Indian and Pakistani troops exchanged fresh fire across their border yesterday as UN chief Ban Ki-moon offered to mediate between the neighbours following an alarming spike in tensions.
Two days after Indian troops claimed carrying out a series of strikes across the Pakistani side, officials said there had been cross-border skirmishes further south.
Although there were no casualties, the predawn exchanges heightened the fear among villagers living along the border, tens of thousands of whom have already been ordered to leave home.
“There was small arms fire and mortar shells fire from across the border in Akhnoor sector which lasted for around two hours,” Pawan Kotwal, a top civilian official in Jammu and Kashmir said.
A Pakistan military statement said its troops had “befittingly responded to Indian unprovoked firing” in the Bhimber sector on the Pakistani side.
The exchanges came shortly before Indian Army chief Dalbir Singh travelled to Northern Command headquarters, which are in Kashmir, to meet soldiers involved in Thursday’s strikes.
Singh was able to “personally compliment officers & men who successfully executed surgical strikes” during his visit, the army said on Twitter.
Since a militant leader was shot dead by soldiers in early July, more than 80 civilians have been killed in Kashmir, many of whom had joined street protests in defiance of a curfew order.
A Pakistan-based militant group then carried out a raid on an Indian army base Uri in Kashmir in mid-September which killed 19 soldiers, the deadliest such attack in over a decade.
Amid massive public anger over the raid, India has sought to isolate Pakistan and has managed to persuade nearly all its other neighbours to boycott a regional summit which was to have been held in Islamabad in November.
India’s claim that it had carried out “surgical strikes” in the early hours of Thursday on militant posts on the Pakistani side of the Kashmiri frontier in turn provoked fury in Islamabad with Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif denouncing what he called “naked aggression.”
A Pakistani envoy, Maleeha Lodhi, met Ban at UN headquarters in New York overnight to ask the veteran diplomat to intervene personally.
Ban called on “both sides to exercise maximum restraint and take immediate steps to de-escalate the situation,” a statement from his spokesman said after the meeting.
The UN chief said India and Pakistan should address differences through diplomacy and dialogue, and offered to mediate.
“His good offices are available, if accepted by both sides,” the UN spokesman said.
Lodhi said “the time has come for bold intervention” by Ban while India’s UN mission said there was “no desire to aggravate the situation.” But aware things could yet escalate, India has evacuated thousands of people from near the northern border in Punjab as well as in Jammu.