Fighting Flares in Kashmir as War Rhetoric Escalates

KARGIL, India — Indian troops battled Pakistan-based fighters entrenched in rock fortresses on Himalayan mountaintops Friday, as India’s prime minister declared that his nation would win if the Kashmir conflict escalates into full-scale war with Pakistan.

Artillery pounded the slopes of a strategic Himalayan peak, and shells slammed roadside camps in a near continuous barrage across the 1972 cease-fire line that has bisected Kashmir since the end of the last war between the two nations.

India and Pakistan have fought three wars during the last five decades, two of them over disputed Kashmir. The fighting has raised fears that the conflict could turn into another war between the two nuclear powers.

“If a war is thrust on us, we will fight with all our might, and we will win,” Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee said at a public rally in the eastern city of Patna. “These Pakistanis fight us again and again and lose every time.”

Vajpayee said India would hold no more peace talks with Pakistan until the Pakistan-based fighters withdraw from Indian-held territory.

Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif “had invited me for peace talks [in February], and now he has gone back on all we had agreed upon,” Vajpayee said.

On the battlefront, officers said 14 Indian infantrymen were injured when an artillery shell slammed into their position high on a mountain near Dras, 25 miles southwest of the abandoned front-line town of Kargil. Farther to the southwest, along the only road across Himalayan Kashmir, an Indian army camp by a river was hit by 15 shells within five minutes.

India accuses Pakistan of sending soldiers and Afghan mercenaries into Indian territory. Pakistan, which is dominated by Muslims, contends that the fighters are Muslim rebels fighting for independence from the Hindu majority in India.

U.S. Marine Corps Gen. Anthony Zinni, chief of the U.S. Central Command, met Friday in Islamabad, Pakistan, with Sharif to express Washington’s “concerns about ending the fighting in the Kargil area of Kashmir,” a U.S. State Department spokesman said.

The Pakistani Foreign Ministry said after the meeting that Sharif had issued a warning: If a peaceful solution is not found quickly to the dispute over territory both nations have claimed since 1947, “situations like Kargil would continue to erupt, threatening peace and endangering the stability of the region.”

Pakistan, which says its army is engaging only in retaliatory shelling, claims that the U.S. stand is encouraging India to talk of war.

Several Indian Cabinet ministers have spoken this week about the possibility of war. Both nations’ armies have reinforced troops along the Kashmir border, and the two navies are on alert.