Why Pakistan Cannot Make Peace with India?

Analysis

By Zahid Sultan and Irshad Ahmad Bhat 

Since 1947, Pakistan has existed not simply as a sovereign entity but as a state deeply tethered to an idea — an idea forged in the fires of Partition, nourished by grievance, and sustained by a civilizational insecurity. While India emerged from Partition as a state striving to reconcile pluralism with modernity, Pakistan evolved into something more brittle: a nation founded not just in separation from India, but in opposition to it.

From the very outset, Pakistan’s identity has been defined negatively, not by what it is, but by what it is not. This foundational impulse — to define the self in contradistinction to a supposed Hindu “Other” — has calcified over decades into a strategic posture that is adversarial by design. The ideological undercurrents of this posture have ensured that Pakistan views India not merely as a rival state but as a civilizational challenge to be resisted, eternally and unconditionally.

This framework helps explain the otherwise bewildering continuity of Pakistan’s antagonism. Since independence, Pakistan has launched four conventional wars against India — in 1947, 1965, 1971, and 1999. Every one of these adventures ended in military embarrassment and diplomatic setback. But more revealing than the defeats themselves is what followed: instead of introspection, Pakistan’s military-political establishment redoubled its hostility, choosing denial over accountability, and ideological rigidity over course correction.

With the conventional military route discredited, Pakistan pivoted to irregular warfare. Insurgencies were fomented across Punjab in the 1980s, then Kashmir in the 1990s, followed by a long shadow war through proxies and terror outfits operating from Pakistani soil. This strategy was not just cynical — it was suicidal. The very actors once nurtured as “strategic assets” have trained their guns inwards. Pakistan today bleeds from wounds it inflicted upon itself.

In 2023 alone, nearly 500 terror attacks rocked the country. The tribal belt, Balochistan, urban Sindh, and even the heartlands of Punjab are engulfed by a level of insecurity once unimaginable. Yet even now, the architects of this ruin — especially the generals in Rawalpindi — remain trapped in the delusion that Pakistan’s national honor lies in resisting India, whatever the cost.

At the core of this tragic impasse is a pathology best articulated by scholar Christine Fair in ‘Fighting to the End’. Fair’s unsettling thesis is this: that Pakistan is not a “normal” state seeking equilibrium with its neighbors. It is a revisionist entity, animated by an existential anxiety, convinced that its survival depends on militarily, diplomatically, and psychologically contesting India. The Pakistan Army, far from being a conventional defense force, has assumed the role of ideological guardian — a self-appointed custodian of the Muslim frontier, perpetually locked in battle with a Hindu-majority India that it perceives as an ever-present threat.

This self-perception is not a fringe view; it is institutionalized. The military dominates foreign policy and defines national identity, media discourse, and educational curricula. Making peace with India is not a strategic decision — it is a philosophical betrayal. It threatens the very scaffolding upon which the Pakistani state was built. In this schema, reconciliation with India is heresy.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the discourse around Kashmir. Often portrayed as the “core issue” between the two countries, Kashmir is, in fact, a proxy—a canvas upon which Pakistan projects its anxieties, ambitions, and unresolved traumas. The demand for Kashmir is not driven by demographic realities, economic interests, or strategic logic. It is driven by a need to avenge Partition, assert Islamic triumphalism over India, and claim moral victory for the very idea of Pakistan.

This is why peace cannot come simply through territorial negotiation. Even if India were to surrender the entirety of Jammu and Kashmir — a proposition far outside the bounds of reality — there is little reason to believe that hostility would end. The ideological compulsion would remain. In fact, victory in Kashmir would likely embolden, not satiate, Pakistan’s military class, which would search for the next front in its imagined civilizational war.

India, for its part, has moved on. While not without its own faults, New Delhi has largely internalized a pragmatic posture toward difficult relationships, especially with stronger powers like China. Despite violent flare-ups and serious border tensions, India approaches China with a degree of realism and diplomatic maturity, accepting the power asymmetry and managing it through dialogue and deterrence.

Pakistan, however, refuses similar realism vis-à-vis India. Instead of recognizing the vast gulf in economic size, diplomatic leverage, technological advancement, and military power, Pakistan’s elite cling to a delusional narrative of parity. This fiction is sustained not through reason, but through mythmaking and mass indoctrination. That is why military budgets remain bloated even as the economy teeters on collapse; that is why every civilian government that even whispers peace is sabotaged, discredited, or dismissed. And that is why the average Pakistani child grows up hearing stories of India not as a neighbor, but as a nemesis.

What makes this all the more tragic is that Pakistan does not lack talent, resilience, or possibility. It is home to a young and energetic population, a rich cultural heritage, and a geostrategic position that could have made it a hub of trade and diplomacy. But these gifts have been squandered in the pursuit of an illusion — the illusion that resisting India is more important than building Pakistan.

Unless and until Pakistan undergoes a radical shift in its national consciousness — a transformation that dethrones the military’s ideological monopoly, embraces democratic accountability, and reimagines Pakistan not as a bulwark against India but as a viable state in its own right — peace will remain a distant dream. Without this metamorphosis, every ceasefire is temporary, every dialogue fragile, and every overture doomed.

India cannot make peace alone. The ball lies in Pakistan’s court. But as long as its ruling class remains beholden to the ghosts of 1947, it will continue to sacrifice its present and future at the altar of a civilizational feud that serves no one, least of all the people of Pakistan.

Zahid Sultan (Freelance Researcher.  PhD in Politics and Governance from Central University of Kashmir)

Irshad Ahmad Bhat (Freelance Researcher: Pursuing PhD in Political Science)