Two boys. One border. Neither chose it.
He was twenty-two years old. He came from a village near Mirpur, in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, where his father grew maize and his mother kept two goats. He had never held a passport. He had never seen the border he was now ordered to defend with his life.
Across that border stood another boy, twenty-three, from a farming family in Mathura. He too had a mother. He too had a debt. He too had a sister whose wedding would now have to wait.
Neither of them drew this border. Neither of them chose it. Neither of them would profit, in any measurable way, from what was about to happen.
What is almost never discussed, in the flag-draped funerals and the prime ministerial addresses and the television studios bright with war graphics, is what happened at that same hour in other rooms. Quieter rooms. Rooms with air conditioning and balance sheets and uninterrupted telephone lines.
This is a story about those rooms.
The oldest business in the world
Before we arrive at India, we need to understand that what happens on the subcontinent is not a local story. It is the Indian edition of a very old, very global pattern.
In 1815, as the armies of Wellington and Napoleon converged at Waterloo, a London financier was already moving capital. His network of couriers gave him advance knowledge of the battle’s outcome hours before the British government itself received confirmation. The Rothschild family, as documented by historian Niall Ferguson in his authorised history of the dynasty, had by that point financed both sides of the Napoleonic Wars. Not out of ideology. Out of arithmetic. War, when you are the lender, is profitable regardless of who wins. The losing side still owes. The winning side borrows to rebuild.
In 1934, the United States Senate convened what became known as the Nye Committee. It was a formal investigation into the role of arms manufacturers and bankers in drawing America into the First World War. Its findings were not subtle. J.P. Morgan, acting as Britain’s sole purchasing agent in the United States, had processed nearly three billion dollars in war contracts. The committee, in its official report, formally described the leading arms manufacturers as merchants of death. These were not the words of radicals. They were the words of United States senators reading from ledgers.
There is another quality of the First World War that history textbooks rarely dwell on. The commanders of the three principal armies, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, and King George V of Britain, were first cousins. Grandchildren of Queen Victoria, each of them. They signed the mobilisation orders and then wrote each other letters. Twenty million people died in the space between those letters.
Through the Second World War, the Bank of International Settlements, established in 1930 and headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, continued to process transactions for both Allied and Axis member banks. As documented by journalist Adam LeBor in his investigation of the institution, the war that consumed sixty million lives did not interrupt the mechanics of international finance. War, at the level at which money actually moves, has no nationality.
Then there is General Smedley Butler. Twice awarded the Medal of Honor, the highest military decoration in the United States. Thirty-three years in the Marine Corps. In 1935, he published a short book called War Is a Racket. “I was a racketeer,” he wrote, “a gangster for capitalism.” He was not a fringe voice. He was the most decorated soldier in American history at the time of his death. He is simply not very often quoted in polite company.
The structural pattern that emerges from this history is not a conspiracy. It requires no secret meetings or coded handshakes. It is simpler and more disturbing than that. Wars require weapons. Weapons require capital. Capital requires return. The return, in a world of managed conflict, comes from the next procurement cycle, which requires the next credible threat, which requires the next war, or something close enough to one that defence budgets cannot be questioned.
This is the architecture India walked into at the moment of its birth.
FACT BOX: The Global Pattern at a Glance
- The Rothschild family financed both sides of the Napoleonic Wars, as documented by historian Niall Ferguson.
- J.P. Morgan processed nearly three billion dollars in British war contracts during the First World War. The United States Senate’s Nye Committee, in 1934, formally called leading arms manufacturers “merchants of death.”
- Kaiser Wilhelm II (Germany), Tsar Nicholas II (Russia), and King George V (Britain) were first cousins. All three presided over armies that killed twenty million people.
- The Bank of International Settlements processed transactions for both Allied and Axis member banks throughout the Second World War.
- General Smedley Butler, the most decorated American soldier of his era, called war “a racket” and himself “a gangster for capitalism.” He said this in 1935. He is rarely quoted.
The wound that was never meant to heal
On the 17th of August 1947, one day after India’s independence, the Radcliffe Award was published. The borders of the new nations of India and Pakistan were announced. Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a London barrister, had arrived in India in July. He departed before the lines he drew were made public, never to return. He reportedly had no desire to see what his map had done.
