POLITICS-SOUTH-ASIA: India Denies Pakistani Aerial Attack

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Aug 23 2002 (IPS) - India found itself denying reports of an aerial attack on Pakistan across the Line of Control (LoC) in disputed Kashmir on Friday, as U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage arrived here to resume talks aimed at de-escalating tensions between the two nuclear-armed neighbours.

Armitage, who will fly to Pakistan on Saturday, was last in the sub-continent in June. At the time, he was credited with defusing tensions between the South Asian neighbours, which had between them amassed more than a million troops along their common border and the LoC.

Last time around, Armitage first visited Islamabad and extracted a promise from Pakistan President Gen Pervez Musharraf that he would not only stop infiltration over the LoC, but would also permanently and visibly shut down terrorist training camps within Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. Armitage carried this commitment to New Delhi.

Indian foreign ministry officials have denied that there were any aerial attacks across the LoC in the Gultari sector on Thursday night, as alleged by a Pakistani military spokesman, and said that “such baseless allegations should be seen in the light of Armitage’s visit to Islamabad on Saturday”.

A military spokesman admitted to heavy exchanges of artillery fire across the LoC. “Pakistani troops opened fire with heavy guns, forcing our troops to retaliate but there are no casualties on our side,” he said, although he too emphatically the involvement of fighter aircraft..

‘Shuttle diplomacy’ by Armitage and other top international diplomats, including U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, resulted in India pulling back its warships from off the Pakistani coast and moving its warplanes back to peacetime locations. But troop withdrawal from the border has yet to happen.

Armitage declined to speak to journalists after an hour-long session he held with Indian Defence Minister George Fernandes, but he is believed have been told of India’s apprehensions that Islamabad would try to disrupt the assembly elections in Kashmir.

According to officials, Fernandes told Armitage, who was accompanied by Deputy Assistant Secretary for South Asia Michelle Sisson, that India was determined to see through the elections scheduled to be held in September and October.

Fernandes also wanted the United States to exert more pressure on Pakistan, its ally in the ‘war against terrorism’ in Afghanistan to also reign in militancy in Kashmir.

On India’s Independence Day on Aug. 15, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee said that by encouraging people in Kashmir to boycott the September-Octber elections in the state, Pakistan was not creating an atmosphere for resumption of dialogue between the two countries.

Vajpayee was responding to a speech made the previous day in Islamabad, Pakistan’s Independence Day, by Musharraf in which he called the elections “farcical” and “yet another effort to give a mask of legitimacy to India’s illegal occupation of the state”.

The current military standoff was triggered off by an audacious but failed attempt by a four-man squad to blow up Parliament House using a car packed with explosives. Subsequently, the two countries hovered on the brink of open war after another suicide squad massacred 34 people near Jammu, winter capital of Kashmir in May.

News reports from Islamabad quoted military spokesman Maj Gen Rashid Qureshi as saying that India had resorted to using its warplanes Thursday to rescue its troops that had made incursions across the LoC in a “highly irresponsible and escalatory act”.

According to Qureshi, the Indian side lost several men in an attack on a Pakistani army post at Gultari which, he said, was repelled.

Qureshi claimed that the incident was engineered for the benefit of Armitage. “Whenever there is a high-profile visit to the subcontinent, the Indian government has got into the habit of either going into escalation or stage-managing an incident,” he told a televised press conference.

The two countries had shot down each other’s warplanes during the brief but bloody war at Kargil on the LoC in 1999. India had moved to recapture encroachments on its territory by heavily armed militants backed by Pakistan army regulars, bringing the two countries close to the brink of a nuclear exchange.

That confrontation ended through the intervention of then U.S. President Bill Clinton, who prevailed on former Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to withdraw the intruders. By October, Sharif was removed in a bloodless military coup led by Musharraf, who is said to have masterminded the Kargil intrusions.

On Thursday, Pakistan’s junior minister for foreign affairs Inamul Haq told British Broadcasting Corp Radio that Pakistan neither encouraged nor allowed any crossing across the LoC as alleged by India, and asked for a “neutral mechanism” to determine whether such crossings were taking place.

Haq said the elections in Kashmir should not stand in the way of resumption of talks between the two countries.

“We should not wait for elections to start dialogue,” he said adding that Pakistan’s stand was that the elections could not be a substitute for a plebiscite to determine Kashmir’s status.

India’s own view since the Kargil war, that there could be no dialogue until there was visible proof of a cessation in what it calls cross-border terrorism, was reiterated in an interview to ‘The Times’ daily by Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani, currently on a four-day visit to Britain.

Advani said that Musharraf has shown no seriousness in abandoning its “policy of using terrorism as an instrument of state policy” in Kashmir and that the two countries were in fact “in a state of war” with each other.