JAMMU, Feb 3 (2000): Foreign militants have swarmed into Indian-run Kashmir and are staging increasingly daring attacks on Indian security forces in the disputed Himalayan region, a senior Indian security official said.
The official said the number of militants operating in Indian Kashmir had more than doubled to 5,000 since Indian troops fought a 10-week campaign last year to evict armed intruders from India’s side of the de facto Kashmiri border with Pakistan.
That conflict brought India and Pakistan to the brink of war.
“These are mostly foreigners from Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, Pakistan, Afghanistan,” the official, who declined to be identified, said late on Wednesday.
“I would put the figure at around 5,000,” he told Reuters in Jammu, the winter capital of India’s Jammu and Kashmir state.
Security officials had previously estimated the number of guerrilla infiltrators since the start of the Kargil conflict eight months ago at around 2,000.
They said the surge in the number of militants in the state explained the rash of attacks on security camps this winter, when heavy snows normally bring a de-escalation of violence.
New Delhi accuses Pakistan of fomenting militancy in India’s only Moslem-majority state by training and arming militants, and then sending them across the Line of Control, a U.N.-monitored ceasefire line dividing the arch-foes in Kashmir.
Pakistan says it provides only moral and diplomatic support to the Kashmiri people’s struggle for self-determination.
Gurbachan Jagat, the Indian state’s director-general of police, said large-scale infiltration into the Kashmir valley began last summer when Indian troops were moved en masse to the rugged heights of Kargil to oust hundreds of infiltrators.
The infiltrators, who India said were largely Pakistani army regulars, retreated behind the Line of Control after an air and ground campaign and diplomatic pressure from the United States.
“The army withdrew 58 battalions, there was a thinning of presence and militants took advantage of this,” Jagat told Reuters. “About 2,000 mercenaries were pushed in that time, obviously this was the game plan.”
MILITANT ATTACKS BECOME MORE DARING
Indian army officials say since the withdrawal of the intruders, which was followed by an army coup in Pakistan last October, militant attacks in Kashmir have become more daring.
“The quality of people coming in (from Pakistan) is better, they are more committed, the equipment has improved,” said Brigadier Randhir Sinh.
‘Fedayeen’, or suicide squads of militants, have launched daring raids on camps of security forces, including an attack on the Indian army’s 15 corps headquarters in Srinagar, the state’s summer capital. Seven personnel were killed.
“If a chap wants to kill himself it becomes very difficult, you can’t really stop him,” said Sinh. “He targets a few people and goes down. The idea is to create a defensive mindset in the security forces.”
Jagat said many suicide killers were teenagers and in at least one case were found to be drugged. “It appears they were drugged with opium or something like that before the attack.”
A year ago, for each soldier killed the security forces killed six militants, according to a senior police official in Jammu. “Today, the ratio is about one to two or three,” he said.
New Delhi’s decision to release three militants from Kashmiri jails in return for 155 hostages on an Indian Airlines jet that was hijacked on Christmas Eve has left its own bitter taste.
“This kind of thing does lead to loss of morale, you cannot deny that,” said Jagat.
