India Have Reasons To Be Happy At Big U.S. Switch On The Status Of Kashmir

By T N Ashok

NEW YORK: For seven decades, American diplomats danced around Kashmir with the precision of tightrope walkers, carefully avoiding any gesture that might suggest the United States had chosen sides in South Asia’s most intractable territorial dispute. Maps were scrubbed of political meaning. Statements were lawyered into studied neutrality. From Truman to Obama, the message was consistent: Kashmir is for India and Pakistan to resolve.

That era ended this week—not with a White House address or State Department briefing, but with a map. Buried inside a trade graphic released by the Office of the United States Trade Representative, accompanying the newly announced India-U.S. Trade Framework, was a cartographic statement of rare clarity: Jammu and Kashmir depicted in its entirety as Indian territory, including regions administered by Pakistan since 1947.

There was no fanfare, no press conference, no carefully parsed explanation. The map simply appeared—vetted, approved, published—as part of a document celebrating a landmark $500 billion trade agreement between Washington and New Delhi.

For Pakistan, the message could not have been starker. For India, it was validation without triumphalism. For the region, it marked the moment when America’s economic and strategic priorities finally aligned its cartography with reality.

The Kashmir conflict has outlasted the Cold War, survived four India-Pakistan wars, and defied countless mediation attempts. Its origins trace to the chaotic partition of 1947, when Maharaja Hari Singh, ruler of the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, acceded to India after armed tribal militias from Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province invaded his territory. Indian troops secured roughly two-thirds of the state; Pakistan consolidated control over the remainder, creating what it calls Azad Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan—and what India describes as Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.

The defining mistake came in 1948. Despite holding a military advantage, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru took the dispute to the United Nations, accepting a ceasefire that froze the front lines. That decision—rooted in faith in international institutions and fear of escalation—ensured Kashmir would never be resolved on the battlefield but endlessly replayed in diplomacy, insurgency, and terrorism.

The 1972 Shimla Agreement between Indira Gandhi and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was supposed to end it. Both countries committed to bilateral resolution and respect for the Line of Control. Pakistan, having just suffered a devastating military defeat and lost East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), appeared to accept reality. It didn’t last.

For Pakistan’s military establishment, Kashmir has never been merely territorial—it is existential. The dispute serves as the foundational justification for the army’s dominance over civilian politics, the rationale for outsized defense budgets, and the glue binding national identity to perpetual confrontation with India.

Over decades, Islamabad shifted tactics from diplomacy to deniability. The late 1980s saw the rise of a Pakistan-backed insurgency in Indian-administered Kashmir, followed by cross-border militancy, proxy warfare, and attacks that brought the nuclear-armed neighbours to the brink multiple times.

Today, that institutional obsession is embodied in Army Chief Asim Munir, who has eclipsed Pakistan’s elected leadership to become the country’s de facto power broker. His recent visits to Washington were widely interpreted as attempts to revive Pakistan’s strategic relevance, particularly as America disengages from Afghanistan and refocuses on great-power competition with China.

Yet on Kashmir, Washington did not oblige. Munir received polite audiences and transactional pleasantries. What he didn’t get was the one thing Pakistan has sought for decades: American doubt about India’s territorial claim.

In Washington’s bureaucratic machinery, maps are not accidents. They are vetted by lawyers, cleared by policy staff, and approved at senior levels. Every border, every shading, every territorial designation carries diplomatic weight.

Which makes the Trade Representative’s map all the more significant. Jamieson Greer, the U.S. Trade Representative behind the document, authorized a quiet revolution in American positioning. By depicting Kashmir as Indian territory in official U.S. government materials, the map effectively closed the door on Pakistan’s long-running effort to internationalize the dispute.

The timing amplifies the message. The India-U.S. Trade Framework represents far more than commerce—it signals India’s emergence as a pillar of American strategy in the Indo-Pacific. With bilateral trade targeted at $500 billion and expanding into manufacturing partnerships, technology cooperation, and supply-chain integration, India is no longer just a market. It is a geopolitical counterweight to China and an indispensable partner in reshaping global economic architecture.

