Muhammad Sheharyar Khan, a Gold Award-winning International Relations graduate, actively contributes to policy discourse and academic research. He has worked with national institutions including Pakistan’s National Assembly and authored the Urdu poetic book Khayaal Nagri.

On 22 April 2025, a tragic bus bombing against a Hindu pilgrimage bus in Kashmir’s Pahalgam killed 26 and injured dozens of others. The attack by the Resistance Front (TRF) has been met with a sudden intensification of the previously delicate relationship between Pakistan and India. In response to the attack, India suspended the Indus Waters Treaty. It closed its border with Pakistan, signalling a swift deterioration of the relationship and a risk of a general military conflict. While the risks escalated to date, the international community and the European Union (EU) appear to have largely dismissed the growing risk of nuclear conflict in the region.

Although the Kashmir crisis is usually described in regional terms, Indian-Pakistani nuclear competition is a matter of international concern with international implications, and most critically, to the EU. In this piece, I contend that the EU’s passivity regarding the Indo-Pak crisis is a strategic mistake and that the EU has to be more engaged in preventing nuclear war in South Asia.

India and Pakistan are nuclear-armed nations and long-standing rivals with a conflict-heavy past. Throughout the decades, their competition has been punctuated by military clashes, most prominently the wars of 1947, 1965, and 1971. These were predominantly conventional, though the nuclear connotations of the Indo-Pak competition have completely changed the nature of their confrontation. Both countries hold nuclear weapons in their arsenals, and the possibility of a full-scale nuclear war between them is rapidly being made more likely.

The........

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