for their vanity? Or will they finally listen—not to the angry mobs they provoke, but to the quieter, steadier will of the people: a will that demands not war, but dignity, justice, and peace?
In the end, it is not terror, not treaties, not tanks that will define the subcontinent’s destiny. It is whether its leaders can imagine a politics large enough to match the grandeur of its rivers—and the hopes of its people.
[Photo by Hellohappy, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons]
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect TGP’s editorial stance.
K.M. Seethi, Director, Inter University Centre for Social Science Research and Extension, is the Academic Advisor of the International Centre for Polar Studies at Mahatma Gandhi University, Kerala. He also served as ICSSR Senior Fellow, Senior Professor and Dean of International Relations at MGU.
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