India/Pakistan: Shelling is 'ominous sign of war'
Overnight mortar shelling between Indian and Pakistani troops had border villagers convinced today that war is coming.
Villagers fled with everything from their beds to their clothes, bringing the estimated number of migrants to 10,000 since India and Pakistan began moving troops and weapons to their 1,100 mile border.
Tens of thousands of soldiers, squadrons of fighter jets, artillery and ballistic missiles face each other along the frontier that extends from the Himalayas in the north through the Thar Desert to the Arabian Sea in the south.
‘‘The war is about to break out,’’ said Sumitra Devi, in her 60s, lodged in a dilapidated school at Koota in Kashmir state, with her belongings in a corner and her sons and grandsons around her.
Having seen her house demolished in the last war between India and Pakistan in 1971, Devi said she was already packed when soldiers came to the village of Mangoo Chak yesterday and told people to move out.
Evacuated villagers spoke about when, not if, India and Pakistan would go to war for a fourth time since they were separated at independence from Britain in 1947.
‘‘There is no measuring scale that we have to say how near or how far we are to war,’’ Indian Foreign Minister Jaswant Sing said as he announced the latest sanctions against Pakistan last night. ‘‘I will just say this: Don’t worry. We are ready.’’
In Pakistan, a spokesman for President General Pervez Musharraf’s military government offered similar sentiments: ‘‘We have the capacity to react and retaliate in all conceivable ways,’’ said General Rashid Quereshi.
The troop buildup and the tit-for-tat bans on air flights and reduction of embassy staff were the worst since the 1971 war.
After two days of relative calm, the armies fired mortars at each other for five hours overnight in the Poonch sector along the 1971 ceasefire line that divides Kashmir between India and Pakistan.
An Indian army spokesman said there was also intermittent small-arms fire across the international border, but exchanges died down this morning.
India accuses Pakistan of responsibility for the December 13 suicide assault on Parliament, in which nine Indians and five attackers died. Pakistan denies having anything to do with the raid.
Both sides yesterday banned its rival’s airlines to overfly its territory.
India also ordered half of the Pakistan High Commission staff to leave in 48 hours, halved its own staff in Islamabad, and restricted remaining Pakistani diplomats to the city limits of the capital, New Delhi.
Pakistan responded in kind, but Indian airlines are not affected as they do not fly to Pakistan, or over it, because of security concerns.
India has also banned train and bus services to Pakistan - a move that hits ordinary Indians and Pakistanis who have maintained ties of family and friendship despite 53 years of separation.
The last few trains and buses were selling out of tickets as weeping passengers many of them old, seeing their relatives for perhaps the last time cut short once-in-a-lifetime visits and headed home.
‘‘I had come here to stay for two months but now I’m going back just after seven days,’’ an elderly Indian woman, Amina Begum, said as she boarded the train in Lahore, Pakistan. She held onto the hand of her brother, Tanveer Ahmad, 62, whom she had come to see after 53 years.
‘‘He used to talk to me by phone, but it’s the first time I had come here,’’ Begum said. She had hoped Tanveer would someday attend her funeral in India.
‘‘Now I don’t think he will be able to see me after my death,’’ she said.
