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Yarn
Gandi was assasinated by a fundamentalist Hindu for adovcating peace. The reason why Pakistan and India split up in the first place was because the Hindu and Muslim masses hated eachother so much that they were genociding eachother all over the country. An estimated several hundred thousand to a million people were slaughtered in this barbaric fued.
They had small scale wars every now and then over a pittance of land that still constitutes the greatest concrete focal point of their mutual antagonism.
Besides that, there is the case of the Pakistani army. The army is heavily involved in Pakistani politics, such that Pakistan is not entirely democratic. The army periodically overthrows the democratic government of Pakistan and then later allows it to come back. Thd army enjoys enormous funding given Pakistan's size and wealth, and as a result much of the rest of the civil system is pitiful. Per instance, the education system is a complete mess. There is 1 teacher to 50-100 students, they don't have enough books to go around, and often they don't even have school buildings.
What does this have to do with the India-Pakistan conflict?
The Pakistani army justifies its massive parasitic nature on the basis of the Indian threat. In Pakistan, politicians who promote peace are opposed by the army because peace threatens the army's budget. So such politicians rarely get much power.
Pakistan and India are way overpopulated. They are plagued by religous extremism and territorial innanity. Their economies are ravaged by short sighted protectionism that crippled India so much that its economy was outperformed by Maoist China's back in the day, and while China rockets ahead now India is left coughing in the dust. Speaking of Maoism, India is in the middle of a civil war with Maoists, and these rebels comprise more than 70,000 men focused in the rural areas of the East actively seeking to overthrow India's democracy. Frequently, they de facto control Indian territory. Their revolutionary brethren in Nepal recently overthrew the Nepalese government.
Meanwhile, Northern India and Pakistan are wholly dependent on the flow of the Indus, Ganges, and Brahmaputra rivers to feed their ever growing bloated populations. Therefore, they are extremely vulnerable to global warming because those rivers rely on glacial meltwater for summer flow. If the glaciers melt away too rapidly, they will dissappear altogether. At that point we may be looking at hundreds of millions Pakistanis and Indians starving to death and possibly nuking eachother in a war fought over shared portions of the water supply...the whole subcontinent is a damn time bomb.
IF there is to be peace, then it will have to center around a mutually agreed demarcation of the border. India and Pakistan will have to sign a treaty denoting who formally gets what. Kashmir is split in 2. Pakistan holds part of it, India holds part of it, both claim all of it. Amusingly enough, China claims it as well but controls only a small portion of it. The Kashmiris themselves want to be part of Pakistan, but India thinks it deserves Kashmir for some reason, and will not allow the territory to decide for itself what country it wants to be a part of. Bangladesh, formely known as East Pakistan, doesn't have this gadfly. So relations between India and Bangladesh are much better than those between India and Pakistan.
As far as I can tell, Pakistan and India aren't interested in making any sort of compromise agreement over Kashmir, and, until they agree to, I don't see how they can achieve a lasting peace.
Now they both have nuclear weapons, so any war between them that escalated would kill tens of millions directly via explosion, and would possibly threaten a billion lives globallly due to the resulting nuclear winter. They are building more and more nukes. In fact, US money is helping spur this on. In an attempt to bribe Pakistan into helping us defeat Al Qaeda and the Taliban, we are giving the Pakistan military lots of money. This helps enable it to increase its nuclear arsenal. The nuclear arsenals are not static, they are getting bigger and bigger, meaning the death toll that would result from a true war is getting ever higher.
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