SOUTH ASIA: India Pulls Troops Back from Pakistan Border

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Oct 16 2002 (IPS) - Following the successful completion of state assembly elections in disputed Kashmir earlier this month, India announced Wednesday gradual the withdrawal of the 700,000 troops it has deployed since December along the 3,000-kilometre frontier with Pakistan.

Following a meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS), Defence Minister George Fernandes announced the redeployment of troops ”from positions on the international with Pakistan without impairing their ability to respond decisively to any emergency”.

Earlier, the influential National Security Advisory Board (NSAB) recommended to the National Security Council chaired by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee the ”calibrated withdrawal of troops” from the international border that runs through western Gujarat, Rajasthan and Punjab states.

However, the board recommended that the government continue to maintain military readiness further north along the Line of Control (LoC), which has separated the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir from its Pakistan-occupied portion for more than half a century.

Military experts welcomed the decision. ”It was high time the withdrawal took place the utility of the deployment was eroding,” said V R Raghavan, a retired army general and top strategic analyst. ”Now that the elections are over, the logic of deployment no longer exists,” he added.

The troop mobilisation, considered the biggest since the Second World War, was ordered by New Delhi in response to an attack on India’s Parliament on Dec. 13 by a four-man suicide squad that managed to drive up to the main entrance of the massive, red sandstone building in a bomb-laden car.

Pakistan denied involvement in the attack. But India said it had positively identified the four-man squad of ‘fedayeen’ (members of suicide mission) as Pakistani nationals and members of the internationally banned militant group Lashkar-Toiba (Soldiers of God).

Apart from the troops and their armour, India also moved its fighter squadrons to forward bases and positioned its navy in the high seas off Pakistan’s coastline. The two nuclear-armed neighbours hovered on the brink of war in May and June.

Wednesday’s meeting of the NSAB was the first after the 1999 war at Kargil, in which the Indian armed forces expelled heavily armed intruders from Pakistan that had occupied mountain heights on the Line of Control.

A major consideration that went into Wednesday’s recommendation for troop withdrawal was the sheer cost of keeping troops on rugged terrain, which stretches from the deserts of Rajasthan and into the foothills of the Himalayas.

Estimates of keeping the troops deployed in forward positions on the border have averaged 40 million U.S. dollars a month.

But costs are said to have been reduced since a partial de-escalation that followed intense international diplomacy led by the United States, which depends on facilities in Pakistan for its ‘war on terror’ in neighbouring Afghanistan.

India said it was prepared to prosecute a war with Pakistan despite the presence of U.S. troops in that country, but withdrew its navy and most of its air force from forward positions after assurances from Washington.

These assurances were conveyed by U.S. Assistant Defence Secretary Richard Armitage, who said he had word from Pakistan President Gen Pervez Musharraf that infiltration across the Line of Control would be permanently stopped.

India, however, insisted that the troops stay deployed until after the September-October elections in Kashmir, especially after Musharraf appeared to step back from his promise to stop infiltrations and called the Kashmir polls ”illegal” and designed to perpetuate ”Indian occupation of the state”.

Musharraf brought up the issues of troop deployment and the elections in Kashmir when he addressed the U.N. General Assembly (UNGA) in September.

”Boasting of its coercive capability, India has deployed about a million troops in battle formation against Pakistan,” Musharraf said, vowing however that his country would not be ”coerced or frightened into compromising our principled position on Kashmir”.

Those polls, declared free and fair by independent observers that included western diplomats and the international media, drew a 45 percent voter turnout. Analysts here said they seemed to indicate a desire by most Kashmiris to stay within the Indian Union rather than accede to Pakistan.

The elections have also prompted Indian leaders to explore the withdrawal of the troops that Musharraf so bitterly complained about.

With winter fast approaching, the costs of India’s troop deployment would have escalated. It would have been pointless anyway given that most of the passes along the Line of Control become snowbound and impassable for the constant infiltration that India says has continued in spite of the promises made by Musharraf.

India and Pakistan, which is said to have massed 300,000 troops on its side of the border, have been under considerable pressure from the western countries to de-escalate tensions especially at a time when Washington is readying for military action in Iraq.

New Delhi has also been asked to resume diplomatic dialogue with Pakistan but has resisted this saying that talks this could happen only after it was certain that the neighbouring country had ”given up the use of terror as state policy”.

Raghavan thought that talks were still a long way off, but said the troop withdrawal could help create the right ambience for the resumption of dialogue.

But on Wednesday, India’s Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani said that he saw little chance of Pakistan changing its polices and that he expected the ”proxy war” that Pakistan pursues by arming militant groups in Kashmir to continue for some time.