NEW DELHI, Jan 29 (2002): Indian and Pakistani troops traded small-arms fire along their tense frontier in Kashmir on Tuesday as Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee raised hopes of avoiding an all-out war.
An Indian defence official said both armies – involved in a powerful buildup along their border – exchanged machinegun fire in several Kashmir frontier areas overnight and into Tuesday.
The two countries have mobilised about a million troops along their border from Kashmir in the Himalayas to the Arabian Sea after a bloody December attack on India’s parliament New Delhi blamed on Pakistan-based Muslim militants fighting its rule in Kashmir.
India says it will not scale down its deployment until Pakistan ends support for the militants. Pakistan denies sponsoring the groups and has banned several.
Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee said late on Monday he did not expect the tensions to lead to war, adding diplomatic efforts were yielding some progress.
But at the same time, he rejected Pakistan’s latest offer of discussions and urged Islamabad to return the roughly one third of Kashmir it controls before any talks.
“If Kashmir is the central issue, then one third of Kashmir is occupied by Pakistan illegally,” the Press Trust of India quoted Vajpayee saying. “Therefore, they should return that to India and then start talks.”
With a harsher than normal winter hitting the Himalayas and large-scale military action unlikely before spring anyway, analysts saw no significant change in Vajpayee’s position.
“The position has remained the same. It is a strategy of using coercive diplomacy and force to ensure that Pakistan is under pressure to end cross-border terrorism,” C. Raja Mohan, The Hindu newspaper’s strategic affairs editor, told Reuters.
India would wait for Islamabad to hand over men on a list of 20 alleged terrorists and criminals it says are sheltering in Pakistan and for evidence militants had stopped slipping into Indian Kashmir, he said.
“Once that happens, there will be diplomatic de-escalation and then negotiations,” Mohan said.
Indian Home (Interior) Minister Lal Krishna Advani said last week it would take at least another two months, until after the winter peak, to be able to determine if the number of infiltrations was falling or had stopped.
