Near Kashmir Border, India Villages Brace for War

by Rahul Bedi

"It seems as if hostilities will break out soon and we are ready for it," said the officer of the unit hunkered down close to the border in the RS Pura sector, around 25 km from Jammu, the winter capital of disputed Kashmir state.

Over one million India and Pakistani soldiers stand locked in a stand-off along roughly 2,000 kms of their common frontier that stretches from the Siachen glacier to the burning deserts of western Rajasthan. Troops have been massing along the border since last December's suicide attack on India's parliament that New Delhi blamed on Islamabad.

Tension heightened between the nuclear rivals following another attack by three gunmen on an army garrison near Jammu in which 31 people, mostly wives and children of soldiers, were mowed down in their quarters.

India again blamed the Pakistani army for launching the attack and said they were part of a "proxy war" that Islamabad has been waging against its neighbor and arch-rival.

"The army's morale to join battle with Pakistan is high," said the confident commanding officer, who sleeps with a 9 mm pistol under his pillow. He declined to be identified.

"We want to punish Islamabad for fuelling terrorism in Kashmir for 13 years, provided the politicians in Delhi let us," he added, sipping warm beer in the cool of the well-appointed bunker, offering an endless stream of snacks to his clandestine journalist guests.

Over 35,000 people have died in Kashmir's insurgency, in which Pakistan denies involvement but hopes to gain should the Muslim-majority territory accede to it.

Above the bunker at ground level, soldiers in full battle gear peered over sandbagged machine gun posts, waiting for some enemy movement across the searing hot border, before firing.

"It's a cat and mouse game that both sides play," said a corporal manning the post. "Sometimes they get lucky and sometimes it's us. But for the moment we are taking the offensive," he added.

Nearby, field artillery pieces, well camouflaged in dugouts, were being readied to shell the Pakistani garrison town of Sialkot, known for its sporting goods industry, barely 10 kms away. A pincer movement launched from R.S. Pura in the 1965 war over Kashmir led to Sialkot's fall.

Nuclear-armed India and Pakistan have been to war three times since independence 55 years ago, twice over Kashmir. They also fought an 11-week long battle three summers ago in Kashmir's mountainous Kargil region in which 1200 soldiers died.

"We will lose face if we do not fight after such a buildup and withdraw," another officer said. It will merely give Pakistan and the world the message that India only postures, but does not follow up with action, he added.

"The militants can attack us, not our women and children," a soldier said, referring to the recent Jammu strike. "Is this the kind of war that Pakistan and its Lashkars (militants) are capable of fighting?" he asked, his voice choked with emotion.

"It (the firing) has never been so bad," said another soldier at a border outpost, who daily faces over 5,000 rounds of heavy caliber "grazing" machine gun fire from 300 yards away. India, he stated, must not "waste" the military buildup and must "sort out" Pakistan once and for all.

But other military officers conceded a war would serve little purpose other than to beggar the two impoverished nations. "We need a peace offensive, not war," one officer declared, adding that politicians are prone to acting with haste on military matters and regretting the consequences at leisure.

Meanwhile, the once bustling north Indian village of Manihari, some 800 yards from the Pakistani border, has been reduced to rubble by the barrage of enemy artillery and mortar shells that rained down upon it for nearly two hours recently.

Mounds of freshly harvested wheat, burnt by mortar fire, lay strewn around the village while slippers, utensils and half-cooked food were strewn among the debris, indicating a speedy exit by all 313 families following the pitiless shelling that began two days earlier.

The mangled remains of two bicycles and a tractor trolley blocked a narrow alleyway past which cows and mangy mongrels tried squeezing through foraging for food in the ghost village in the Sambha sector, some 60 kms from Jammu.

"We dropped whatever we were doing and simply ran," Kunjalal Sharma, the only Brahmin (member of priestly upper caste) in the village of lower-caste Dalit farm laborers said.

He said his wife, who had just undergone surgery, staggered up from her bed and somehow managed to crawl to safety a mile up the road. His three-year old daughter, traumatized by yesterday's shelling, has still not been able to sleep.

Sharma returned home briefly to try and transport some of his wares to the relief camp 15 kms way. But despite lucrative offers, no tractor owner from any of the surrounding villages, fearful of Pakistani shelling was willing to hire out his services.

Scores of villages along a 70-km border stretch in the Sambha and adjoining Hira Nagar sectors are empty, tractor-trolleys having ferried all valuables to safer locations. Officials said over 40,000 villagers have fled to rudimentary camps set up by the local authorities in nearby towns that are beyond the range of Pakistani artillery guns.

"We have become refugees in our own country," Nandi Devi, an 80-year old widow of Panser village said at the crowded Marheen Camp, 30 miles from Jammu. "The army should fight Pakistan and bring an end to this cross-border firing that has plagued us for the last 13 years and made life a living hell," she added to the cheers of others similarly made homeless.

"We cannot live in constant fear like rats. Pakistan needs to be severely punished," Ram Singh, a retired corporal from nearby Gajnal said. This "torture" has gone on long enough. There will be no resolution without a fight, he added.

Security officials in Jammu admitted that all corresponding villages on the Pakistani side had likewise emptied out under equally relentless shelling by India in a region where it feels militarily vulnerable.

A determined Pakistani thrust, like in the 1965 and 1971 wars, they fear could sever a vital bridge link between Jammu and crucial forward posts to the northwest near Sambha.

"We want to leave, but have nowhere to go," said Shankari whose 30-year old son died after being hit by a stray bullet as he slept, fired from a Pakistani post 200 yards away. "We live in constant dread and want this tension to be sorted out one way or another," she said. "If it means war, we are ready," she added.