This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

India is urgently seeking the release of one of its soldiers captured by Pakistani troops in Kashmir, the contested territory where Delhi said it had conducted “surgical strikes” on Wednesday night.



Rajnath Singh, India’s home minister, said “all attempts are being made” to secure the soldier’s release. It is not clear whether the soldier was connected with the claimed multiple raids across Kashmir’s “line of control”, a mutually recognised ceasefire line.

Some reports said the soldier had wandered across the line hours after the operation had concluded. Maleeha Lodhi, Pakistan’s ambassador to the United Nations, told al-Jazeera the soldier was captured while trying to enter into Pakistani territory.

Tensions remain high and on Friday thousands of Indians living near the Pakistani border in Punjab were ordered into buses and taken to evacuee camps.

Pakistan’s army has vigorously denied that Indian troops entered territory it controls, saying Delhi is exaggerating what it claims was relatively common cross-border firing for domestic public consumption.



Although India has conducted cross-border raids in the past, it has never announced them so publicly. On Thursday, the Indian army’s director of military operations held a press conference in which he said multiple “terrorist launchpads” inside Pakistani-controlled territory had been targeted.

Pakistan said two of its soldiers were killed during what it described as “Indian unprovoked firing”.



The Indian operation followed more than a week of rising tensions in the wake of an attack on an Indian army base near the town of Uri on 18 September. Nineteen Indian soldiers died in the attack, which Delhi blamed on Pakistan-backed militants, a claim flatly denied by Islamabad.

The latest incident has demonstrated the willingness of India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, to take a hard line with Pakistan. Most analysts had assumed India would not seek to retaliate militarily for fear of prompting a cycle of escalation between the two nuclear-armed states.

Delhi has sought to isolate Pakistan diplomatically, and this week Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Bhutan followed India’s lead in saying they would not attend a regional summit in Islamabad in November.



The crisis has inflamed public sentiment on both sides of the border, with some Pakistani cinemas announcing the cancellation of all Indian films. On Thursday, the Indian Motion Picture Producers’ Association announced a ban on Pakistani actors working on Bollywood productions.

After a meeting of his cabinet on Friday, Pakistan’s prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, vowed to “defend our homeland against any aggression”. He added: “The entire nation is standing shoulder to shoulder with our armed forces.”