Defence minister calls Pakistan an ‘aggressor’ and threatens retaliation for what he termed unprovoked attacks

This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

India’s defence minister has warned that Pakistan would pay an “unaffordable price” if the neighbouring state did not stop shelling in the disputed Kashmir region.

Artillery, rifle and mortar fire continued on Thursday as the worst outbreak of cross-border violence in a decade showed no signs of fading.

Arun Jaitley called Pakistan an “aggressor” and accused it of making unprovoked attacks on Indian-controlled Kashmir. He threatened heavy retaliation. “If Pakistan persists with this adventurism then our forces will continue to fight,” he told a news conference in Delhi. “The cost of this adventurism will be unaffordable.” He did not give more details.

Both India and Pakistan accuse the other of starting the new bout of fighting, and the border truce that has largely held since 2003 is starting to look increasingly shaky.

In total, nine Pakistani and eight Indian civilians have been killed along a 200km (125 mile) stretch of border.

Almost 20,000 Indian civilians have fled their homes to escape the fighting, taking refuge in schools and relief camps.

Hopes of better relations between India and Pakistan were raised when the new Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, invited his Pakistani counterpart, Nawaz Sharif, to his inauguration in May. However, contact has now been broken off and any chance of progress towards normalising ties appears distant.

Senior Indian officials from the ruling Bharatiya Janata party have made clear that they want to mark a distinct change from the policies of the previous government, led by the centre-left Congress party. In opposition the BJP repeatedly criticised Congress for “appeasing” Pakistan.

“We want to assure the nation we will not let it down,” said Rajnath Singh, the Indian home minister.

In Pakistan, the defence minister, Khawaja Asif, said his nation was fully capable of responding to any Indian aggression, though added that Islamabad did “not want to convert border tension … into a confrontation”.

Both countries claim all of Kashmir, a former princedom renowned for its natural beauty that was split between them shortly after they won independence from Britain in 1947. The dispute has been a major cause of tension in south Asia, provoking two wars.

Ajai Sahni, of the Institute of Conflict Management thinktank in Delhi, downplayed the significance of the latest exchanges of fire, which he said were “an annual ritual”.

“For them [Pakistan], it is basically seen as a last opportunity to push through as many infiltrators as possible before the onset of the bone-chilling winters,” he told AFP news agency. India has long accused Pakistan of violating the ceasefire pact to push armed fighters into the Kashmir from training camps sited across the de facto border.

Pakistan maintains that it does its best to prevent incursions into India-administered Kashmir and that it shut down such camps more than a decade ago.

Ajai Shukla, an analyst and former Indian army officer, said that infiltration was not the aim of the Pakistani army as fighters could use all-weather routes into India year round. Hostilities made it easier for troops on the border to deploy firepower locally without reference to their chain of command, he said.

Instead, Shukla argued, the recent fighting had been prompted by the desire of the most senior commanders of the Pakistani army to bolster their internal prestige after launching a controversial campaign to wipe out groups of Islamic militants in the west of their country..

“Their real focus is elsewhere but they don’t want to be accused of being stooges for the US so take on the ‘big bad enemy’ of India,” Shukla said.

India held a meeting on Wednesday of its top security officials to discuss how to handle the conflict. Pakistan’s Sharif has called a similar meeting on Friday.

“Everything will be fine soon,” Modi told reporters after a meeting with India’s air chief late on Wednesday. The terse sentence is all Modi has so far said publicly.

Channels set up to lower tensions when hostilities break out between the nuclear-armed neighbours have not been used this time.

No meetings of senior officials at the border, as occurred during previous spikes in violence, have been arranged, and there has only been one phone call between the two armed forces.

Major General Khan Tahir Javed Khan, the Pakistani officer responsible for the section of the border where the violence has broken out, said he had been trying to meet his Indian counterparts since the exchanges of fire began, but they would not return his calls.

“You need a strict discipline to be imposed by both sides and that only happens if there is a commitment from the leadership to do that,” said Talat Masood, a retired general in the Pakistan army. “It seems right now there is a lack of commitment on both sides to rein it [in].”

Sharif, who took power last spring, has angered members of Pakistan’s powerful military by backing closer ties with India, particularly in the commercial sector. He has been weakened by recent political protests in Islamabad aimed at unseating his government.

Modi has an unshakeable dominance in parliament’s lower house but faces key state elections in coming weeks.

However, though the language used by officials in Delhi was tougher, the actual military response was similar to previous clashes, Shukla said.

Some commentators in the region have raised the prospect of increased tensions in Kashmir as most US and other international troops leave Afghanistan. They argue that Islamic extremists currently fighting there will transfer their attentions to the conflict with India rather than battle Afghan government forces, who are fellow Muslims.

Despite a slight increase last year, overall levels of violence are lower now in Kashmir than at almost any time since an insurgency that pitted young Muslim Kashmiri Islamists and separatists, and later extremists from Pakistan too, against Indian security forces first flared more than two decades ago.

In total, more than 50,000 militants, soldiers, police and civilians are thought to have died in the fighting in India’s only Muslim-majority state.