[“It happened last
night. There are fatal casualties on Indian side. One of our post was attacked
in Poonch area,” said S.N. Acharya, a spokesman for the Indian Army in the
Jammu area of Indian-administered Kashmir. Poonch is a mountainous district around
200 kilometers, or 124 miles, from Srinagar, the summer capital and the largest
city in the Indian-administered-Kashmir.]
 |
| Tauseef Mustafa/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIndian Border Security Force personnel at an outpost on the India-Pakistan border in Kashmir in January 2013. |
NEW DELHI — Five Indian soldiers were killed Monday night after Pakistani
troops attacked an Indian post in the disputed border that divides the
Indian-administered and Pakistan-administered parts of Kashmir, according to
Indian Army officials.
The incident cast an
immediate shadow on the warming relations between the two countries since the
formation of a new government in Pakistan in June. Nawaz Sharif, the new prime
minister of Pakistan, has made conciliatory gestures recently toward India, and
formally sought dates for the resumption of talks between top diplomats and
bureaucrats of the two countries. Mr. Sharif is expected to meet the Indian
prime minister, Manmohan Singh, in September in New York on the sidelines of
the United Nations General Assembly.
Indian officials
described the bloodshed as happening in a mountainous outpost along the Line of
Control, the disputed border area.
“It happened last
night. There are fatal casualties on Indian side. One of our post was attacked
in Poonch area,” said S.N. Acharya, a spokesman for the Indian Army in the
Jammu area of Indian-administered Kashmir. Poonch is a mountainous district around
200 kilometers, or 124 miles, from Srinagar, the summer capital and the largest
city in the Indian-administered-Kashmir.
The lower and upper
houses of the Indian Parliament were adjourned for several hours after a noisy
clamor by lawmakers over the reported killings of Indian soldiers. On Rajya
Sabha TV, the official network of the upper house of the Indian Parliament, the
lawmakers competed to make themselves heard and demanded that the defense
minister make a statement.
“We need answers for
some serious questions,” Ravishankar Prasad, a member of the upper house and a
spokesman for the Hindu nationalist party, Bharatiya Janata, said in
Parliament. “How many Indian soldiers will be sacrificed?”
Pakistani officials
categorically denied any responsibility for the killings and even disputed that
they occurred.
“No such incident took
place,” said a senior security official, who declined to be identified by name.
“There has been no-cross border violation from our side.”
India and Pakistan
agreed to a ceasefire agreement on the Line of Control, the mountainous border
that stretches 740 kilometers, in November 2003. Before the ceasefire was
signed, the Indian and Pakistani armies routinely shelled each other’s
positions and the hundreds of the civilian villages along the Line of Control.
India’s defense
minister, A.K. Antony, addressed the Indian Parliament late Tuesday afternoon
on the soldiers’ deaths on the disputed border.
“There have been 57
violations of ceasefire this year ,” Mr. Antony said. “The government of India
has lodged strong protest with the government of Pakistan,” he added.
Since the eruption of
a separatist insurgency in Indian-administered Kashmir in 1990, the Line of
Control has been used by Kashmiri and Pakistani militants to enter
Indian-controlled Kashmir. India put up fencing along 550 kilometers of the
Line of Control to prevent the infiltration.
“These incidents don’t
help efforts to normalize or even improve relations with Pak & call in to
question the Pak Govt’s recent overtures,” said Omar Abdullah, the chief
minister of Indian-administered-Kashmir, on the social networking site Twitter.
The ceasefire has been
mostly honored by the Indian and Pakistani armies and has been one of the most
significant initiatives of India-Pakistan diplomacy in the past two decades.
Person-to-person contacts, official and back-channels talks also followed between
the two countries to resolve their long and complicated disputes.
“It is important for
both India and Pakistan to preserve the gains of a successful ceasefire,” said
Srinath Raghavan, Senior Fellow at Center for Policy Research and author of
“War and Peace in Modern India,” a history of India’s wars with Pakistan.
The last skirmish
between India and Pakistan on the Line of Control occurred in January, when
Pakistani troops killed two Indian soldiers. One of the two soldiers was
beheaded. Indian troops retaliated by killing three Pakistani soldiers. Yet
compared to the violent 1990s, when killings on the Line of Control were
frequent, the disputed border remains mostly peaceful.
“India has the
strength, the Indian army has the strength, and the Indian Parliament has the
strength to send a reply to Pakistan in the language it understands,” Yashwant
Sinha, a senior leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party, said Tuesday afternoon in
the Indian Parliament.
Sanjay Raut, a leader
of the militant Hindu party, Shiv Sena, told a news conference Tuesday morning
that the Indian Army should retaliate and kill 50 Pakistanis.
“Incidents like this
have to be taken up at political and diplomatic level. It is a serious
escalation and such attacks must be prevented,” Mr. Raghavan said. He cautioned
against the rhetoric of retaliatory attacks. “If we escalate the situation and
the ceasefire goes, India and Pakistan will have to go back to a scenario that
would be much worse,” Mr. Raghavan said.
Despite the attack,
some in Pakistan said that it was unlikely to upset warming ties.
“Nawaz Sharif is
firmly committed to improving ties with India. He is keen on renewing the peace
process and expanding the economic ties between the two countries,” said Raza
Rumi, director of Jinnah Institute, a public policy think-tank in Islamabad.
“Sharif also sees better ties with India leading to a reduction of militarism
in Pakistan. Incidents like the one on the border or the attack on the Indian
embassy in Kabul again point toward nonstate actors that need to be
controlled,” Mr. Rumi said.
Lal Din, 60, a farmer
from Gowhalan village on the Line of Control in the Uri area of
Indian-administered Kashmir, noted that tensions had lessened recently.
“Before the ceasefire,
it was a very dangerous place to live. Several houses in my village were
destroyed in shelling and some villagers were killed,” Mr. Din said in a phone
interview from his village.
Hundreds of border
villages, like his, have seen an era of relative peace since November 2003. He
said the fence meant that “no militants are crossing from Pakistan anymore
here.”
“There have been no
killings for ten years,” he said, “and neither the Indians nor the Pakistanis
have fired mortar shells in a long time near my village.”
“It is quite safe and
peaceful now,” he added. “I hope it stays like that.”
Salman Masood
contributed reporting from Islamabad, Pakistan, and Hari Kumar contributed from
New Delhi.
