A socialist view on the India-Pakistan conflict: Interview with Imran Kamyana

In May 2025, Pakistan and India came to the brink of all-out war. Tensions escalated in the wake of the killing of 26 Indian tourists near Pahalgam, a town in Indian-occupied Kashmir. The Indian government accused Pakistan of sponsoring the attack and moved rapidly to expel Pakistani diplomats and suspend the Indus Water Treaty which gives Pakistan access to river water from Indian-controlled Kashmir. Border skirmishes between Indian and Pakistani troops then erupted in late April and early May. On 7 May the Indian government initiated Operation Sindoor, launching missiles at mosques in Pakistani-occupied Kashmir and directly into Pakistan itself, including near the city of Lahore. Thirty-one Pakistani civilians were killed in the strikes. The Pakistani military then launched its own missile strikes into northern India and Indian-occupied Kashmir. Sixteen civilians were killed and dozens wounded in what was the heaviest direct attacks between the two nations since the 1971 Indo-Pakistani War. On 10 May an uneasy ceasefire, brokered by the United States, was reached between the two countries. However, the underlying roots of the conflict remain.

The South Asia region is home to over 2 billion people, 25 percent of the world’s population. Understanding the dynamics of this conflict then is important for socialists around the globe. In late May Marxist Left Review interviewed Imran Kamyana, a member of the national leadership of The Struggle, a Marxist group in Pakistan, about the background to the conflict and the debates that have emerged within the Pakistani and Indian left in response to its escalation.

Jordan Humphreys: Let’s start with the latest round of conflict in May. The Indian government said its military strikes were only a response to the killing of 26 tourists in Indian-controlled Kashmir, which it claimed the Pakistani military had some hand in. On the other side, Pakistan justified its military strikes against India on the basis that it was just defending itself against aggression. What is the truth behind all this?

Imran Kamyana: First of all, from a Marxist point of view, the question of how a war starts, who started it, what the balance of power is between the different warring parties, is of secondary importance for us. Our starting point, as Lenin explained in his writings on the First World War, has to be the historical background of the war. Who is waging the war? What is the class character of the nations waging the war? Is this a conflict between an imperialist country and a colony? Or are these countries major imperialist powers or regional imperialist ones? For us the starting point has to be an analysis of what India and Pakistan are, the class character of these nations, and how they came into being in 1947.

Our organisation in Pakistan has a unique perspective on this question, which differs from the analysis of South Asia held by the Stalinist left.^[1] We argue that Pakistan and India are both imperialist states. True, they may not be global imperialist powers on the scale of the United States, but they are regional or sub-imperialist powers. They both have imperialist designs in the region. Pakistan has imperialist ambitions in Balochistan, in Afghanistan and in Kashmir. The same goes for India, which is trying to exert more control over Kashmir, Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh. In recent years India has also been expanding its influence in Balochistan, which is occupied by Pakistan.

Both of these states then have this imperialist character and both occupy and plunder dozens of different oppressed nationalities in the territories they control. In Pakistan, there are three or four major separatist movements, some armed and some not.^[2] In India, there are around a dozen such movements, including the Maoist insurgencies. Just the other day the leader of one of these insurgencies, the Communist Party of India (Maoist) was murdered by the Indian state.^[3]

These two states then have an anti-working class, oppressive and imperialist character. In some ways, their position is similar to pre-1917 Russia. Tsarist Russia, while weaker than the Western European imperialist powers, had its own imperialist designs in Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Also like tsarist Russia, Pakistan and India didn’t come into being through the classical fashion of the European bourgeois states that were established through revolutions.

In India and Pakistan, a new ruling class and capitalism were grafted onto this region of the world by British imperialism. When India and Pakistan emerged as independent nations in 1947 there was a basic continuity with the previous system established by the British. The new ruling classes of India and Pakistan continued the same brutal behaviour towards the working classes, the oppressed nationalities, the rural poor and women. They did this in different forms and in different guises, with new slogans, but their class character remained the same. What emerged after independence then was a comprador bourgeoisie in this part of the world. In India capitalism became larger and more powerful than in Pakistan, but the essential class character and capitalist nature of both nations is the same. In both countries, we have a capitalist ruling class that is dependent upon and complicit with imperialism.