Historians continue to debate the intent behind the Radcliffe Line. Scholars like Ayesha Jalal have argued that Pakistan itself was conceived as a bargaining chip that solidified into a state. Others, like Patrick French, document the sheer administrative chaos of the process, a map made in haste with outdated surveys under impossible political pressure. What is not debated is the consequence. A wound drawn in a manner that could never fully close.
Kashmir was left as an open question. A princely state whose ruler was Hindu, whose majority population was Muslim, and whose accession was conditional, contested, and permanent only in its impermanence. The Kashmir dispute was not a problem waiting to be solved. It was, from the perspective of anyone in the business of selling weapons, a contract waiting to be renewed.
The arms supply chains of the wars that followed tell a story that no flag can obscure. In 1947 to 1948, both sides fought with weapons manufactured under British contracts. The colonial power’s final, unintended legacy. By 1965, the pattern had globalised. The United States supplied Pakistan through the CENTO and SEATO alliance frameworks. The Soviet Union deepened its military relationship with India. Both superpowers, locked in ideological conflict with each other, found the subcontinent useful. A place to move weapons, test doctrines, and keep client states dependent.
The 1971 war, which created Bangladesh and ended with the Pakistani army’s surrender in Dhaka, saw the Nixon administration make one of the most documented geopolitical calculations of the Cold War. Declassified records and Henry Kissinger’s own memoirs confirm that Washington tilted toward Pakistan not out of any sympathy for the Pakistani military’s conduct in East Pakistan but because of the China channel. Pakistan was the intermediary for Nixon’s opening to Beijing. The subcontinent, in that calculus, was a piece to be positioned on a board, not a population to be protected.
The SIPRI Arms Transfer Database, a publicly searchable archive maintained by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, allows anyone to trace, year by year, the weapons that flowed into India and Pakistan across every decade since 1947. Conflict years are followed, predictably, by procurement surges. Every escalation opens a new order book.
FACT BOX: Who Armed Whom – The Subcontinent’s Weapons Trail
- 1947 to 1948: Both India and Pakistan fought the first Kashmir war with weapons supplied under British colonial contracts.
- 1965: The United States armed Pakistan through CENTO and SEATO alliance frameworks. The Soviet Union supplied India.
- 1971: The Nixon administration tilted toward Pakistan despite documented atrocities in East Pakistan. The reason, confirmed in declassified records and Kissinger’s own memoirs, was the China channel.
- Post-1962 onwards: The Soviet Union became India’s primary arms supplier after the humiliation of the 1962 war against China. That relationship defined India’s defence procurement for four decades.
- Source: SIPRI Arms Transfer Database, publicly searchable at sipri.org.
1962 and what it really cost
Okay, so here is where the India-China dimension comes in and it is, honestly, worth pausing on because the numbers are striking.
In the autumn of 1962, Chinese forces advanced across the Himalayan frontier in what became the most humiliating military defeat in independent India’s history. The war lasted one month. When it ended, China held territory India considered its own, a ceasefire had been declared on Beijing’s terms, and the Indian Army, under-equipped, poorly supplied at altitude, and operating under political leadership that had refused to acknowledge its own intelligence warnings, was left to reckon with its failures.
What followed in procurement terms was extraordinary. The 1962 defeat triggered the most significant peacetime military build-up India had undertaken since independence. The Soviet Union deepened its arms relationship with India in ways that would define the next four decades. The war had lasted thirty-two days. The procurement cycle it launched lasted a generation.
The Line of Actual Control, the boundary between Indian and Chinese-administered territories across Ladakh, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Sikkim, and Arunachal Pradesh, is not a treaty border. It is a line that both sides patrol, periodically contest, and never formally settle. In the strategic literature, this is called a frozen conflict. It never thaws into war. It never freezes into peace. It remains, perpetually, just warm enough to justify budgets.
