How India and Pakistan share one of the world's most dangerous borders

Living along the Line of Control (LOC) – The de facto volatile border that separates India and Pakistan will always exist on the razor edge between fragile peace and open conflict.

Recent escalations have brought India and Pakistan to the edge again after the Pahalgam attack. The shells rain on both sides of the LOC, turning the house into rubble and surviving it as statistics. At least 16 people were reportedly killed on the Indian side, while Pakistan claimed 40 civilians died, although it is not clear how many people directly caused the shelling.

“LOC's family is subject to the idea of ​​India and Pakistan and is facing the heightened tensions first,” Anam Zakaria, a Canadian-based Pakistani writer, told the BBC.

“Every time a fire is opened, many people get stuck in bunkers, livestock and livelihoods lost, infrastructure – families, hospitals, schools – is damaged. The vulnerability and volatility experienced has a serious impact on their daily reality,” said Ms. Zakaria, author in Pakistan-Administered Kashmir’s book, he said.

India and Pakistan have a 3,323 km (2,064 miles) border, which includes a 740 km LOC; and the International Boundary (IB) is approximately 2,400 km. The LOC began with the first Indian-Pakistan war in 1949 and was renamed under the 1972 Simla Agreement.

LOC cutting through Kashmir – claimed by parts of India and Pakistan and managed in parts – remains one of the world's most wartime borders. The conflict will never fall behind, and the ceasefire is only as durable as the next provocation.

Happymon Jacob, a foreign policy expert at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in Delhi, said ceasefire violations here could range from “low-level shooting to major land robbery to surgical strikes”. (Snatching the land may involve grabbing critical positions such as a mountain top, an outpost, or a buffer zone of force.)

Many experts say LOC is a classic example of “the boundary of blood created through conflict.” As Ms. Zakaria said, it was also a line: “Indian and Pakistani carving, militarizing and weapons without considering Kashmiris.”

Such wartime borders are not unique to South Asia. Sumantra Bose, professor of international and comparative politics at the London School of Economics, said the most famous is the “Green Line” – the 1949 ceasefire line – a generally recognized border between Israel and the West Bank.

Not surprisingly, the tentative calm that has continued since the 2021 ceasefire agreement between two nuclear-weapon neighbors is prone to collapse after the latest hostilities.

“The current escalation on the LOC and the International Border (IB) is very important because it is a four-year period of relatively peacefulness on the border,” Surya Valliappan Krishna of Carnegie India told the BBC.

The violence along the India-Pakistan border is nothing new – Before the 2003 ceasefire, India reported 4,134 violations in 2001 and 5,767 violations in 2002.

The ceasefire was initially held in 2003, and the violations were ignored from 2004 to 2007, but tensions surfaced in 2008 and escalated sharply in 2013.

Between 2013 and early 2021, LOC and IB witnessed a high level of ongoing conflict. In February 2021, a new ceasefire caused an immediate decline in violations until March 2025.

“We have seen thousands of months of displaced border populations for months during the intense cross-border fires,” Krishna said. Between late September and early December 2016, more than 27,000 people were displaced from the border areas due to ceasefire violations and cross-border shootings.

It seems more and more now, and it is uncertain now.

Tensions broke out after the Pahalgam attack, and India suspended a key water sharing treaty between India and Pakistan, the Indian Waters Treaty (IWT). Pakistan responded by threatening to withdraw from the 1972 Simla Agreement, which formalized LOC-although it has not been followed.

“This is important because the Simla agreement is the basis of the current LOC and despite their political differences, both sides agreed not to change unilaterally.”

Mr Jacob said that for some “curious reasons”, the ceasefire along the LOC was violated during discussions and debates on the escalation of conflict between the two countries.

“It is itself puzzling how the regular use of high-calibre weapons such as 105mm mortars, 130 and 155mm artillery guns and anti-tank guided missiles by two nuclear-capable countries, which has led to civilian and military casualties, has escaped scholarly scrutiny and policy attention,” Mr Jacob writes in his book, Line On Fire: Ceasefire Violations and India-Pakistan Escalation Dynamics.

Mr. Jacob identified two main triggers of the violation: Pakistan often uses covert fire to promote armed invasion of Indian-managed Kashmir, which has witnessed three decades of armed rebellion against Indian rule. Pakistan, in turn, accused India of unreasonable fire in civilian areas.

He believes that the ceasefire violation along the India-Pakistan border is not a product of advanced political strategies, but a result of local military dynamics.

Hostiles are usually initiated by field commanders – sometimes approved by the central government, but usually without the central government. He also challenged the notion that only Pakistani military driving violations were directed, instead pointing to a complex combination of local military demands and autonomy granted by both border forces.

Some experts believe it is time to revisit the idea that was put on hold nearly two decades ago: turning the LOC into a formal internationally recognized border. Others insist that the possibility will never be realistic and still not.

“This idea is totally unfeasible. For decades, India maps have shown the state of Prince Jamu and Kashmir as a whole territory as part of India.”

“For Pakistan, putting the position of the international border as part of the international border would mean resolving the Kashmir dispute (that is the one Pakistan is equivalent to the Holy Grail), as far as India’s preferred clauses are concerned. Over the past seventy years, every Pakistani government and leader, civilian or military has rejected this.”

Professor Bose wrote in his 2003 book Kashmir: The Roots of Conflict, “A Kashmir settlement must range from iron curtains, bunkers, ditches and hostile troops to linen curtains to linen curtains.

“However, I stress that this shift in this LOC must be embedded in the wider Kashmir settlement, a pillar of the multicircular settlement,” he told the BBC.

Between 2004 and 2007, turning LOC into a soft border was at the heart of Kashmir’s infancy in the Indian-Pakistan peace process, and Kashmir eventually collapsed.

Today, the border has been rekindled, bringing a cycle of violence and uncertainty to those living in the shadows.

“You never know what will happen next. No one wants to sleep tonight.” An employee at a Pakistan-run Kashmir hotel told BBC Urdu during the recent hostilities.

It's a quiet reminder of how fragile peace is when your windows open to the battlefield.