Major Territorial Disputes Between India and Pakistan: Jammu & Kashmir, Sir Creek, and More

The 3,300-kilometre border that separates India and Pakistan is one of the most heavily militarised in the world. But the lines on the map were never settled cleanly. When the British left in 1947, they handed over a subcontinent divided in haste, with boundaries that were vague in some places and outright contested in others. Nearly eight decades later, several of these disputes remain unresolved, shaping diplomacy, defence budgets, and even the lives of soldiers posted at altitudes where survival itself is a daily battle. This post unpacks the major territorial disputes between the two neighbours, why they began, and where they stand today.

The colonial roots of the conflict 🔗

To understand why India and Pakistan disagree over so much land, you have to go back to the Partition of 1947. The job of dividing British India fell to Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a British lawyer who chaired the two boundary commissions. The problem? Radcliffe had never set foot in India before and was given barely five weeks to divide territory containing 88 million people.

The result, known as the Radcliffe Line, was published on 17 August 1947, two days after both countries had already declared independence. It drew borders largely along religious demography, but ran through villages, fields, and irrigation systems with little regard for the people living there. The line satisfied no one and infuriated everyone, and the chaos it unleashed triggered one of the largest and bloodiest mass migrations in human history.

Crucially, the Radcliffe commission only demarcated Punjab and Bengal. It said nothing about the princely states, the high Himalayas, or the shifting marshes of the west. These gaps and ambiguities became the seeds of the disputes that persist today. As Britannica notes, the Radcliffe Line directly contributed to territorial disputes, water-sharing tensions, and military conflicts, including the Kashmir conflict and the Indus waters dispute.

Jammu and Kashmir: the central dispute 🔗

No territorial conflict between the two countries is older or more consequential than the dispute over Jammu and Kashmir. At Partition, the princely states were given the choice of joining India, joining Pakistan, or remaining independent. Kashmir, with a Muslim-majority population but a Hindu ruler, Maharaja Hari Singh, hesitated. When tribal militias backed by Pakistan invaded in October 1947, the Maharaja signed the Instrument of Accession to India in exchange for military help.

This sparked the first India-Pakistan war. By the time a United Nations-brokered ceasefire took effect in 1949, the region was effectively split, a division that broadly survives to this day.

Who controls what 🔗

Today, the former princely state is divided among three parties. India administers Jammu, the Kashmir Valley, and Ladakh. Pakistan controls the territories it calls Azad Jammu and Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan. China holds a portion known as Aksai Chin in the east. The dividing line between Indian and Pakistani forces is the Line of Control (LoC), a heavily militarised frontier rather than a recognised international border.

India’s position is that the entire former princely state, including the parts held by Pakistan, is an integral part of India by virtue of the legal accession. Pakistan disputes the accession’s legitimacy and has long called for a plebiscite. These differing perspectives have fuelled multiple wars, including the conflicts of 1965 and the Kargil intrusion of 1999, and continue to define the relationship.

Sir Creek: a marsh worth fighting over 🔗

Far to the south of Kashmir lies a dispute that looks small on the map but carries outsized strategic weight. Sir Creek is a roughly 96-kilometre tidal estuary in the marshlands of the Rann of Kutch in Gujarat. It separates India’s Kutch region from Pakistan’s Sindh province before emptying into the Arabian Sea.

The 1914 ambiguity 🔗

The roots of this quarrel are almost comically minor. The dispute is said to have first erupted in 1908 over a pile of firewood on the banks of the creek. To settle matters, the colonial Bombay government issued a resolution in 1914. And here lies the problem: the document contradicts itself.

Pakistan relies on one part of the 1914 resolution, which places the boundary along the eastern bank of the creek, meaning the entire waterway would belong to Pakistan. India points to another paragraph in the same document, which invokes the Thalweg Principle, an international rule that places boundaries in navigable channels along the mid-point of the deepest channel. Under this reading, the border runs through the middle of the creek.

Why it matters 🔗

This is not just about a strip of muddy water. The demarcation of Sir Creek directly affects the delimitation of the Exclusive Economic Zones of both countries in the Arabian Sea, which in turn determines rights over fishing grounds and potential offshore oil and gas reserves. The area also has military significance; Indian and Pakistani troops clashed in the Rann of Kutch during the 1965 war. Despite multiple rounds of talks, the dispute has remained too intractable to satisfy both sides, and tensions have flared again in recent years over military build-up near the region.

The Siachen Glacier: the world’s highest battlefield 🔗

If Sir Creek is a dispute over too little definition, Siachen is a dispute over a line that was simply never drawn. The Siachen Glacier sits in the eastern Karakoram range, and the conflict over it has earned the grim title of the world’s highest battlefield, with troops deployed at altitudes above 6,000 metres in temperatures that can drop below minus 50 degrees Celsius.

The gap in the map 🔗

The problem traces back to the 1949 Karachi Agreement and the 1972 Simla Agreement, which demarcated the ceasefire line only up to a point known as NJ9842. Beyond that, the agreements vaguely stated the line would run “thence north to the glaciers”, without specifying an exact route across the uninhabited ice. Both countries interpreted this ambiguity in their own favour.

In the early 1980s, India received intelligence that Pakistan was planning to occupy the glacier. On 13 April 1984, the Indian Army launched Operation Meghdoot, pre-empting the Pakistani move by a matter of days. Indian forces seized the heights of the Saltoro Ridge and the glacier itself, positions they hold to this day.

The human cost 🔗

The strategic value of Siachen has long been debated, but the cost of holding it is not. For nearly two decades, soldiers on both sides fought and died, with the vast majority of casualties caused by the extreme weather rather than enemy fire, things like avalanches, frostbite, and altitude sickness. A ceasefire came into effect in 2003 and has largely held, but both armies still maintain a heavy and expensive presence on the ice.

The Baglihar Dam and the politics of water 🔗

Not every dispute is about who owns a piece of land. Some are about who controls the water flowing through it. The Baglihar Dam, a hydroelectric project built by India on the Chenab River in Jammu and Kashmir, became a flashpoint precisely because of this.

The Indus Waters Treaty framework 🔗

Water sharing between the two countries is governed by the Indus Waters Treaty of 1960, brokered by the World Bank. The treaty assigned the three eastern rivers (Ravi, Beas, and Sutlej) to India and the three western rivers (Indus, Jhelum, and Chenab) to Pakistan. India is permitted to use the western rivers for limited purposes, including run-of-the-river hydroelectric generation, as long as it does not interfere with the flow into Pakistan.

The dispute and its resolution 🔗

Pakistan objected to Baglihar’s design, particularly its gated spillways, fearing that India could use them to control the timing and flow of water, especially during sowing seasons. The disagreement became the first time the treaty’s formal dispute resolution mechanism was invoked. Pakistan approached the World Bank, which appointed a neutral expert, Swiss engineer Raymond Lafitte.

In 2007, Lafitte delivered a mixed verdict: he asked India to make some modifications to the dam’s design, but broadly upheld India’s right to build the project and proceed. The Baglihar case set a precedent for later water disputes over the Kishenganga and Ratle projects. It also showed that even a functioning treaty could not fully insulate water from the broader rivalry, a fragility laid bare when India announced in April 2025 that it would hold the treaty in abeyance following a terror attack in Kashmir.

Why these disputes endure 🔗

Look across all four disputes and a common thread emerges. Each one is rooted in ambiguity inherited from the colonial and immediate post-colonial period: a self-contradicting 1914 resolution at Sir Creek, an undefined line beyond NJ9842 at Siachen, an unresolved accession in Kashmir, and a treaty that allocates rivers but cannot fully separate them from politics.

What keeps these disputes alive is not just geography but the layering of historical grievance, national identity, and strategic calculation on top of these original ambiguities. For both countries, conceding ground is rarely just a technical matter; it carries deep symbolic and domestic political weight. That is why issues that experts often describe as technically solvable, such as Sir Creek or Siachen demilitarisation, have survived round after round of negotiation. The lines drawn in 1947 were meant to be a settlement. Instead, they became the starting point of a rivalry that still shapes South Asia today.

What do you think? If many of these disputes are considered technically solvable by experts, what do you think is the bigger obstacle to peace, the geography itself or the politics surrounding it? And should disputes over resources like water be handled through the same lens as disputes over territory, or do they need a completely different approach?

References

1. https://www.britannica.com/place/Radcliffe-Line
2. https://www.britannica.com/event/Partition-of-India
3. https://thediplomat.com/2025/10/is-sir-creek-the-next-india-pakistan-flashpoint/
4. https://www.pmfias.com/sir-creek-dispute/
5. https://www.stimson.org/2024/a-shared-interest-why-india-and-pakistan-should-strengthen-the-indus-waters-treaty/
6. https://byjus.com/free-ias-prep/operation-meghdoot/
7. https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/war/siachen.htm
8. https://www.britannica.com/event/Indus-Waters-Treaty
9. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2007/2/13/world-bank-rules-on-kashmir-dam