In June 2020, Indian and Chinese soldiers clashed in the Galwan Valley in Ladakh in a night of brutal hand-to-hand combat at an altitude of 14,000 feet. Twenty Indian soldiers were killed. China, characteristically reluctant to acknowledge military losses, waited until February 2021 before officially confirming four fatalities on its side. External assessments, including analysis cited by Russian state media at the time, put the Chinese toll considerably higher, though Beijing has never revised its official figure. Both countries lost men. Both governments spent months managing the domestic narrative around those losses. Within months of the clashes, the Indian government had approved emergency procurement of fighter aircraft, artillery systems, and ammunition. The LAC had, once again, functioned as a procurement trigger.
The companies supplying India’s military are publicly known. Dassault Aviation of France supplied the Rafale jets. Russia’s Rosoboronexport won the S-400 missile system contract. Lockheed Martin and Boeing supply transport aircraft and helicopters. MBDA of Europe supplies missiles. These are legitimate businesses operating within legal frameworks. No allegation attaches to them. The observation that attaches is structural. Every flare-up at the LAC is, for these companies, an argument made in the language of geopolitics for a product they sell.
FACT BOX: The LAC as a Procurement Trigger
- The Line of Actual Control spans approximately 3,488 kilometres across Ladakh, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Sikkim, and Arunachal Pradesh.
- It is not a treaty border. It has never been formally delineated or agreed upon by both sides.
- June 2020, Galwan Valley: 20 Indian soldiers killed. China officially confirmed 4 fatalities in February 2021. External assessments put the Chinese toll higher. Beijing has not revised its figure.
- Within months of Galwan, India approved emergency procurement of fighter jets, artillery, and ammunition.
- February 2021: India signed a Rs. 48,000 crore contract with Hindustan Aeronautics Limited for 83 LCA Tejas Mk1A fighter jets, directly linked in Ministry of Defence documentation to the lessons of the Galwan confrontation.
- Major current suppliers to India’s military: Dassault Aviation (France), Rosoboronexport (Russia), Lockheed Martin and Boeing (United States), MBDA (Europe).
The Indian boardroom and the border
For most of independent India’s history, the defence sector was the exclusive preserve of the public sector. Hindustan Aeronautics Limited, the Defence Research and Development Organisation, the Ordnance Factory Board. Private capital was kept at a deliberate distance from the business of war. This began to change with the Defence Procurement Procedure of 2016, and accelerated sharply with the Defence Acquisition Procedure of 2020, which opened significant portions of Indian defence manufacturing to private sector participation under the Aatmanirbhar Bharat framework.
The policy rationale is sound and well documented. India has for decades been one of the world’s largest arms importers, and building a domestic defence manufacturing base reduces that import dependence. The Tata group, Larsen and Toubro, Mahindra Defence, Adani Defence and Aerospace, and a range of other private conglomerates have entered the sector, winning contracts, building facilities, and establishing joint ventures with foreign original equipment manufacturers. Their filings are public. Their contracts are a matter of government record.
The scale of what is now at stake financially is not abstract. In February 2021, the Indian government signed a contract worth Rs. 48,000 crore with Hindustan Aeronautics Limited for 83 LCA Tejas Mk1A fighter jets. It was, at the time of signing, the single largest defence contract in Indian history. The procurement was directly linked, in official Ministry of Defence documentation, to the operational lessons of the Galwan confrontation and the accelerated need to reduce dependence on imported platforms. A border clash in June had, by February, become a Rs. 48,000 crore domestic order. That is not a criticism of the policy. It is a description of how the system works.
This is not, by any reasonable standard, a scandal. It is industrial policy. What it does create, for the first time in India’s history, is a domestic constituency with a financial interest in sustained defence spending. And sustained defence spending requires a sustained threat environment.
A pattern documented across democracies, most visibly in the United States but present in Britain and France as well, and now visible in India, is what analysts call the revolving door. Retired military officers and senior defence bureaucrats move onto the advisory boards and directorates of defence companies. This is, in most cases, entirely legal. Former service chiefs bring expertise, institutional knowledge, and access. What it creates, structurally, is a category of individuals whose post-service income is tied to the health of the defence sector, and whose public commentary on threat environments and border policies is routinely sought by media and government alike.
