This article critically assesses the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), once seen as a flagship of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and its failure to deliver on its ambitious promises in Pakistan. Instead of driving economic growth and cohesion, the CPEC exposed deep governance challenges – marked by institutional fragility, lack of elite consensus, and military dominance in policymaking. Strategic and security imperatives often outweighed economic rationale, resulting in a non-transparent process that sidelined parliament and marginalized provincial actors. Projects were selected based on political expediency rather than viability, leading to inefficiencies and delays. The CPEC also re-centralized power, weakening provincial autonomy and intensifying center-periphery tensions, particularly in Balochistan. In Gwadar, local communities saw disruption without benefit, fueling political discontent. Investor confidence waned amid an uneven playing field and the failure of Special Economic Zones to take shape. Far from transformative, the CPEC reinforced narrow elite interests, worsened federal strains, and deepened Pakistan’s economic and institutional uncertainties.

This article examines the interaction of events in the Lahore and Amritsar borderland with the wider course of Indo-Pakistan relations in the early postindependence period. Its findings reveal the ways in which events in this sensitive borderland reflected, symbolized, and influenced wider Indo-Pakistan relations. The examination focuses on the 1951 War Scare and the Cricket Diplomacy four years later. In a foretaste of the use of cricket in 2004–2005 to normalize relations, the India-Pakistan Test Series of January–February 1955 provided an occasion for opening the Wagah border crossing. Here was evidence that despite the human tragedies surrounding Partition, the region of the Punjab could act as a bridge between India and Pakistan.