Take two nuclear-armed countries which are not officially at war, yet whose armies shell each other on a near-daily basis.  That is how it was between India and Pakistan before a November 2003 ceasefire ended their fighting over the divided former kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir.  With that ceasefire now showing signs of fraying at the edges and India saying that its peace process with Pakistan is under stress, it is worth remembering quite what a dramatic development it was for two countries which had come close to war in 2001/2002 to tell their armies to stand down.

Nearly five months after the ceasefire, I visited an Indian border post that had seen heavy fighting for years. It was in the Jammu region, at what had been a busy railway station in pre-partition days, on a road that once ran from the town of Jammu to Lahore. The railway station was left in India, with a railroad track that led nowhere, while the road had been closed since 1947.

The station building was pock-marked with bullets, but the guns had disappeared and the grass was beginning to grow again in the surrounding fields. The Indian troops had stripped down to their vests and trousers and were out playing soccer. On the megaphone,  they played music from Hindi films. They knew the Pakistanis at the other side liked the music. But they remembered to turn it down when it was time for the call to prayers. They had a respect for the other side here, born out of the strange courtesies that grow between two land armies when they fight each other for long enough.

Beyond the Indian checkpoint, a long avenue lined with poplar trees led up to the “zero line” between India and Pakistan. Virtually every tree was marked with bullets that had scraped across them or in some cases passed right through them. In the middle of the avenue, a giant peepul tree straddled the two countries, half of its roots in India, half in Pakistan. We walked up to the tree and waved at the Pakistani soldiers at the far end of the avenue. 

This was the closest India and Pakistan had come to peace in half a century.

Is this peace now unravelling as each country faces its own domestic crisis? The current situation does not create a stable foundation for  talks — Pakistan’s shaky coalition is struggling with an economic crisis, political instability and the threat of U.S. action against al Qaeda and Taliban militants on its border with Afghanistan, while the Indian government faces a showdown over its nuclear deal with the United States.

A return to the pre-ceasefire days looks unlikely, at least for now.  But with violence also on the rise in the Kashmir Valley — at least nine soldiers were killed by an IED at the weekend –you have to ask whether the two countries might have missed their chance to secure a durable peace in the more than four years since the ceasefire was declared.

Are tensions over Kashmir and Afghanistan returning to haunt relations between India and Pakistan?

At first glance, it looks unlikely. The two countries have more or less managed to hold to a ceasefire agreed at the end of 2003 on both the Line of Control (LoC) dividing Kashmir and on Siachen, and they have a slow-moving peace process which at least has India and Pakistan talking rather than fighting each other. India is far too interested in winning itself superpower status to let itself be distracted by some embarrassing fighting on its border. And Pakistan has enough problems dealing with al Qaeda and the Taliban on its western  border with Afghanistan, without having to cope with trouble on its eastern border with India as well.

But there have been signs of a new strain in relations this week. The two armies exchanged fire across the LoC  in a violation of the ceasefire. That in itself might not be too troubling, were it not for the fact that long-simmering resentment in Kashmir against Indian rule has burst into the open again. A decision, subsequently reversed, by the state government to transfer land to the Hindu Amarnath Shrine Board sparked some of the biggest protests since the Kashmir separatist revolt erupted in 1989 and has now brought down the state government.

At the same time, the bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul has exposed the rivalry between India and Pakistan over Afghanistan. Afghan authorities hinted that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) was behind the attack — prompting Indian analysts to say that the ISI was sending India a message to get out of Afghanistan. Before the fall of the Taliban in 2001, Pakistan regarded Afghanistan as its own preserve — a place that would offer it “strategic depth” against India.  Since 2001, it has been forced to watch in frustration as India builds economic and political ties  with the government of President Hamid Karzai in Kabul.

So will Kashmir and/or Kabul become the slow burning fuse threatening relations between India and Pakistan? Or is the peace process well enough entrenched to douse the flames?

(Update: Thanks to readers for pointing out the obvious error in the original post which wrongly said that Afghanistan was on Pakistan’s eastern border and India on its western border. I have now corrected above).