The India-Bangladesh relationship offers a quieter version of the same logic. The border between the two countries spans nearly 4,200 kilometres, the fifth-longest land border in the world. It is the site of documented illegal crossings, NRC-related anxieties, and the long-running Teesta water dispute. It is also the site of one of the most significant fencing projects in Indian history. The Border Fencing project, records of which are available through parliamentary questions and government tender portals, has over two decades generated contracts worth thousands of crores. The companies awarded those contracts are matters of public record. The border, after all that construction, remains porous in many sections. The contracts are renewed.
FACT BOX: India’s Defence-Industrial Shift
- Until 2016, India’s defence manufacturing was almost entirely state-owned.
- The Defence Procurement Procedure of 2016 and the Defence Acquisition Procedure of 2020 opened the sector to significant private participation.
- Major Indian private conglomerates now active in defence manufacturing include the Tata group, Larsen and Toubro, Mahindra Defence, and Adani Defence and Aerospace.
- February 2021: India signed its largest ever defence contract, worth Rs. 48,000 crore, with Hindustan Aeronautics Limited for 83 LCA Tejas Mk1A fighter jets.
- The India-Bangladesh border spans approximately 4,156 kilometres, commonly rounded to 4,200 kilometres, and is the fifth-longest land border in the world.
- Border fencing contracts along the India-Bangladesh frontier have, over two decades, generated thousands of crores in government tenders. Records are available through parliamentary questions and government tender portals.
What it costs the person who doesn’t own the war
The Siachen Glacier is the highest battlefield on Earth. Indian and Pakistani troops have faced each other across its crevasses and ice walls since 1984. No meaningful territory that supports human life has changed hands in four decades. The cost to India of maintaining its Siachen deployment has been estimated, through parliamentary questions and defence analyses, at several crore rupees per day. Pakistani costs are comparable. Soldiers have died not from enemy fire but from frostbite, avalanche, and altitude sickness.
Every rupee spent at Siachen is a rupee not spent on a primary school in Bihar, or a hospital in Vidarbha, or a water treatment plant in rural Rajasthan. This is not an anti-military argument. It is arithmetic.
The Indian military draws its personnel disproportionately from specific communities and geographies. The agrarian belts of Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Punjab, Bihar, and Uttarakhand. These are not the children of industrialists. They are the children of farmers, of daily wage earners, of families for whom the army pension is not a supplement but a lifeline. When a soldier dies at the LAC or on the Line of Control, the family that receives the tricolour-draped coffin is, statistically, a family that cannot absorb the loss, economically or otherwise.
The mirror on the Pakistani side is identical. The Pakistan Army draws from Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, from families of similar means and similar hopes. The Pakistani defence budget, as tracked by SIPRI, consumes a share of GDP that leaves the country chronically underfunded on education and healthcare. The boy from Mirpur and the boy from Mathura are, in this arithmetic, the same boy. Divided by a line neither of them drew.
Every major India-Pakistan military escalation, including Kargil in 1999, the standoff following the Parliament attack in 2001, and the post-Pulwama confrontation of 2019, was accompanied by commodity price spikes, stock market volatility, and a contraction in cross-border trade. Small businesses and agrarian communities on both sides pay the largest share of that bill. The traders of Amritsar and Lahore, who share a language, a cuisine, and a history, pay the price of tensions manufactured in capitals they have never visited.
FACT BOX: The Commoner’s Arithmetic
- Siachen Glacier: Indian and Pakistani troops have been deployed at the world’s highest battlefield since 1984. No strategic territory has changed hands.
- India’s cost of maintaining Siachen: estimated at several crore rupees per day, as referenced in parliamentary questions and defence analyses.
- Indian Army recruitment: disproportionately drawn from agrarian communities in Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Punjab, Bihar, and Uttarakhand. The children of industrialists and financiers are not in these numbers.
- Pakistan: defence spending as a percentage of GDP consistently leaves education and healthcare chronically underfunded, as tracked by SIPRI.
- Every major India-Pakistan escalation since 1999 has been accompanied by commodity price spikes, market volatility, and a sharp fall in cross-border trade, costs borne primarily by small traders and farming families on both sides.
