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Rare back-to-back bombings in the capitals of two nuclear-armed neighbors are threatening to send India and Pakistan to the brink of conflict for the second time this year, as tensions also soar between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

India is describing the car explosion that struck Delhi on Monday, killing at least eight people and injuring 20 others, as a “terror incident.” Authorities say they are investigating the explosion under an anti-terrorism law and considering “all possibilities.”

“The country has witnessed a heinous terror incident, perpetrated by anti-national forces,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s cabinet said in a resolution on Wednesday.

The investigation must be “pursued with the utmost urgency and professionalism so that the perpetrators, their collaborators, and their sponsors are identified and brought to justice without delay,” it added.

A day after the explosion at a busy intersection near Delhi’s iconic Red Fort, a suicide bombing outside a district court on the outskirts of Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, killed at least 12 people and injured 27 others on Tuesday.

Though both India and Pakistan have struggled with militant attacks in recent years, they are usually confined to border areas, making the car bombings in Islamabad and Delhi — both heavily surveilled and militarized — incredibly rare.

The attacks in the heart of the two capitals underscore the growing threat of militant violence facing India, Pakistan and Afghanistan and the strained relations that hinder a unified response.

“It’s a fragile moment for South Asia,” said Walter Ladwig, an associate war studies professor at King’s College London.

“Pakistan is under strain on several fronts — political turmoil, economic stress, and rising violence along the Afghan border,” he said. “At the same time, both India and Pakistan seem to have recognized that another open crisis would help no one.”

A fragile ceasefire

The bombings threaten to undo the India-Pakistan ceasefire reached earlier this year.

The two longtime rivals engaged in a brief armed conflict over an April terrorist attack that killed 26 people, mostly Indian tourists, in the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir. New Delhi said the militants were backed by Pakistan, which denied the accusations, and dozens more people were killed on both sides in the cross-border shelling that followed.

Though India has historically accused Pakistan of backing terrorist attacks on its soil, it has not done so this time so far.

By contrast, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has blamed Indian “terrorist proxies” for the explosion in his country, without providing evidence.

New Delhi rejected the “baseless and unfounded allegations,” saying they were intended to distract the people of Pakistan from “the ongoing military-inspired constitutional subversion and power-grab unfolding within the country.”

Lawmakers in Pakistan, where the military has either governed directly or controlled civilian governments since independence in 1947, on Wednesday granted the army chief, Asim Munir, lifelong immunity and wider powers.

“The situation is clearly precarious,” said Chietigj Bajpaee, a senior research fellow for South Asia at Chatham House, a London-based think tank. “We have seen a gradual movement up the escalation ladder.”

“But because both countries are nuclear-weapon states, while there are heightened risks, at the same time, it helps manage the escalation to some extent,” he added.

While India has not officially named a suspect, police across the country have carried out sweeping raids, especially in Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority region. Police in the Pulwama district of Kashmir said Wednesday that they had detained “several suspects” in an operation against an alleged militant group.

The day before Monday’s attack, police in Kashmir said they had seized over 6,300 pounds of explosive material and arrested at least seven people linked to a militant cell in a joint operation in two of Delhi’s neighboring states, Uttar Pradesh and Haryana.

Authorities have not commented publicly on whether those arrests were linked to the explosion.

Analysts say India will be careful before pointing the finger at anybody.

“We have to be cautious about the reaction of people outside India, who might say India has done a knee-jerk reaction,” said Rajiv Dogra, a former Indian diplomat who was based in Pakistan.

“As far as India is concerned, it’s already hurt, and it hopes Pakistan can assure it that it was not linked,” he added.

If confirmed as a wider terrorist plot, the attack on Delhi will be the deadliest since 2011, when over a dozen people were killed in a bombing.

Meanwhile, Pakistan has also accused Afghanistan of involvement in Tuesday’s bombing.

Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi said Afghan citizens were behind the attack, citing “Indian-backed elements and Afghan Taliban proxies,” naming the Pakistani Taliban, also known as the TTP. Pakistan has long said the group is supported by the Afghan Taliban, which Kabul denies.

Though TTP denied involvement on Tuesday, a breakaway faction claimed responsibility, only to have one of its commanders contradict the statement, the Associated Press reported.

“The bigger problem is the absence of any real security dialogue among India, Pakistan and Afghanistan,” said Ladwig.

“Without any real regional intelligence sharing, every act of violence tends to be viewed through a political lens — as state-sponsored, rather than part of a broader extremist problem,” he added.

Since 2021, when the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan after the withdrawal of U.S.-led forces, Pakistan has experienced a surge in cross-border attacks by militants along its western border, which it shares in part with Afghanistan. Tensions between the two countries are at their highest in years after deadly border fighting last month that killed dozens of soldiers and civilians.

Talks in Qatar and Turkey to defuse the tensions have yielded no progress, Afghanistan’s foreign minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi, said Thursday.

Ladwig said an off-ramp is possible among the conflicting countries.

“But it depends on keeping counter-terror cooperation separate from other disputes,” he said. “If the quiet intelligence contacts continue, they might prevent the region from sliding back into another crisis cycle.”