Tension has risen between India and Pakistan after India staged an air strike on Pakistani territory. This was packaged as a retaliation for a suicide bomb attack in Indian controlled Kashmi. The supposed targets were the bases of insurgent groups seeking making Kashmir part of Pakistan. The Pakistani government has threatened retaliation for the Indian incursion into its airspace, “at the time and place of its chosing”.
The attack was claimed by a group based in Pakistan, Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), and India had vowed to retaliate.
India accuses Pakistan of allowing militant groups to operate on its territory, something Pakistan denies.
Both India and Pakistan claim all of Muslim-majority Kashmir, but control only parts of it. The two have fought three wars and a limited conflict since independence from Britain in 1947 - and all but one were over Kashmir.
The strikes are the first launched across the line of control - the de facto border that divides India-administered Kashmir from Pakistan-administered Kashmir - since a war between the two countries in 1971.
A difference between earlier wars is that now both sides have nuclear weapons. They are both in a “mutually assured destruction” scenario as an exchange would result in hundreds of millions dead.
The basis of the conflict is the (hurried) end of British rule. Mountbatten was unable to get the agreement of the local (non-Muslim) heritary ruler to allocate Kashmir to Pakistan as it had majority Muslimpopulation. In the end it was left under the control of India but with the understanding that a referendum would be held to finalise the border- hence the current border being referred to as the “line of control”. (A similar situation happened with the end of the Palestine Mandate. The “two state plus Jerusalem” solution proposed and adopted by the UN was for a “Jewish state” and Palestine consiting of the West Bank and Gaza, not on current boundaries, plus Jerusalem as an open city administered by the UN. The provisional borders left by the British included some places where the line cut through communities. Similar to Kashmir, it was understood that there would be detailed negotiations to iron out these problems.)