Turning to the current situation. Why did India behave so aggressively? To start with, what happened in Pahalgam with the attack on the tourists is complicated. The Pakistani state has been carrying out a policy for many years of trying to manipulate the legitimate struggle of the Kashmir masses for the Pakistani military’s purposes. They have sought to use Kashmiri groups as their proxies, and then India does the same in Balochistan and elsewhere. This is a very poisonous and very reactionary policy that the two states use against each other.

So what happened in Pahalgam? There was another incident which happened a few weeks before it. In Balochistan a whole train was hijacked by a separatist organisation, the Balochistan Liberation Army. They bombed the train and killed a lot of people, both civilians and soldiers. The Pakistani state blamed India for this, and India indeed has a history of supporting such groups both directly and indirectly. It is possible that Pakistan then supported the attack in Pahalgam as a retaliation for this attack on the train. But there are other possibilities too. Perhaps the Indian government knew it was coming and just let it happen. Or, and this is not impossible, the Indian government carried out the attack in Pahalgam more directly. In this part of the world, where we have a lot of covert actions and proxy military groups, things become very complicated as you can imagine.

At any rate, India escalated the situation with military strikes this time, but it is important to remember that in the past Pakistan has been the initial aggressor. For Modi, the motivation for taking an aggressive stand is related to his declining popularity. All the talk about India Shining is very exaggerated and that is becoming clearer to people.^[4] There are also important elections coming up in Bihar, a major state, in November. In response to his declining popularity, Modi is inciting the flames of religious and communal hatred and divisions. And so you have this hyped-up anti-Pakistan rhetoric. In a way, it is similar to what Trump has been doing.

Then the Pahalgam incident happened and the hysteria ramped up. India launched strikes not only in Kashmir but directly into Pakistan itself, including near Lahore. From their point of view, it was impossible for the Pakistani state not to respond and so they launched their own strikes against India. At this point, the Americans intervened to try and calm down the situation, which was rapidly getting out of control. Trump pressured both sides to accept a ceasefire. However, despite the fact that both India and Pakistan accepted this, India really has suffered a setback from these events. It acted very aggressively and talked big about taking on Pakistan and then backed down. In the aftermath, the Pakistani military has rebuilt a popular image among the masses and come out of this strengthened, while Modi comes across as weak and is attacked by the nationalist right in India for capitulating. He took a gamble and really he lost.

Jordan: There are people on the international left or involved in the Palestine solidarity campaign who were very much on Pakistan’s side in this conflict. They argued that Pakistan is resisting Western imperialism while India is on the West’s side. Some even see Pakistan as like Palestine and India as Israel. What do you make of this argument?

Imran: It is a typical campist argument. The whole idea is that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. It is a naive and stupid idea at best, reactionary and counter-revolutionary at worst. It is also notable that many who make this argument support Putin’s invasion and occupation of Ukraine, despite claiming to be anti-imperialist.

Here in Pakistan, there is a section of the left who have this position. Some on the left argue that the Pakistani state isn’t very good but under the circumstances, we have to put aside our criticisms and support it against India. For others, it also overlaps with the Muslim question. This is because Pakistan is the only Muslim-majority country with nuclear weapons, and so there is this idea that it is the ultimate protector of the Muslim world. Either way you end up just lining up with your oppressors, with the ruling class and the state.

We argue that in this conflict we cannot support either of these states; instead, we must advocate for an anti-war position that unites people from across the region against their governments. If open war did break out, we would of course try to safeguard the lives of people; after all, we cannot welcome the enemy who won’t be coming with flowers in their hands. They would rape, they would destroy, they would burn. But that doesn’t mean supporting your own state or the military. The key thing is to fight to stop such a conflict from breaking out in the first place because if it did it would be absolutely devastating. Both the Indian and Pakistani governments have nuclear weapons and the official military policy is to use them if the integrity of either nation is threatened.

So sections of the left going along with one side or another in this conflict are just turning themselves into pawns for their own ruling classes and becoming minor players in this whole imperialist game.

Jordan: India obviously has close ties to Western governments and to Israel which is partly why this comparison comes up, but I believe Pakistan also has a long history of collaboration with the United States. On the other hand, it also has a long-standing relationship with China. Has the growing rivalry between the US and China impacted Pakistan? Is this a factor in the current tensions between India and Pakistan?

Imran: To answer this question we have to go back into the historical background. Pakistan and India both emerged out of the bloody partition of the subcontinent on a religious basis in 1947. The Soviet Union tried to forge ties with Pakistan after 1947 but the Pakistani elite rejected this and essentially became a part of the US camp in the Cold War. The Western powers supported Pakistan as a conservative religious buffer state against the spread of communism and Soviet influence in South Asia.

