Asia Times: India/Pakistan


	May 31, 2002	atimes.com

India/Pakistan

Frontline soldiers gear up for war
By Rahul Bedi

JAMMU - Washing down a sumptuous lunch with beer as he sat in a cool, deep bunker, the commanding officer of an Indian Army unit seemed unperturbed by the mortar and artillery shells flying in from the Pakistan border and crashing around him and his men.

"It seems as if hostilities will break out soon and we are ready for it," said the officer of the unit hunkered down close to the border in the R S Pura sector, about 25 kilometers from Jammu, the winter capital of the Indian-administered section of Kashmir.

More than 1 million Indian and Pakistani soldiers remain locked in a standoff along roughly 2,000 kilometers of their common frontier that stretches from the Siachen glacier to the burning deserts of western Rajasthan. Troops have been massing along the border since last December's suicide attack on India's parliament that New Delhi blamed on Islamabad. Tension heightened between the nuclear rivals following another attack by three gunmen on an army garrison near Jammu in which 31 people, including wives and children of soldiers, were gunned down. India again blamed the Pakistani army for launching the attack and said they were part of a "proxy war" that Islamabad has been waging against its neighbor.

"The army's morale to join battle with Pakistan is high," said the confident commanding officer, who sleeps with a 9mm pistol under his pillow. He declined to be identified. "We want to punish Islamabad for fueling terrorism in Kashmir for 13 years, provided the politicians in Delhi let us," he added, sipping his beer in the cool of the well-appointed bunker, while offering an endless stream of snacks to his clandestine journalist guests.

More than 35,000 people have died in Kashmir's insurgency in which Pakistan denies involvement but hopes to gain should the Muslim-majority territory of Indian-administered Kashmir accede to it.

Above the bunker, at ground level, soldiers in full battle gear peer over sandbagged machine gun posts, waiting for some enemy movement across the searing hot border, before firing. "It's a cat-and-mouse game that both sides play," said a corporal manning the post. "Sometimes they get lucky and sometimes it's us. But for the moment we are taking the offensive," he added.

Nearby, field artillery pieces, well camouflaged in dugouts, were being readied to shell the Pakistani garrison town of Sialkot, known for its sporting goods industry, barely 10 kilometers away. A pincer movement launched from R S Pura in the 1965 war over Kashmir led to Sialkot's fall.

India and Pakistan have been to war three times since independence 55 years ago, twice over Kashmir. They also fought an 11-week long battle three summers ago in Kashmir's mountainous Kargil region in which 1,200 soldiers died.

"We will lose face if we do not fight after such a buildup and withdraw," another officer said. It will merely give Pakistan and the world the message that India only postures, but does not follow up with action, he added. "The militants can attack us, not our women and children," a soldier said, referring to the recent Jammu strike. "Is this the kind of war that Pakistan and its lashkars [militants] are capable of fighting?" he asked, his voice choked with emotion.

"It [the firing] has never been so bad," said another soldier at a border outpost, which daily faces more than 5,000 rounds of heavy caliber "grazing" machine gun fire from 300 yards away. India, he stated, must not waste the military buildup and it should "sort out" Pakistan once and for all.

But other military officers conceded a war would serve little purpose other than to beggar the two already impoverished nations. "We need a peace offensive, not war," one officer declared, adding that politicians are prone to acting with haste on military matters and regretting the consequences at their leisure.

Meanwhile, the once-bustling north Indian village of Manihari, some 700 meters from the Pakistani border, has been reduced to rubble by the barrage of enemy artillery and mortar shells that rained down upon it for nearly two hours recently. Mounds of freshly harvested wheat, burnt by mortar fire, lie strewn around the village while slippers, utensils and half-cooked food litter the debris, indicating a speedy exit by all 313 families following the pitiless shelling that began two day earlier.

Mangled remains of two bicycles and a tractor trolley blocked a narrow alleyway past which cows and mangy mongrels tried squeezing through foraging for food in the ghost village in the Sambha sector, some 60 kilometers from Jammu. "We dropped whatever we were doing and simply ran," said Kunjalal Sharma, the only Brahmin (member of priestly upper caste) in the village of lower-caste Dalit farm laborers.

Scores of villages along a 70-kilometer border stretch in the Sambha and adjoining Hira Nagar sectors are empty, tractor-trolleys having ferried all valuables to safer locations. Officials said at least 40,000 villagers have fled to rudimentary camps set up by the local authorities in nearby towns that are beyond the range of Pakistani artillery guns.

"We have become refugees in our own country,'' Nandi Devi, an 80-year-old widow of Panser village complained at the crowded Marheen Camp, 60 kilometers from Jammu. "The army should fight Pakistan and bring an end to this cross-border firing that has plagued us for the last 13 years and made life a living hell," she added.

Security officials in Jammu admitted that all corresponding villages on the Pakistani side had likewise emptied out under equally relentless shelling by India in a region where it feels militarily vulnerable. They fear that a determined Pakistani thrust, like in the 1965 and 1971 wars, could sever a vital bridge link between Jammu and crucial forward posts to the northwest near Sambha.

(Inter Press Service)