NEW DELHI, Jan 29 (1996): India maintained on Monday it did not fire the rockets that killed 20 people in a border village in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir last week and analysts said the incident was unlikely to raise long-term tension.
The bloodshed at a mosque on Friday in the village of Forward Kahuta was followed by a weekend of heavy firing across the ceasefire line that splits the Himalayan region.
Pakistan accused India of responsibility for the attack.
Indian analysts largely accepted their government’s line that it was not responsible, pointing out that Delhi had little to gain from heightened tension at this time.
“It seems unlikely that it would have come from the Indian side,” political analyst Pran Chopra told Reuters. “Although there has been a fair amount of shelling on both sides, the targets have normally been logistical.”
The government spokesman insisted on Monday that India was not behind Friday’s attack.
“Our people at the highest level say no rockets have been fired from our side for the last few days,” spokesman S. Narendra told Reuters. “Certainly from our side there will not be any kind of adventurism.”
Pakistan President Farooq Leghari said on Sunday there was no threat of war with India over the incident, and analysts said it should be seen in the context of the regular exchanges of rocket fire across the ceasefire line in Kashmir.
India and Pakistan have fought two of their three wars since independence from Britain in 1947 over Kashmir. Delhi accuses Islamabad of arming and funding the six-year seccessionist insurgency it is battling in Kashmir, a charge Pakistan denies.
Each side has a strong military presence in the area and India on Saturday conducted a further test in the east of the country of its indigenous Prithvi medium-range missile, a weapon Islamabad sees as “Pakistan-specific”.
The Indian government, which faces general elections in April, is keen not to allow its political opponents to paint it as weak on defence. It is pressing on with the Prithvi testing despite objections from Washington which sees the move as increasing regional tension.
Military analysts discounted the possibility that any attack from India might have been aimed specifically at the mosque hit on Friday.
Retired air commodore Jasjit Singh, director of the Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses, told Reuters that the rocket launchers India used to fire across the border towards Pakistan were mostly multi-barreled and vehicle mounted, like the “Stalin Organs” used in the old Soviet bloc.
He said they were unguided and and not ballistic and usually fired in bulk.
“These rockets are awfully inaccurate. Nobody can aim at a particular spot and expect that it will hit there,” he said.
However the timing of the incident, on India’s Republic Day when it traditionally displays its military might, prompted some to see a motive for a possible Indian attack.
“The coincidences are too obvious,” a senior Western diplomat said, referring to the testing of the Prithvi missile and a hardline speech by Prime Minister Narasimha Rao the previous day, in which he told party workers India would not give up its nuclear option.
India is resisting U.S. pressure to sign a Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty without pledges from the five nuclear powers to eliminate their arsenals within a specified time.
But for others, the explanation that the rocket was fired from inside Pakistan, perhaps by a Kashmiri separatist group seeking to escalate tension, was more plausible.
“There are lots of groups in the area with portable rockets,” said defence analyst Brahma Chellaney. “The only way that it would have been possible to hit a target like that was to have had it in visual contact.”
