The order to light up the 'festival' crackled down to Alpha Company post. The post, a mini stone and concrete fort perched atop a hill on the Line of Control (LoC), came alive. It faced the Pakistani army positions-codenamed 'festival', a few hundred metres across the Valley. Unshaven men rushed through a warren of Hesco-lined passages. The gun ports swung open.

The tarpaulins were ripped off the man portable artillery: scope-mounted heavy sniping rifles, each firing a TV remote-sized bullet designed to explode inside an enemy bunker. Shoulder-fired rocket launchers, shooting out mineral water bottle-sized explosive shells designed to punch through tank armour. Heavy machine guns stripped from battle tanks whose dense armour-penetrating rounds could chew concrete.

Alpha post's battlements spat steel fire at 'festival'. One post collapsed in a cloud of smoke. A mission accomplished signal went back. An infiltration attempt by terrorists trying to sneak into the Kashmir Valley had been thwarted. A post had been punished. A point had been made. "Idhar toh hum hi hum hain (we rule this place)," guffaws a burly goggle-eyed Sikh JCO, his moustache waxed into spiky horns.

Alpha Company is one of four units guarding a 20 km stretch of the LoC in Jammu and Kashmir's Rajouri sector. It juts into PoK, fist-like, separated from the Pakistani posts by a dry riverbed. The floodlit counter-infiltration fence, part of a 550-km double row of concertina wires and 12-ft-high steel fence, hugs the rugged terrain, and shimmers like a necklace strung over the wooded hills several kilometres to the rear.

Not a shot has been fired on the Line of Actual Control (LAC) with China for close to half-a-century. The Indian army patrols have had a few physical wrestling bouts with their Chinese counterparts and even some fisticuffs. But here, along the LoC, it's an entirely different story. The chances of being killed by a bewildering array of weapons-artillery, mortars, rockets, landmines and small arms-are high. The temperate scrubland of No Man's Land between Indian and Pakistani positions hides predators more ferocious than the resident Himalayan black bears and leopards-BATs or Border Action Teams of the Pakistan army. Hooded machete-wielding raiders who ambush soldiers and then hack off heads to carry away as macabre trophies. The LoC is one of the last places on earth where men hunt men.

Today is gunfire day. The rat-a-tat of Pakistani heavy machine gun bullets from all around rake the dry rivulets around Alpha Company's positions. The firing has a purpose. The Pakistani posts are trying to deter another commando raid like the 2016 'surgical strikes' by the Indian army that destroyed camps used to launch terrorists along a 250 km LoC frontage. The fear of retaliation hangs rain cloud-like over the boundary. It is just 48 hours after three Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) terrorists sneaked into Jammu's Sunjuwan army camp to attack the families of sleeping military personnel, killing six soldiers and the father of one, shooting a 14-year-old boy in the head and a pregnant lady in the back.

A terse warning of retribution followed from defence minister Nirmala Sitharaman. Six hours after her warning, Alpha Company is bearing the brunt of the Pakistani cease-fire violations (CFV). The bullets play out a staccato Morse code-like message over Rajouri. The young unshaven major at Alpha Company post crouches below a stone bastion cradling his black AK-47 rifle as if to read it. "They're telling us they are waiting," he grins. "They know we are coming." Retaliation for the Sunjuwan attack will come, as Sitharaman says, "in a time and place of our choosing." "We have options A, B and C?" a general counts on his fingers without naming them.

In an underground command post a few kilometres away ringed by steel nets designed to trap rockets, a soldier sits motionless before a bank of giant TV screens. The sets flicker with images from thermal imagers along the LoC. The battalion commander, a colonel, plays back a 'festival' transgression on his laptop. Five ghostly blobs captured by thermal sensors. Several bursts of gunfire from multiple directions. Two figures go down. More gunfire. Only two figures remain. The fifth bolts back towards PoK.

"We are proactive here, not reactive," the Colonel says, sipping steaming tea from a glass covered in a camouflage cloth sheath. "I have denied the enemy the freedom of movement. We have achieved moral ascendancy over him."

The 748 km LoC has been a violent de facto military border between India and Pakistan. Earlier known as the Cease Fire Line (CFL) where both armies stopped fighting at the end of the first Kashmir War in August 1948, it was converted into the LoC by the 1972 Shimla agreement. It has since been a boundary demarcated by bullets until the guns fell silent after the November 23, 2003, ceasefire. Last year was the most violent year along the LoC in the decade-and-a-half since the 2003 ceasefire. And with 980 ceasefire violations (860 on the LoC and 120 on the international border), it was also the most violent year since then. There have been 244 CFVs by the Pakistani army across the LoC this year alone, claiming the lives of nine Indian soldiers.

The firing by Pakistani positions also covers infiltration by terrorists as its deep state seeks to inject foreign terrorists into the Valley. The Rajouri unit, it would seem, stands at the crossroads of a history which seems to have changed little in 70 years. In 1947, a little distance from the spot, tribal 'raiders' from Pakistan's lawless North West Frontier Province in grass sandals and salwars hefting bolt action rifles, raped and looted their way towards the Kashmir Valley. Today, it is an unending army of expendables-brainwashed youth from dirt-poor homes in Pakistan's most populous Punjab province carrying backpacks and slinging assault rifles to wage a so-called holy war in the Valley. The pawns in this outsourced war have changed. The player is the same. The Pakistan army and the ISI's notorious 'S branch', tasked with waging cross-border war.

From the clouds of gunsmoke and the debris of collapsed border posts has emerged a new unnamed Indian army strategy to counter this proxy war, the coercive end of the Modi government's 'talks and terror can't go hand in hand' hard line with Pakistan. The 'proactive strategy', as one general calls it, is different from the earlier 'reactive strategy'-to retaliate only to specific incidents of fire. "Earlier, it was bullet for bullet," says a general in the Northern Command. "Now, it is a hundred rounds for every round he fires."

