LoC, Working Boundary remain tense

ISLAMABAD: Situation between Pakistan and Indian troops remains tense along the Line of Control (LoC) and Working Boundary in three sectors of Sialkot which on Friday saw 11 civilians killed on both the sides and dozens of Pakistanis injured, some seriously.
Military sources tell ‘The News’ that since June 2015, India has carried out 140 ceasefire violations at the LoC and Working Boundary which saw 22 killed and hundreds injured. Since Friday, death toll now stands at 30.
Defence Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif is of the view that India wants to engage Pakistan in a “low-intensity war”, when he earlier told Parliament that “It seems that India does not understand the language of love and peace. India wants to keep us busy in a low-intensity war or low-intensity engagement on our eastern border. They are pursuing the same tactics of keeping our forces busy on all fronts and the anti-Pakistan mentality of the Indian leadership is now fully exposed.”
Meanwhile, Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan while focusing on Pakistan’s continued fight against terrorism says that Pakistan is “in a state of war”.
On Friday after a bloody battle on the Working Boundary near Sialkot, Senator Sherry Rehman from the PPP asked, “Is India looking for a limited war? But not for a solution to conflict?”
Conflict is certainly on the mind of our neighbour on our eastern border where this month sees, according to an Indian writer, the Modi government is spending Rs35 crore for a month long celebration of the 50th anniversary of the 1965 war.
This has led one young Indian to ask, “Given the highly divergent accounts of victory in India and Pakistan, does it make sense for us to go in for an expensive, triumphalist celebration without first establishing what we are commemorating, and which objectives were at stake in the conflict?”
New Delhi has recently, shunned bilateral engagements between the two countries except for some “limited engagements”, when the two sides meet briefly, with September 6, 1965 a grim reminder of why India needs to throw out “limited war”, from it strategy.
Indians, young and old, have pointed out to confusion when hostilities continue on a daily basis, questioning when it is really a war.
Capt S K Garg, who commanded an infantry company in the Khemkaran sector during the 1965 war, recently corrected some facts for those who easily manipulate history.
Recently, he wrote a letter in an Indian publication saying, “It’s true that on the Lahore front, the Pak Army carried the fight into Indian territory. In Khemkaran sector, the enemy had penetrated 20km. Brig Shammi of the Pakistani Army was killed on some recce. We were on the doorsteps of Lahore but, contrary to belief, could not have entered that city. All along its outskirts, fully equipped bunkers and pill boxes had been dug to check any enemy advance. Thus, no Indian division ever attacked Lahore in 1965. Rather, it was impossible.”
Young Pallavi Raghavan, a fellow at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi, in a refreshing piece writes, “The differences in the two countries’ interpretations of the war’s timeline reveal a deeper issue: We are never clear about just when we are in a state of all-out war.”
Nothing could be truer.
In her own words she brilliantly describes the dilemma of diplomats who wondered in 1965, whether technically the two countries were really at war.
She notes, “It is also worth considering that for several weeks in the summer of 1965, it was, in fact, not clear that the countries were formally at war. In the preceding months, even when the two sides had clashed in the Rann of Kutch, and rhetoric and tensions had been running high, officials, on both the sides closely connected with the developments, were unsure whether their countries were actually in a state of war.
Among the more unusual features of this conflict was also that the two countries’ diplomatic missions never shut down – the representatives did not leave their respective posts for the entire duration of the war. Admittedly, their movements were heavily restricted and all contacts with their respective headquarters severed, but that in itself was not a clear indication of a state of war.
Certainly, the Indian high commissioner in Karachi, Kewal Singh, had some doubts about whether in the legal and diplomatic senses war had actually broken out between India and Pakistan, and, if so, whether he should destroy confidential papers and cypher codes. In his autobiography, Partition and Aftermath: Memoirs of an Ambassador, Kewal Singh recounted how, in the absence of any official intimation, he had dispatched the Indian deputy high commissioner to Pakistan’s foreign ministry in Karachi to seek a clarification about whether war had broken out.
Bizarrely, the Foreign Office in Karachi replied that it would need to consult with Islamabad, where the presidency and the seat of government had shifted, to provide an answer, which it would do in due course. Like Kewal Singh, the Pakistani high commission in New Delhi faced a dilemma: to destroy the cypher codes or not? The deputy high commissioner, Afzal Iqbal, later described his improvised solution: escaping the surveillance around the Pakistan High Commission in Chanakyapuri, he deposited the cypher pads with startled Iranian and Turkish ambassadors.”
Pallavi also notes, “Rather than uncritically accept one version of the narrative, it is important to recognise that these legacies rest on selective interpretations of victory by both sides. In fact, the argument could very well be made that the reasons for the celebration are not unanimously held –that the battles that India acknowledges and claims as victories are not the ones that Pakistan prioritises.”