Anger against Pakistan rose in India yesterday as bodies of soldiers who died fighting Islamic intruders in northern Kashmir were given to their families to be cremated.
The families of soldiers killed in Kashmir's six-week armed conflict, nowhere close to ending, are vowing revenge against Pakistan which India claims is responsible for inducting into the region its soldiers and mercenaries.
One of the more moving tales is that of Capt. Amod Kalia and his 13 men from the 12 Battalion of the Jammu and Kashmir Light Infantry. Their unit had left Kashmir for a posting to Delhi two weeks before the conflict began. However, being acclimatised, they were recalled and ordered to climb a 17,000 ft mountain spur to dislodging the enemy.
Moving up the last 2,000 feet of a vertical ice wall, which took them the entire night to ascend, they surprised a group of some 30 intruders. After the fighting, six intruders and all 13 soldiers lay dead. The remaining 17 intruders had fled, giving Indian reinforcements control of the crucial peak.
So far, 104 soldiers have been killed and 242 wounded, many seriously. The fighting takes place on snow-bound ridges at 16,000 feet.
Pakistan denies Indian's allegations, claiming the intruders are Kashmiri freedom fighters continuing their decade-long civil war for independence which has claimed over 20,000 lives.
India yesterday claimed it had pushed the intruders back some three kilometres from the positions they occupied last month in Dras, Batalik and Mushkoh after crossing the disputed line of control between the two nuclearcapable neighbours.
"The army's progress is deliberate," an army spokesman, Col Bikram Singh, said. It's a hard slog forward and will take time, he added. India, meanwhile, was buoyed by President Clinton telephoning Pakistan's Prime Minister, Mr Nawaz Sharif, late on Wednesday and asking him to withdraw "Pakistani forces back across the line of control" to bring peace.
However, the face-off between the two armies has continued in the plains of Punjab and in neighbouring Rajasthan. People from the border areas have continued to flee, fearing a fourth war between India and Pakistan since independence 52 years ago.
Military camps across northern India are nearly deserted as thousands of soldiers, on a six-hour alert for over a fortnight, left earlier this week for the frontier.