However, Pakistan balanced this support from the West with its relationship with China. Pakistan was the first Muslim country to recognise the People’s Republic of China after the 1949 revolution. A lot of people think that the Pakistani state is stupid or naïve, but they are not dumb; in the pursuit of their own interests the Pakistani ruling class can be very clever and devious. Most of the time they know exactly what they are doing. They saw an alliance with China as important in containing the ambitions of the Indian government, which was allied with the Soviet Union. Pakistan supported China when it broke from the Soviets and then played a role in mediating between the US and China when Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger started having meetings with Mao. After this Pakistan would go to China to get them to lean on the US to help them against India. And that’s why the Pakistani military started getting all of this US military hardware, particularly the F-16 fighter jets, as well as Chinese weaponry.

In recent years, with the decline of US imperialism and the coming to power of clowns like Trump who are volatile and unpredictable, the situation has shifted again. It has pushed Pakistan to become closer and closer to China. It wasn’t that they weren’t close before, but with the West trying to use India against China, this pushes Pakistan into a closer alliance with China.

Until 1991 India was in the Soviet camp but after that India opened up their economy to Western capital. Before this the Indian economy had been very protectionist, a form of state capitalism was in place in which there was a lot of corruption in the ruling classes but also large amounts of state ownership and some state regulations and protections for workers. This ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. India then moved into the Western camp and established strong ties with the United States. The US hoped to use India as a counterweight to the growing military weight of China as it too grew out of the turn towards the world market. As tensions between the US and China grew, India became more important for the US and the West. This then reinforced China’s relationship with Pakistan, you can see the imperialist logic of competition very clearly in all of this. Now China is giving more advanced weapons to Pakistan, there is even talk about Pakistan getting new generation fighter jets at discounted prices, which would be unprecedented. Chinese banks are indicating that they would help the Pakistani government to pay for these very expensive jets.

After the recent conflict, there has been a bit of a shift again. Pakistan has strengthened its position as a regional power. This will reinforce their ruthlessness inside and outside of Pakistan. Despite the US being close to India, Trump has surprisingly been quite positive about the Pakistani military. Both during and after the conflict he praised the Pakistani government as pragmatists with whom he could deal, and was cold towards Modi, effectively blaming him for the escalation. Perhaps it is because Trump likes tough military guys and rogue authoritarian states like Pakistan. He might think he can deal with them a lot more easily than more complicated nations like India. There are also trade issues between India and the US. Trump has forbidden Apple to establish new assembly facilities in India and attacked them over trade imbalances, whereas this isn’t so much of an issue between Pakistan and the US.

However, Trump is unpredictable, so it isn’t clear what this all means for the future relations between the US, Pakistan and India. But he did intervene quite strongly to bring the recent conflict to an end, and not on India’s terms.

Jordan: It’s interesting how much Trump is really impacting the whole world in different ways. Let’s discuss the issue of Kashmir in some more detail. There is a long struggle for independence in Kashmir. However, as you said earlier there is also a history of both Pakistan and India intervening into Kashmir, and elsewhere in the region, in order to influence independence movements for their own purposes. What is your perspective on this issue? What should socialists say about the question of Kashmir?

Imran: In this part of the world the belated nature of capitalist development has created crisis-ridden and weakened capitalist states and a lackey comprador bourgeoisie. Capitalism has not been able to accomplish many of its historical tasks. In particular, it has struggled to form unified and stable nation-states. This is the case not just in South Asia but in other areas of the world, such as in parts of Africa.

This leads not to just one or two national questions but to dozens and dozens of national questions arising in response to the weakness of this belated capitalism. These nationalities were oppressed first by the British and then by the post-independence ruling classes when the new states of India and Pakistan came into being. These new states used the same policies of occupation, annexation, loot, plunder and oppression to try to crush these oppressed nationalities that threatened their new nation-states.

So having an answer to this complex situation is vital if we are going to build a revolutionary organisation in this region. To start with we endorse, without any hesitation, the right of self-determination for all the oppressed nationalities in this region. This includes the right of separation or secession for these nationalities. However, we don’t limit ourselves to just supporting the right to self-determination. What we want to do is unite the peoples of the region into a voluntary socialist federation of South Asia – similar to what Lenin and Trotsky envisioned in the early years of the USSR before the Stalinist counter-revolution.

