New Delhi blamed the attack on the Pakistan-based militant groups Jaish-e-Mohammad and Lashkar-e-Taiba, and demanded that Islamabad shut down the outfits and arrest their leaders.

Indian Foreign Affairs Minister, Jaswant Singh announced that his country was going to both reduce to half its diplomatic staff in Islamabad and to require Pakistan to reciprocate, by halving the number of its diplomats in New Delhi.

India also decided to stop flights by Pakistan’s major airline, Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) bound for India as from first of January 2002, prompting Islamabad to announce similar retaliatory measures.

As the Indian Defence Minister George Fernandes described the situation as very "serious", the two "eternal enemies", now both nuclear powers, moved missiles and other conventional weapons to their borders in the disputed Cashmere region, several countries, including the European Union, Russia, China and Iran, but most particularly the United States, as well as the United Nations, have called on the two countries to show reserve and avoid a new conflict.

The Indian army ordered evacuations of 20,000 people from more than 40 border villages in the Indian-held part of Kashmir, and traded shells overnight with Pakistani border forces, officials said Friday. Soldiers also laid mines outside the villages.

He said he discussed escalating tensions between India and Pakistan with his national security advisers and that Secretary of State Colin Powell had spoken with both sides, urging restraint. Bush also praised Pakistan's president, Parviz Mosharraf, for arresting 50 "extremists or terrorists".

"My government and my administration are working actively to bring some calm in the region to hopefully convince both sides to stop the escalation of force."

Bush said that he had not yet personally telephoned Musharraf or Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee. "I will if need be", he said. Bush made a point of praising Mosharraf's response to India's demand that the perpetrators of the attack be arrested.

But Singh said suggestions by the United States for the two countries to have a dialogue may be well meant, but it was not practical at this moment.

"I don't think advocating of dialogue between India and Pakistan is any kind of evil. I might not accept the advocacy. That is different," he said, in response to a question about US Secretary of State Colin Powell's call for talks.

"Of course, I think the secretary of state is fully entitled to suggest that the two countries have a dialogue. What difference does it make? (But) it is not practical it is not possible. I have told him. He knows it."

The increasing tension between India and Pakistan all the more worries the Americans because if its implications on the effectiveness of tracking of Osama Ben Laden and his organisation, "Al Qa’eda", suspected by the Americans as the main perpetrators of the 11 September attacks on the USA, as the military pressure exerted by India on Pakistan could force Islamabad to re-deploy troops currently mobilised at the Afghan borders for the tracking Taleban and Al-Qaeda fighters.

"By placing Islamabad in a difficult situation, India forces Pakistan to mobilise and beef up significantly its troops in the Easter borders", Mr. Hasan Askari Rizvi, a leading Pakistan analyst said, accusing New Delhi to "undermine" Pakistan’s contribution to the US-led "war on terrorism".

"Any tactical or defensive move by one side may be perceived as a strategic threat by the other and trigger an explosion", said the noted defence analyst, adding: "Only a "diplomatic miracle" can avert looming war between Pakistan and India.

"It is a very, very dangerous standoff. Guns may start roaring any time unless the world powers and the United Nations use their good offices to perform a diplomatic miracle by defusing tension", Mr. Rizvi said.

"A military showdown looks inevitable", another Pakistani political analyst said, observing that India is bent upon it and it is going to be a showdown, leaving Pakistan to choose between the paths of over-caution and restraint and that of retaliation."

Suspecting that the Indian military strategists are seeking to benefit from the situation to prepare specific raids, even a major offensive against Pakistan, Hamid Gul, the former head of the Pakistan’s notorious Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) warned that due to Pakistan’s "stretched military resources", it is absolutely imperative for the country to withdraw forces from the frontiers with Afghanistan to deploy them at the Eastern border in order to "maintain the balance of the forces with India".

Top Pakistani military spokesman Major General Rashid Qureshi said the deployment of forces on the borders had established a "certain momentum."

Asked if the two countries are closer to war, he said: "Any deployment in excess of what is required on the border and the Line of Control will be seen as a threat by the other country."

Since their independence from Britain in 1947, India and Pakistan have already fought three deadly wars over the total sovereignty of the disputed, Muslim-dominated, mountainous region.

The possibility of a new war worries already the markets and, yesterday, Karachi Stock Exchange, once again, plunged with a fall of 3,4 %.

Though cargo can still be moved by train across the border, the closing of transportation links was likely to hurt the countries' $280 million in official trade annually. Another $1 billion worth goods illegally cross the border every year.

First, Dawn editorial entitled:

Closer To the Brink?

The world is growing increasingly concerned about the tense situation developing along the India-Pakistan border. Reports that the two South Asian nuclear powers are moving guided missile units closer to strategic locations and amassing a large number of troops along their borders have set off a flurry of international diplomatic activity aimed at defusing tensions.

With the rhetorical onslaught showing little sign of abating since the December 13 attack on the Indian parliament, fears are that the on-going war of words could turn into a real war between the two neighbours. Washington is clearly afraid that the current standoff could spiral out of control and lead to a terrible conflagration.