Pakistan, by contrast, offers diminishing returns. Asim Munir, who prided himself before the Pakistan political hierarchy as supremo with his proximity to Trump, has now turned into a Toast from the Toast he enjoyed at White House luncheon, not too long ago. Such successes don’t endure for long.

The contrast between how Washington treats New Delhi and Islamabad has rarely been so stark. While Asim Munir was “toasted at the White House,” as one Indian analyst put it, the substantive outcomes were thin. President Trump’s apparent warmth toward Pakistan’s army chief is transactional, not transformational—focused on narrow counterterrorism cooperation and potential (though problematic) access to rare earth deposits in violence-wracked Balochistan.

Those resources, however, are neither vast nor easily exploitable, controlled in practice by military-linked networks even as Baloch insurgents intensify attacks on infrastructure and Chinese interests. Pakistan’s utility to Washington is limited, conditional, and shrinking.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Narendra Modi secured what Pakistan has sought and failed to obtain for generations: American alignment with India’s territorial claims, embedded not in rhetoric but in official documentation.

The symbolism is unmistakable. Munir, the shadow prime minister who arrived in Washington seeking strategic rehabilitation, left with handshakes but no substantive shift in American policy. Modi, without travelling to Washington at all, received cartographic recognition that fundamentally altered the diplomatic landscape.

It’s a volte face without drama. What makes this moment remarkable is its subtlety. There was no presidential statement on Kashmir, no public rebuke of Pakistan, no diplomatic grandstanding. Instead, the United States embedded its position inside a trade narrative—where it could be dismissed as technical boilerplate yet remain unmistakable to those who understand how Washington signals policy. This is diplomacy by stealth, but no less consequential for it.

For seven decades, American presidents navigated Kashmir with caution. Truman backed UN internationalization. Eisenhower proposed partition plans that India rejected. Kennedy tried leveraging the 1962 China war for concessions. Nixon tilted toward Pakistan during the Bangladesh crisis. Clinton called Kashmir “the most dangerous place in the world” but backed India during the 1999 Kargil conflict. Obama explicitly ruled out mediation.

Each administration calibrated its approach based on Cold War calculations, South Asian crisis management, or counterterrorism imperatives. None redrew the map. Until now. Why does the silence matter now, so significantly? That much of the international media missed or underplayed this shift reflects how Kashmir has become background noise—a dispute so familiar that only explosions register anymore. Quiet signals, even consequential ones, are easily overlooked. But in South Asia, quiet signals endure.

For Islamabad, the message is uncomfortable: decades of lobbying, UN resolutions, and international appeals have failed to move Washington’s cartography. For New Delhi, it represents validation of a position long dismissed by Pakistan as illegitimate occupation. For the region, it suggests that American policy has finally aligned its maps with its economic and strategic priorities.

The Kashmir dispute will not vanish. It will remain contested, militarized, and unresolved. Insurgency may flare; diplomatic tensions will persist. But the era in which Pakistan could plausibly hope that external powers would question India’s sovereignty over the territory appears to be closing.

The map seems like a Big Thank You from White House for closing finally the $530 bn deal that had been in the works for so long contested hotly on agricultural access on one side and technological access on the other.

In the cold calculus of great-power competition, gestures carry weight. The map is, in effect, Washington’s quiet thank-you to New Delhi for committing to a trade framework that reshapes economic geography in the Indo-Pacific and provides alternatives to Chinese manufacturing dominance.

It is also a message to Beijing, which has long used Pakistan as a counterweight to India and invested heavily in the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor running through Pakistan-administered Kashmir—territory that both India and the United States now, through this map, implicitly reject as legitimately Pakistani.

The shadow prime minister who came seeking strategic renewal left empty-handed. The elected prime minister who didn’t even need to ask received what Pakistan has demanded for seventy-seven years—and was denied. This time, the tectonic plates of South Asian geopolitics shifted not with an earthquake but with a cartographer’s pen. Not with a bang. But with a map. (IPA Service)