Keeping in view the global developments during the last few years, what are the prospects of cooperative and friendly relations between India and Pakistan. (1993)
The years 1989–93 changed the international system: the Cold War ended, the Soviet Union collapsed and left Afghanistan, and globalisation and regional blocs spread. Liberal theorists, from Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye on complex interdependence to Richard Rosecrance’s The Rise of the Trading State (1986), expected such changes to make old rivalries look costly. For India and Pakistan, the same years brought both new openings and new causes of conflict.
Developments favouring cooperation
- The end of bloc politics reduced Pakistan’s value to Washington. The Pressler sanctions (October 1990) cut off American aid, and India lost its Soviet guarantor.
- Economic liberalisation: India’s 1991 reforms and the global turn to markets made trade a possible basis for peace. SAPTA was signed in April 1993.
- A new layer of CBMs: the non-attack agreement on nuclear installations (1988, in force 1991), the 1991 agreements on advance notice of military exercises and on airspace violations, and the 1992 joint declaration on chemical weapons.
Developments working against it
- Afghan jihad veterans and Islamist mobilisation flowed into the Kashmir insurgency from 1989, which Pakistan externalised.
- Nuclear opacity: the 1990 crisis showed that both states had near-weapon capability. This created the space later called the stability–instability paradox.
- Communal shocks: the Babri Masjid demolition (December 1992) and the Bombay blasts (March 1993) hardened opinion on both sides.
- Internationalisation: after the Cold War, Western attention to human rights in Kashmir encouraged Pakistan’s strategy of internationalising the dispute.
How the prospects played out
- Limited cooperation proved possible: the Gujral Doctrine (1996–97), the Lahore Declaration (1999), and the 2004–07 back-channel, which came closest to a Kashmir framework.
- Friendship did not. Kargil, the attacks on Parliament (2001) and Mumbai (2008), Uri, Pulwama and Pahalgam each ended a phase. Trade has been fully suspended since April–May 2025. The World Bank estimates a potential of US$37 billion, but no business constituency for peace was ever allowed to form.
- Today’s global developments cut the same two ways. US–China rivalry has deepened the China–Pakistan bond: SIPRI finds that China supplied 80% of Pakistan’s arms imports in 2021–25, up from 73% in 2016–20. Washington has re-courted Pakistan: Asim Munir was hosted at the White House in June 2025, and Pakistan mediated the April 2026 ceasefire in the Iran war. The Saudi–Pakistan defence pact (September 2025), extended to Turkey in August 2026, adds Gulf backing. Multilateral forums still keep the two in contact: an Indian delegation attended the SCO National Coordinators’ meeting in Islamabad (28–30 September 2026).
Assessment
The liberal expectation failed because the rivalry rests on identity and civil–military structure, not on the Cold War. T. V. Paul (ed., The India–Pakistan Conflict: An Enduring Rivalry, 2005) classes it as an enduring rivalry, sustained by territorial and identity stakes and by an asymmetry Pakistan offsets through external alliances. Stephen P. Cohen’s paired minority conflict and Ayesha Jalal’s account of military primacy explain why systemic change did not reach the dyad. Interdependence cannot form where trade is itself treated as a security concession.
Conclusion
The prospects for cooperative management are real and have been partly met: nuclear-list exchanges have continued unbroken since 1992, the LoC ceasefire has been reaffirmed and contact continues in multilateral forums. The prospects for friendly relations were low in 1993 and are lower now. They depend less on global change than on Pakistan’s internal balance and an end to cross-border terrorism.