‘Hindustan bhi mera hain, aur Pakistan bhi mera hain’ – Habib Jalib

India and Pakistan have fought four years till date: 1947, 1965, 1971 and 1999; and have been engaged in an unending proxy war since 1947. They are yet again at loggerheads with one another following the Pahalgam Attacks which resulted in the killing of 26 civilians including Hindus, Muslims and Foreign Nationals. Although The Resistance Front (TRF) has taken responsibility of the attacks, the Indian government has constantly emphasised that such outfits have been allowed to function under the patronage of the Pakistani government. It is important to consider in this context that the history of fundamentalist outfits in Pakistan being allowed to function and granted access to arms and ammunition is an old one, which goes back to the days of the Cold War and the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan under Leonid Brezhnev. The constant rise of such tendencies in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and the concurrent rise of fundamentalism in Kashmir during the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s – which resulted in the Kargil War in 1999 – had created an important foundation for the Islamophobia and Hindutva far-right that India has been witnessing today. Pakistan too, has mostly been under the rule of military dictatorships which have mostly emphasised the creation of a surveillance-based and theocratic state. Both India and Pakistan have also at different points of time taken recourse to banning left-wing formations and dissent, which can be seen in recent times as well.

In recent times, the far-right governments on both sides of the border have been attempting to use the situation to their advantage, advocating for a full-fledged escalation at the Line of Control (LOC) that separates the two countries. It is important to note in this context that the governments of both India and Pakistan have in recent times found themselves under pressure following the economic hardships that both these countries have been facing. While India is placed at the 105^th  position in the Global Hunger Index (GHI), Pakistan is placed at the 109^th  position. In both these counties, there has been a constant rise of multi-dimensional poverty and far-right hardline politics that has constantly sought to undermine democratic values, social justice, human rights, and the secular ethos. While the Pakistani left has largely been divided upon the approach that is needed to analyse the existence of state-sponsored fundamentalist outfits in Pakistan, the Indian left too has failed to analyse the border tensions from an anti-war perspective. Almost all the major Communist Parties – for example, the CPI, the CPI(M) and the CPIML-PCC – have shied away from directly taking an anti-war position.

As Marxists, it is of utmost importance to realise that such wars, in the end, benefit only the ruling classes of the warring sides at the expense of innocent civilian lives, and that in this case as well, it will be the same. The most important objective that the Indian, Pakistani and the Global Left have at their disposal at this moment is to advocate and push for an immediate de-escalation of the tensions between the two nuclear-powered countries.