India's war cry over Kashmir

'It is time to wage a decisive battle,' PM tells troops on border

India moved a step closer to war with Pakistan yesterday when its Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, rolled into the Kashmir Valley on a surge of jingoistic rhetoric.

With an estimated one million Indian and Pakistani troops in combat readiness along the border, the momentum for a bloody conflagration between these nuclear-armed neighbours seems unstoppable.

Mr Vajpayee held talks with senior Cabinet ministers and military officials in today, as shelling between India and Pakistan pounded villages on both sides of their border.

At least one Indian soldier was killed and seven civilians injured in overnight firing, police said.

Addressing 600 troops at an army camp on the ceasefire line yesterday, the 78-year-old Indian leader said: "Our goal is victory. It is time to wage a decisive battle ... India is forced to fight a war thrust on it and we will emerge victorious. Let there be no doubt about it ­ a challenge has been thrown to India and we accept it." General V G Patankar, the commander-in-chief of the army in Kashmir, said: "We are ready to die. We are resolved to wage war."

The speech by Mr Vajpayee, a moderate Hindu nationalist who three years ago travelled to Pakistan in search of peace and only last summer invited Pakistan's military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, for a summit meeting, was carried live on Indian state television.

Tony Blair said a regional conflict would have "implications for the whole of the world", as Britain recalled diplomatic staff from Pakistan because of unspecified terrorist threats.

Mr Vajpayee's rhetoric was prompted by an attack on an army camp in Kashmir by Islamic militants last week in which more than 30 died, most of them soldiers' wives and children. India says Pakistan trains Islamic militants and sends them into Indian territory to wage "proxy war" on the pretext of aiding the freedom struggle of Kashmir's Muslims, a majority of the state's population.

It is a familiar charge, and Pakistan's formulaic response was repeated in Islamabad yesterday. In a statement, the government said it would continue "Pakistan's diplomatic and moral support for the legitimate struggle of the people of Jammu and Kashmir for the realisation of their right to self-determination".

Mr Vajpayee has raised the level of India's anti-Pakistani rhetoric to a level of shrill bellicosity never before heard. India's customary front of reticence has been tossed aside.

Nor are they merely words. Yesterday more people died on both sides of Kashmir's line of control, the de facto border between Indian and Pakistani-controlled parts of the state.

In the Uri sector, near the old road from the Kashmiri capital, Srinagar, to the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi, an Indian civilian died and five were wounded by mortar and heavy machine-gun fire. In Pakistan, a girl was killed and three people injured.

At least 25,000 people living close to the line of control have fled their homes in anticipation of more shelling. In Punjab, beside the international border with Pakistan, more fertile farmland has been sown with minefields. Five Indian warships have been ordered to sail from the east of the country to Indian waters off the Pakistani port of Karachi. In Kashmir, paramilitary forces including the Border Security Force have been put under direct command of the army.

Yet for all the vast machinery of conventional war in place, the real menace to the world in the latest bout of Indo-Pakistani brinkmanship, the fiercest they have indulged in, is nuclear. Four years ago this month, days after Mr Vajpayee's Hindu nationalist-dominated government came to power, India staged five nuclear tests in the Thar desert of Rajasthan. In June Pakistan followed suit. Both nations were widely vilified, and sanctions imposed on both ­ most of which were lifted post-11 September as reward for their support in the war on terrorism.

India has since declared a nuclear "no first-use" policy, but Pakistan has declined to reciprocate. To the contrary, in fact, Pakistan under General Musharraf has made clear that it will use nuclear weapons in defence of its territory.

Last weekend General Musharraf ordered Pakistan's Shaheen missiles, which have a range of 750km (470 miles), to be moved to forward positions. He said yesterday: "If war is forced on Pakistan, the enemy will find us fully prepared." He went on to add that Pakistan's strategy was "basically one of deterrence". Pakistan's barely veiled threat is that if India breaches the line of control, it would answer with nuclear missiles ­ and the first would be aimed at Delhi.

Many siren voices in India are clamouring for India to call General Musharraf's bluff and settle the Indo-Pakistani dispute "once and for all". The popular excitement is helped by the fact that many Indians have little concept of what nuclear weapons can do. There are new aspects to the crisis that make it uniquely perilous. The most serious is the presence in Kashmir of Islamic militants disaffected from the Musharraf regime, eager to embroil India and Pakistan in a disastrous war.

The clear danger now is that one or two more atrocities will prompt Mr Vajpayee to attack Pakistan. And after all his talk of "deterrence", General Musharraf will have little left in the locker but to launch the third nuclear attack in human history.