In terms of Kashmir specifically, this is a complex situation. Kashmir is divided by three different imperialist and regional imperialist powers. One part is occupied by Pakistan, another by India and yet another part by China. When the British left in 1947 they left a bloody wound in the body of South Asia and laid the basis for decades of violent conflict in this region.

We support the struggle in Kashmir for national emancipation against the occupation of these three countries. They should withdraw their forces and the Kashmiris should be given the right to decide for themselves, in a peaceful democratic manner, what form of state they want Kashmir to be. At the same time though, we oppose the imperialist powers, like Pakistan, manipulating this genuine struggle for national emancipation for their own ends. This happens not just in Kashmir but across the entire region, as I said earlier. The Kashmiris must be free to make their own decisions about the independence struggle without the intervention of foreign powers.

As well, while we support the struggle for independence, we discourage and criticise the strategy of the armed struggle. This question comes up not only in Kashmir but also in Balochistan, which is occupied by Pakistan. We oppose the armed struggle for a variety of reasons. To start with you cannot fight, and hope to win, against a gigantic imperialist power like India or Pakistan on the basis of the armed struggle of small militant groups. The armed struggle also discourages the involvement of the popular masses in political and class struggles. It also gives the bourgeois state excuses to violently oppress you even more, and this repression often extends beyond the militant groups themselves to all organisations or individuals involved in the independence movement, even those who don’t support the armed struggle.

So this is our attitude not only to Kashmir but to the other oppressed nationalities in the region. We shouldn’t water down our own revolutionary class-based program to appease nationalism, but we also shouldn’t in any way take a position that aligns with our own oppressive imperialist state. We should present a socialist solution to the national question, one that argues that the way out of national oppression is through socialist revolution in the region.

We don’t want to divide people, we don’t want to erect new walls and new borders. Instead, we want to unite people – but on a free, democratic and voluntary basis. Lenin argued that even though Marxists support the rights of the oppressed nationalities, we also want to bring nationalities closer together and ultimately merge them in a future socialist society. So the Marxist perspective goes against the narrow nationalism and liberal nationalism that is influential among many of the oppressed nationalities in the region. But for this merging to take place we cannot support the oppression of the nationalities in any way, or condone imperialist states that occupy them against their will. So we believe that only socialism and revolutionary Marxism present a viable solution to the incredibly complex national question in the region. The only viable way forward for national freedom is working-class self-emancipation and socialism.

Jordan: To pivot to a different topic, would you be able to explain how the socialist left in India and Pakistan have responded to the current conflict? From what I have read, sections of the left in both countries have supported their own states, is this correct? In India, the Communist Party of India and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) have similarly taken a terrible stand supporting the Modi government’s military strikes.^[5] Is this a new problem for the left? And has there been a significant shift in positions on the left in the region in response to this current conflict?

Imran: This is not a new problem for the left in South Asia, but some sections of the left have gotten a lot worse. There have been three major wars between India and Pakistan as well as other minor conflicts, and much of the left took ambiguous or bad positions on these wars. However, for left-wing parties to openly support their own state’s military action is unprecedented. In order to understand what has happened you need some background on the current state of the left in the region.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union the socialist left in Pakistan and India, as well as the workers’ movement, retreated significantly.

This was much worse in Pakistan than in India, where the left has held on somewhat. In Pakistan, the vast majority of the socialist left disintegrated in the space of a few months after the end of the USSR. This idol that they had worshipped for decades was discredited and the Stalinist left just collapsed in response. Most of the members of the left-wing parties openly abandoned Communism. Some became born-again Muslims, others went into the imperialist NGOS and became moderate liberals. Again this happened in the space of only a few months, it was a very rapid shift to the right. That period was a very dark time.

Historically the largest group on the Pakistani left had been the Pakistani Peoples’ Party. During the revolutionary movements of the 1960s, the Peoples’ Party became a mass force in the struggle against the dictatorship. During this time a huge movement engulfed the country. Workers occupied factories, peasants took over the land, hundreds of thousands radicalised, and there was a revolutionary situation. Workers and peasants went well beyond demanding the end of the dictatorship and started raising openly socialist demands. The Stalinist left raised only democratic demands because of their two-stage theory of revolution. They lagged far behind the masses and so failed to make much headway. Instead, the People’s Party dominated the movement.^[6] The People’s Party wasn’t a revolutionary socialist party, it was a populist left-wing party. In 1971 the People’s Party came to power, and once in office it began to shift to the right, making all sorts of concessions to the state and compromises with religious conservatives. Despite this, the People’s Party government was overthrown by the military in 1977 and its leader, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was executed.

