Operation Sindoor has electrified the nation, sorrowing and grieving after the dastardly terrorist attack in Pahalgam on 22 April. The nation’s resolve has been made a reality by the Modi government in the form of decisive action against the perpetrators of terror and their supporters with attacks on Bahawalpur, Muridke and Muzaffarabad among others. Twenty-four hours later, it is now amplified into a systematic attack on the air defence systems in the largest and most strategically vital cities of Pakistan—Lahore, Karachi, Sialkot, Peshawar, Astore, and even Rawalpindi. The defence minister has more than delivered what he promised, in that the people of India got what they wanted. They will probably get even more.

Exceeding mere revenge or revanchism, however, public sentiment has transcended emotionality, and is seeking a long-term solution to the blight known as Pakistan, and settle forever the unresolved issues of partition. How our country and its armed forces achieve this goal, in what timeframe, and by employing which means is not the subject of this piece. In fact, this would be a futile exercise in a war situation where events are changing by the hour. Instead, we attempt to understand why the return of Gilgit-Baltistan to Bharat is of paramount importance.

Before advancing further, it is important to understand what Pakistan is and why it exists. These questions are strongly interrelated. In essence, Pakistan is a geography for hire under an extractive elite, eager to find a larger power to which it may sell its geography. Pakistan, in essence, is the Sindhi and Baloch coastline on one end, the gates to Central Asia on the other (via Khyber Pakhtunkhwa onto Tajikistan and Afghanistan), with a Muhajir-Punjabi elite enriching themselves off the connection between these two ends and the intervening land. This elite called upon the British, the Americans, the Gulf States, and then finally the Chinese to successively rent out Pakistan’s geography, which connects the western Indian Ocean to the Central Asian heartland and beyond, and incidentally fund their debauchery in upscale neighbourhoods in Islamabad and Lahore.

The government is the Pakistani State but the power lies with the army. Pakistan’s bloated and ruthless army is the obvious conduit for this business of geographic renting and feudal landlordism because controlling (and immiserating) disparate ethnicities with their own sense of history, and preventing a population reduced to serfdom from demanding economic betterment, requires extensive use of force. The bogeyman of India, or the rabble-rousing calls of Ghazwa-i-Hind, were convenient distractions to paper over the severe internal contradictions existing within Pakistan.

The above scheme was not an accident, or a case of convoluted historical evolution, but of conscious design. Pakistan’s history can be reduced to transactions between roughly 70 families, many of who were zamindars wary of pre-independence socialists who intended to place land ceilings and found a convenient way of retaining holdings by demanding a separate State altogether, control all institutions (including the military and judiciary) within and beyond the Pakistani State.

This elite inspired great confidence in the British, such that they could set up a suitable entity providing sufficient leverage in the region. Thus, Cyril Radcliffe carved out a geographical oddity which connected the heartland with the rimland, and could be intermeshed with........

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