The Economic Pressures Behind the Latest India-Pakistan Clash
Pakistan may have been eclipsed by India’s rise, but it remains critical in areas of war, peace, and prosperity.
Indian Border Security Force (BSF) personnel (in brown) and Pakistani rangers (in black) take part in the Beating Retreat ceremony during the Republic Day celebrations at the Wagah border on Jan. 26.
Photographer: Narinder Nanu/AFP/Getty ImagesOn a dark Friday evening, Indian Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman looked calm in a blue suit jacket and white-collar shirt as he was escorted by Pakistani servicemen in front of TV cameras across the floodlit frontier point of Wagah. With his extravagantly flared mustache, the pilot had become the face of the latest conflict between India and Pakistan.
Wagah—the only land border open between the two countries—is well known to tourists: Its daily militarized and comically exaggerated closing ceremony is a symbol of the enduring animosity between the two nations, which has endured since Muslim-majority Pakistan was partitioned from Hindu-dominated India in 1947 at the end of British rule. Right after Varthaman was handed over, the heavy, barred border gates were once again shut. Many hoped it marked the end of the most dramatic military escalation over Kashmir—a divided territory that each of the nuclear-armed nations claims is theirs—since a Himalayan conflict in Kargil two decades earlier.