The US is also concerned that any conflict in the subcontinent would distract Pakistani troops from playing their role in the on-going US-led war against terror. The US has to play an extremely delicate balancing act between India and Pakistan at this juncture. India has been particularly sensitive to criticism that it is over-reacting, and has accused the US of double standards for asking Delhi to offer proof before it takes any precipitate action.

One obvious attempt to mollify India was the US decision to place two militant outfits, Jaish-i-Mohammad and Lashkar-i-Taiba, on the State Department's list of officially designated terrorist organisations. These, in fact, are the very organisations that are at the centre of the current storm.

India had accused first one and then the other of carrying out the December 13 attack, which they alleged was masterminded by Pakistan. Islamabad, which had immediately condemned the attack, was stung by the swiftness with which New Delhi started pointing its fingers at Pakistan. As war hysteria mounted in India, Pakistan offered to take action against those involved if India could provide proof. The US too chipped in with an offer to involve the FBI in the investigations, but the Indians spurned all such offers. Instead, it retaliated by scaling up its war rhetoric, recalling its high commissioner to Pakistan and announcing the suspension of rail and bus services between the two countries. Pakistan refused to be drawn into this frenzied rush towards a confrontation and did not take retaliatory measures, even when the Indians roughed up a Pakistani diplomat.

As the tension in the region rose, there was a chorus of voices pleading sanity. China's plea to the two neighbours to settle matters through dialogue was met with a curt rebuff from New Delhi. British Prime Minister Tony Blair is due to visit New Delhi shortly and is also likely to urge restraint. The irony is that India's moves come at a time when Pakistan has been showing every inclination to get tough with the extremists. General Mosharraf has expressed his displeasure over their activities on various occasions and has seemed increasingly determined to rein in such elements. Already, Pakistan has taken a number of significant steps, such as freezing the bank accounts of both the concerned militant groups and arresting the Jaish-i-Mohammad leader, Maulana Azhar Mas’ood.

By aggressively demanding action against such groups, the Indians are actually making it more difficult for Pakistan to move against them without seeming to act under duress. It is time the Indians took a cool hard look at the consequences of their actions. No one really wants a war between the two countries at this point. To fuel war hysteria for domestic political gains, as even opposition politicians in India have claimed, is an extremely irresponsible and dangerous way for such a large and important nation to behave. If the Indians want to cash in on the current anti-terrorist climate in order to make some gains in their war against freedom fighters in Kashmir, there are more subtle ways to go about things.

And now "The Hindu":

New Delhi's decision to downsise its diplomatic mission in Islamabad and close India's airspace to Pakistan will effectively hurt the long-term interests of the two countries. The existing undesirable reality is one of only low-key contact between the Governments of India and Pakistan before and after the terrorist attack on Parliament House in New Delhi on December 13.

Yet, the latest action may appear to be a lesser evil than a complete rupture in diplomatic and economic ties with Islamabad. Hence there is room for some sense of relief on this count. However, the Vajpayee Administration will be well advised to treat these "sanctions", which really epitomise a counter-productive policy, as a temporary measure.

Islamabad has indeed lost no time in retaliating with diplomatic measures of a similar kind as India's. On a different but related plane, Pakistan's President, Gen. Parviz Mosharraf, had in fact signalled the beginning of a crackdown against terrorist groups before New Delhi fired its latest "diplomatic" salvo without allowing him any political space or time to act decisively. In these circumstances, the best that the people of India can discern at this new stage is that New Delhi may have reaffirmed their indignation over the terrorist assault on their parliamentary democracy. Yet, the truth is that New Delhi has already conveyed such moral indignation by recalling its High Commissioner from Islamabad only a few days ago.

Realistically, too, the Vajpayee Administration must know that it has little elbow room to mount a serious offensive of coercive diplomacy against Pakistan in a manner that could be consistent with India's own enormous standing on the world stage as an established democracy which is counted on to act responsibly.

New Delhi's reasoning at this juncture has much to do with impatience and a perception that Pakistan cannot be trusted to weed out the anti-India terrorist groups. The argument is that Islamabad has so far taken only "half-measures'' or "non-measures'' inclusive of some "fictitious incidents'' of action against the terrorists. What is worrying is not so much the evident tendency to draw dramatically quick conclusions of this kind as the patent failure of New Delhi to try and imaginatively capitalise on the growing international sentiment against the politics of terrorism.

Far from seeking to ride the crest of the surging international opinion against terrorism and to explore ways of taking the U.N. into confidence at this juncture, New Delhi has opted for "diplomacy" of confrontation with Pakistan.

The prime casualty of this seemingly incremental process is the already fragile system of people-to-people contacts across the India-Pakistan psychological divide. The potential tragedy goes beyond the conspicuous disruption of all direct transportation links between India and Pakistan as a result of two sequential decisions by New Delhi. With Islamabad taking counter-measures, the grim atmospherics of bilateral "diplomacy" can no longer be allowed to ruin the interests of the real stakeholders of good neighbourliness - the people of India and Pakistan.

Editor's note:

Highlights, phoneticalisation of names and places and paragraphings are from Iran Press Service