[alephnerd]

> involves swapping land, specifically, ceding Muslim-dominant territory to Pakistan

The sectors on the Indian side where fighting is happening right now in Jammu Division are 50-50 Muslim-Hindu/Sikh. What you are advocating would lead to Yugoslav style ethnic cleansing.

> setting borders along rivers

It already is that on the LoC, or mountain faces where rivers are not existent.

[JumpCrisscross]

> What you are advocating would lead to Yugoslav style ethnic cleansing

Yes. When you have a sectarian conflict, the only lasting solution is moving people around. Hateful people don’t learn to stop hating each other. Particularly not when you’re dealing with the levels of education in J&K.

> It already is that on the LoC, or mountain faces where rivers are not existent

And. Having a river with a sectarian cross isn’t useful.

This stuff is hard and controversial. It takes work. My point is nobody is particularly interested in that work versus leaving the region in a low simmer.

[alephnerd]

> Yes. When you have a sectarian conflict, the only lasting solution is moving people around. Hateful people don’t learn to stop hating each other.

Jammu Division is an entirely separate ethnic community (Pahari) from that in Kashmir Division (Koshur).

Even during the worst of the partition and the Indo-Pak Wars, the mountain areas where active fighting was occurring never saw the same kind of religious violence you'd see in neighboring Kashmir or Punjabi speaking areas like Jammu City or Mirpur City.

This would be solving a non-existent problem, as the leadership making decisions for conflicts on or around the LoC are not from these regions.

And btw, the Indian and Pakistani army did attempt that when my grandmother was a child, but it didn't stick and people from one side or the other would just cross back - and this was the norm until the 1980s.

---------------

There are ways to resolve the problem longer term, and that requires forcing professionalization of the Pakistani Armed Forces and cajoling India back to the negotiating table using the carrot and the stick. Similar precedent already exists with the Israel-Egypt peace accords under Sadat, and would have happened under Bajwa, Nawaz Sharif, or Musharraf if they weren't undermined.

[JumpCrisscross]

> leadership making decisions for conflicts on or around the LoC are not from these regions

The people in the region are pretty much irrelevant, one can successfuly model the conflict as a proxy war between New Delhi and Islamabad. Their interests are particular to the borders in the region, namely, access to waterm, China and the other side's Kashmir.

> ways to resolve the problem longer term, and that requires forcing professionalization of the Pakistani Armed Forces and cajoling India back to the negotiating table using the carrot and the stick. Similar precedent already exists with the Israel-Egypt peace accords under Sadat

This is a solution from a different era. The current borders are unstable and thus unsustainable. Between proxy forces and the militarisation of the South China Sea, we're kicking the can down the road until someone acts decisively.

The game theory is that kicking the can down the road works for both sides. There isn't a pressing need for peace between India and Pakistan, just not nuclear conflict. And that's achieved with a Korean Peninsula-esque stalemate. The problem is either side gaining an advantage resolves the issue, and the later that happens the more destructive the resolution would be. (Think: Pakistan gaining top-of-the-line Sino-Russian missile defence.) And both sides know that ex ante. So we have a prisoner's dilemma without the common enemy (and common ally) that animated Tel Aviv and Cairo.

[saagarjha]

> Yes. When you have a sectarian conflict, the only lasting solution is moving people around. Hateful people don’t learn to stop hating each other. Particularly not when you’re dealing with the levels of education in J&K.

"We should do my poorly thought out plan because they're too dumb to stop killing each other" is not a reasonable way to discuss geopolitics.