In the 1980s a small group of our comrades, mainly teachers, started to build a Trotskyist group. Before that, there had been a few attempts to build such a group but they had failed to work out. For a period in the 1990s and 2000s, our comrades formed a Marxist tendency within the Pakistan People’s Party, but we abandoned this policy as the party moved to the right. It was very difficult to establish a group supporting revolutionary Marxism throughout this period, when the Stalinist left was collapsing and abandoning Communism and the People’s Party was shifting in a more conservative direction as well. Despite this, our comrades laid the basis for a small organisation to emerge and grow into the future.

So in terms of the Pakistani left today and the debates over the war, the Stalinist left is much weaker than in the past, and while we aren’t a huge party we are popular on the Pakistani left. And so our anti-war position, while not mainstream, has some influence on the left in Pakistan. Other sections of the left, and even some Stalinist groups, have adopted a relatively decent position because of this, not exactly the same as ours, but close, whereas those on the left who openly support the Pakistani military are not so dominant. There is also a section of younger left-wing figures in Pakistan who have studied at elite Western universities and come back to the country presenting themselves as serious Marxist intellectuals in recent years. They have had a very conciliatory attitude towards the Pakistani state, essentially just asking that the state adopt their socialist policies. During this recent conflict, they supported the Pakistani military and were quite discredited on the left for this stance.

In India though the left is still dominated by sizeable Stalinist parties. There are four main communist parties for instance: the Communist Party of India, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) and the banned Communist of Party India (Maoist), which is involved in the armed struggle.^[7]

Historically these communist parties had the typical Stalinist two-stage theory of revolution. But with the passage of time, most have abandoned even pretending to have a second socialist stage at all. Now they believe that the communist movement should just fight for parliamentary democracy, for capitalism with a human face and for the secularisation of society. The failure of the left in India to present a pro-working-class program to the Indian masses is one of the reasons behind the rise of Modi.

So it was not entirely unexpected that the Indian left did not respond in a principled way to the conflict. However, the shameless and open support by the Communist Party of India and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) for the military strikes by the Modi government represents a new low for these parties. Of course, what happened in Pahalgam was a tragedy, but to say you stand with the Indian state in response is just a capitulation to Modi. The mainstream Indian left, in its current form, is in my opinion rotten to the core. This is the end result of its integration into the Indian state and its political degeneration. It is not surprising that they have lost a chunk of their popularity in recent years because of this. There are smaller socialist organisations and individuals who have taken a principled stand against the Modi government and adopted a revolutionary anti-war position, but unfortunately, these are a minority on the Indian left.

Jordan: What is the situation like in Pakistan after the ceasefire? A lot of the media are talking about the rising popularity of the Pakistani military and in particular General Asim Munir. What are the prospects for the left and the workers’ movement going forward?

Imran: As I mentioned earlier, the Pakistani state has come out strengthened from this conflict, at least for the time being. However, we should keep in mind that Pakistani capitalism is crisis-ridden. The economy is under an IMF program and they are tightening the noose around the Pakistani rulers and demanding more attacks on the working masses. The Pakistani state is trying to utilise its alleged victory over India to paper over this situation and strengthen itself politically, ideologically and militarily.

This is also important because the image of the military had been tarnished in recent years by the incarceration of former president Imran Khan and the crackdown on his supporters. Khan isn’t a progressive figure, there are conservative and even far-right tendencies within his supporter base. They came into conflict with the state, but in Pakistan it is not at all unusual for right-wing forces to clash with the state. Often these very parties have been encouraged by the state at some point in the past, but then the state either crushes them or cuts them down to size when they gain too much independence. However, the crackdown on Khan did undermine support for the military for a period, whereas after the recent conflict, the state has been able to reassert its authority.