The system that keeps it going
In the academic literature of international relations there is a concept called the security dilemma. Its logic is as follows. When one state arms for defensive purposes, neighbouring states interpret that armament as offensive threat and arm in response. The original state, seeing its neighbour arm, arms further. Neither side wants war. Both sides accelerate toward it. The dilemma is self-perpetuating.
It also produces, as a byproduct, a public trained to think in threat cycles rather than in structural questions. A public that asks which side provoked the other, rather than who profits when both sides keep arming. That kind of public, one that cannot see past the dilemma to the machinery behind it, is enormously useful to certain interests. It watches the news. It demands retaliation. It does not read procurement budgets.
What the academic literature does not always address is who manages the dilemma and who profits from its continuation.
The media ecosystem of South Asian conflict deserves its own reckoning. Television rating data from BARC India shows consistent, significant spikes in news channel viewership during military escalations. After the Balakot airstrikes of February 2019, news channels reported some of their highest-rated programming in years. The studios were lit, the retired generals were deployed, the graphics were vivid. The business model of conflict television in India, and in Pakistan, runs on threat inflation. Calm borders are bad for ratings. A quiet LAC is an empty studio.
Every genuine peace overture between India and Pakistan in the past three decades has been followed by a destabilising event. The Lahore Declaration of February 1999, in which Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee crossed the border by bus and both governments signed commitments to dialogue, was followed within months by the Kargil intrusion. The Agra Summit of 2001 collapsed. The Composite Dialogue process of 2004 to 2008 was ended by the Mumbai attacks of November 2008. Each of these events may have its own explanation. What they collectively describe is a pattern in which the peace dividend, when it appears to be within reach, is reliably denied.
This article does not allege that peace is deliberately sabotaged. The structural question it raises is different. In a system where the financial rewards of conflict are concentrated among a small number of actors, and the costs are diffused across millions of ordinary people, what incentive exists for those with real power to let the conflict end? It is not a comfortable question. It is, however, a necessary one.
FACT BOX: Peace Overtures and What Followed
- February 1999: Prime Minister Vajpayee travelled to Lahore by bus. The Lahore Declaration was signed. Both governments committed to dialogue. Within months, Pakistani forces were discovered to have infiltrated across the Line of Control in the Kargil sector.
- July 2001: The Agra Summit between Prime Minister Vajpayee and President Pervez Musharraf collapsed without agreement.
- 2004 to 2008: The Composite Dialogue process produced incremental progress on trade and people-to-people contact. It was suspended following the Mumbai attacks of November 2008.
- Each peace process was followed by an event that made its resumption politically impossible. No peace process between India and Pakistan has yet reached a durable conclusion.
Back to the two boys
The boy from Mirpur and the boy from Mathura are composite figures. But they are not fictional. They are the statistical average of every young man who has stood at this border across seventy-seven years. Their outcomes are documented in disability pension files, in PTSD cases that went unnamed and untreated because neither army had the infrastructure to acknowledge them, in debt ledgers of families who borrowed to fund a funeral.
The men who financed the weapons they carried, who lobbied for the defence budgets that put them in uniform, who sat on the boards of companies that built the surveillance towers and the fencing and the fighter jets – their outcomes are documented too. In quarterly earnings reports. In share price charts. In the compounding logic of capital that has no nationality and no grief.
The wars have names. They have dates and monuments and martyrs and national holidays. What they have never had, across all the decades and all the bodies and all the borders, is an honest answer to the simplest question a dead soldier’s mother ever asked.
For whom, exactly, did my son die?
This article draws on publicly available sources including the United States Senate Nye Committee records of 1934, Smedley Butler’s War Is a Racket published in 1935, the SIPRI Arms Transfer Database, India’s Defence Acquisition Procedure of 2020, Ministry of Defence contract documentation on the LCA Tejas Mk1A procurement of February 2021, BARC India viewership data, parliamentary questions on Siachen operational costs, Niall Ferguson’s The House of Rothschild, Adam LeBor’s Tower of Basel, Ayesha Jalal’s The Sole Spokesman, Patrick French’s Liberty or Death, and declassified Nixon-era State Department cables held in the United States National Archives.
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