There is possibly some truth in his statement. Last December, a Pakistani foreign office spokesperson accused the Indian army of over 1,300 ceasefire violations, over 60 per cent more violations than India blames Pakistan for. India lost 19 soldiers and BSF troopers along the LoC and international boundary in 2017 and 12 personnel at the same locations this year. Pakistan has not supplied figures for its troop losses. The army claims to have inflicted more losses across the border. "They have suffered three or four times more than us," army chief General Bipin Rawat told the media on January 12 this year.

The LoC is the only place on earth where two nuclear-armed countries routinely shoot at each other. There is, however, no possibility of this spilling out into all-out war, the army says. The 'No War No Peace' action will be confined to the LoC. The proactive philosophy of military operations percolates from the giant map-lined operations rooms in the Northern Command's headquarters in Udhampur to stone bunkers along the LoC. Ground commanders are free to inflict punishment as they deem fit. The proactive policy has been built on the carcass of the 2003 ceasefire which now exists only in name.

Defence minister Nirmala Sitharaman with Sunjuwan attack victim Shahzada Khan, rifleman Nazir Khan's wife, who delivered a baby later, Feb. 12, 2018.

The army's logic is this-Pakistan didn't honour its solemn January 8, 2004, declaration 'not to permit any territory under Pakistan's control to be used to support terrorism in any manner'. Now, it has to face a war of attrition. "It's very simple really," says a brigadier whose orders can rapidly deliver tonnes of ordnance across an 80 km LoC stretch. "Stop the terrorists," he says, shrugging and holding out his arms, "we'll stop the firing."

This policy might not sound very different from the policy of punitive fire assaults using artillery and small arms after the 1999 Kargil War. It was a response to the Pakistani army stepping up support to cross-border terrorism that climaxed with the brazen December 13, 2001, attack on India's Parliament. The army sought the Vajpayee government's permission to launch cross-border retaliatory raids against terror training camps. They were turned down. 'Denied permission to conduct trans-LoC operations (now called surgical strikes), the army's only option in Northern Command was to "punish"-using direct and indirect fires-the Pakistan army on the LoC for its continued support to the terrorists,' writes then northern army commander Lt Gen. Rustom K. Nanavatty in his 2013 book, Internal Armed Conflict in India.

The ceasefire turned the tables on the Indian army. 'In a single clever move, Pakistan had trumped India,' Nanavatty writes. It negated the effects of India's military coercion along the LoC, continued supporting terrorists by 'denying' its involvement. India, on the other hand, while agreeing to a ceasefire, failed to grasp an opportunity to declare a punitive policy wherein it reserved the right to respond militarily as appropriate, to any hostile act by Pakistan in the future.

The new policy, the army says, reverses this critical loophole. The army now routinely launches fire attacks along the LoC for outrages like the beheading of Indian soldiers and for terrorist attacks.

The army says the post-2016 proactive strategy is different. Not only have the curbs over trans-LoC operations been lifted, the volume of firepower too has gone up. There are now increasing fire assaults-light artillery and mortars designed to destroy posts along the Pakistan side. Alpha Company's secret weapon is an I-tank or Infantry-tank, a retired T-55 battle tank driven up to the LoC and used as a mobile pillbox, its 100 mm gun providing devastating direct fire.

Here is also an unpredictability to the cross-border raids, the most recent being the one in late December following the deaths of an Indian army major and three soldiers on December 23 last. The 'surgical strikes' were designed to signal the government's resolve in tackling cross-border terror. The army says it gets frequent calls for ceasefire from the Pakistan side and the issue was reportedly raised in the talks between India's NSA Ajit Doval and his Pakistani counterpart, Lt Gen. Nasir Khan Janjua (retired), in Bangkok on December 26 last year.

Publicly, the Pakistani army denies losing soldiers in firing, a phenomenon which the Indian army attributes to their ability to control the discourse. This silence is precisely the reason analysts say the Indian army's proactive policy is flawed. The lack of strategic options has trapped the army in an endless cycle of retaliation and counter-violence. "Loss of lives do not make a difference to the Pakistan army," says Ajai Sahni, executive director, Institute for Conflict Management, "unless there is something far more harmful you can do at the strategic level of the country or the army."

The policy has drawn blood on the border but it has failed to deter the Pakistani deep state from launching terror attacks. The attacks continued, spilling out into the hinterland in Punjab through attacks in Dinanagar in 2015 and the Pathankot air base on January 2, 2016, and, more recently, the February 10 outrage at the Sunjuwan camp. The army argues that while the proactive strategy might appear short-sighted and tactical, it is one part of a larger government policy-including a diplomatic push to isolate Pakistan over terrorism-which could produce strategic benefits, an end to Pakistan's support for terrorism. The policy comes at a time when General Headquarters Rawalpindi is confronted with multiple new worries-economic, internal and external. A hostile US administration under President Donald Trump has publicly decried Islamabad's doublespeak on terrorism and there's been an ebb in militant violence and stone pelting in Kashmir. Last year, security forces killed 213 militants, including 86 local and 127 Pakistani militants.

The downslide in Pakistan-Afghanistan ties with Afghan officials blaming Islamabad for giving sanctuary to the Taliban who killed over 200 people in bomb attacks in Kabul has opened up the prospect of the army there fighting on two fronts-the hammer of India's LoC operations against the anvil of a disturbed Afghanistan front. "We have brought Pakistan under sustained pressure. Give this strategy another year. Let's see how the Pakistan army copes with it," says the general in Northern Command. A dangerous game of 'chicken'. Whoever blinks first, it won't be the men of Alpha Company.