Pakistan has been in a deep crisis since 2007, which will continue to upset the legitimacy of the state among the oppressed nationalities and the working masses. The state will try as much as possible to utilise this alleged victory to promote an environment of nationalist hysteria in order to push back against this erosion of its legitimacy, but there are limits. They are still carrying out a ruthless neoliberal program of privatisation, increases to indirect taxes for the poor while cutting taxes for the rich, attacks on workers’ rights and downsizing. Inflation and price rises are ruining the lives of ordinary people. There has been some resistance to these attacks, particularly by public sector workers. However, it is still too weak and scattered. The labour movement in Pakistan, like in many parts of the world, has been in decline for many decades. Despite this though, things can explode. In societies like Pakistan, the space for reforms is very limited and the state’s authority can deteriorate rapidly, as we saw in Egypt in 2011 and in other explosive rebellions in recent years: Kenya, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

This applies not just to Pakistan but to India as well, which is a class-divided capitalist society. Indian capitalism is on the decline, not just economically but politically and even culturally. The nations in South Asia have been deformed by their historical development. They have arisen out of a complex amalgamation of feudalism and capitalism. From the past, we have all these religious prejudices that are mixed in with the modern achievements of science and technology, including the most advanced infrastructure. If you ever come to Pakistan you’ll see first-class motorways as good as what exist in the Western countries, alongside extensive backwardness and illiteracy. This is the complex nature of uneven and combined development in this part of the world.

The recent conflict between India and Pakistan is another reminder that we need to build the revolutionary left internationally. It doesn’t mean we should build in a hurry, or on a non-serious basis, but there is a real urgency to expanding the forces of the Marxist left. Socialism is not guaranteed, unlike what the vulgar Stalinist version of historical materialism once argued. When you look around the world today barbarism is more evident than socialism at this point in history. The genocide in Gaza is being live broadcast across the entire globe. You can see it on any news station, or you can go on the internet and watch it on YouTube and see what a genocide looks like. The threshold of tolerance for violence, bloodshed, oppression, and even open war has massively increased throughout the world.

But we know that only socialism offers a way out of this situation. So we should be more confident in Marxism. It is not some dogma, it is a scientific framework that explains the nature of the capitalist system and how to fight it. We should link all the issues that confront us – the climate crisis, the imperialist rivalries, the exploitation of workers, and the oppression of women and other groups – to the struggle for socialism. And every revolutionary must work out what role they can play in building the socialist movement and dedicating their life to that.

References

Bell, Jessica 2016, “The 1968–9 Pakistan Revolution: a students’ and workers’ popular uprising”, Marxist Left Review, 12, Winter. https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/the-1968-9-pakistan-revolution-a-students-and-workers-popular-uprising/

Khan, Lal 2003, Crisis of the Subcontinent, Partition: Can It Be Undone?, Wellred Publications, London.

Khan, Lal 2009, Pakistan’s Other Story: The Revolution of 1968–69, Wellred Publications, London.

^[1] This perspective is outlined in more detail by Lal Kahn, the historic leader of The Struggle, in Kahn 2003.

^[2] Oppressed nationalities in Pakistan include the Sindhis, the Balochs, the Pashtuns and the Saraikis, although there are other groups as well. The largest ethnic group is the politically dominant Punjabis.

^[3] Nambala Keshav Rao, general-secretary of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) and a leader of the Naxalite movement, was killed on 21 May by Indian security forces in Chhattisgarh.

^[4] India Shining was a marketing slogan popularised by the BJP in the 2004 general elections in order to promote an image of economic optimism, both in India and to overseas investors.

^[5] A 10 May press release states the Communist Party of India “believes that India had little choice but to respond firmly against the sources of such terrorism. The targeted nature of the strikes – avoiding Pakistani military assets and focusing solely on terrorist infrastructure – demonstrates a calibrated and non-escalatory approach, prioritizing accountability without inviting full-scale conflict. At the same time, CPI urges the Government of India to immediately call for an all-Party meeting to strengthen national consensus and collective resolve in the fight against terrorism”. On 11 May the Communist Party of India (Marxist) stated in a press release that “there is a consensus across the political spectrum on the need to respond to the barbaric killings of Indian tourists in Pahalgam”.

^[6] See Bell 2016 and Khan 2009 for an overview of the 1968–69 students’ and workers’ popular uprising in Pakistan.

^[7] The Communist Party of India was founded in 1925. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) was founded in 1964 as a pro-China split, and quickly became the larger of the Communist parties in India. The Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) was founded in 1969 as a split from Communist Party of India (Marxist), accusing them of adopting a parliamentary approach to socialism. The Communist Party of India (Maoist) was formed in 2004, uniting various pro-armed struggle splinter groups from the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist).