Amid rising global conflicts, an escalation between India and Pakistan in May of 2025 caused momentary fear of nuclear war. On April 22, 2025, 25 Indian tourists and one Kashmiri pony rider were killed in a terrorist attack in Pahalgam, Kashmir, according to The Hindu, an Indian newspaper.

Over the next two weeks, India blamed Pakistan, suspended a decades-old water treaty, and began strikes on Pakistan, 

Pakistan denied responsibility for the attack and retaliated. Though this conflict only lasted four days, it became the deadliest cross-border conflict between India and Pakistan in decades, killing over 70 people, mostly Kashmiri civilians. 

Kashmir is a territory on the border between north India and eastern Pakistan that has been disputed since the partition of both countries in 1947. Both countries’ competing claims to the territory have been the source of escalating military conflict in the region for decades. 

A ceasefire was declared on May 10 by President Donald Trump, but explosions were still heard even after a few hours.

Though on the other side of the planet, South Asian Americans at SDSU felt the effects of this conflict, too. 

Muhammad Anjum, a third-year Pakistani American student, recalled sharing the news of the terror attack with his family a few days after it happened. 

“There definitely was the initial sort of shock, especially since we do have family pretty close to the border,” Anjum said. “So it definitely was a bit jarring at first, but over the next couple of days, it did sort of fizzle out.”

Anjum is from the Bay Area, where South Asian Americans reported feeling “anxiety and fear” for their family members back home as the military operations unfolded. 

While many were worried for their families at home, some cheered on the military operations from abroad. Social media feeds became inundated with these strong, mixed opinions. 

Anjum doesn’t closely follow Pakistani news, but encountered nationalist pro-war ideas on social media. He claimed he saw videos of people, including children, declaring, “We hate Pakistan, we’re gonna destroy Pakistan, India is the best.”

“I saw somebody write [in] their bio, ‘boycott Indians,’” recalled Arushi Kalam, a fourth-year nursing student., “Or, like, people in comments being like, ‘this is why Indians suck and we can’t ever be … allies.’”

A viral moment in May involved the widow of a Pahalgam attack victim receiving waves of hate on social media after she opposed violence against Muslims and Kashmiri civilians. 

Indian nationalist sentiments in particular have been on the rise in the United States as South Asian Americans become more politically relevant, according to The Economist. 

Huma Ahmed-Ghosh, a retired SDSU professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, said she grew up in a “very secular India” before immigrating to the United States in 1981, which steered her politics away from religious nationalism. 

According to Ahmed-Ghosh, religious division in India grew after anti-Muslim riots in 2002, for which the Chief Minister, now Prime Minister Narendra Modi, was temporarily banned from entering the United States. 

She suggested that immigrants are influenced by the political climate in which they grew up, and that those who immigrated recently are more likely to be invested in religious nationalism.

Ahmed-Ghosh also drew attention to the name of India’s attack on Pakistan, Operation Sindoor. 

The word “sindoor” refers to a Hindu symbol of marriage, and the name was chosen to pay tribute to the widows of the Pahalgam attack. The branding received both support and backlash in India, according to The Hindu. 

Ahmed-Ghosh, who has family on both sides of the border, saw it as “the appropriation of women and women’s lives to further [the government’s] own political agenda.”

Kashmiri Americans, whose families remain in the disputed, heavily militarized region where the initial attack occurred, felt that their experiences were being erased, even as they continued to bear the brunt of the violence.

“There’s some sort of binary between Pakistan and India, and Kashmir’s just collateral damage every time,” Vuzmal Meesha Sharma, a first-generation Kashmiri American, told Prism.

Shortly after the Pahalgam attack, civilians in India-administered Kashmir faced violence from Indian officials, including home demolitions and mass arrests, according to NPR.

Kalam, who is both Indian and Pakistani, but not Kashmiri, stressed that she believed Kashmiri people should be at the center of this story. 

“We have faced colonization, colonialism, and we’ve been affected by it, yet India and Pakistan are also in a cycle of continuing that,” she said, referring to India and Pakistan’s competing claims to Kashmir. “And I didn’t really know the extent of it until the conflict [this year].”