ASIAN EARTHQUAKE: The devastating earthquake to strike India and Pakistan offers a new opportunity for the nuclear-armed neighbours to overcome past hostilities as they tackle a shared humanitarian crisis in the Kashmir region they have long fought over.
Within hours of Saturday's earthquake, India's prime minister, Manmohan Singh, called up Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, and offered relief and rescue assistance, as did his foreign minister.
Gen Musharraf, in turn, offered India help in any way, though his country suffered the quake's worst impact, with nearly 30,000 people dead. Indian Kashmir accounted for around 600 deaths.
During their six-minute conversation, Mr Singh and Gen Musharraf agreed that their respective envoys would co-ordinate disaster relief operations, Indian officials said yesterday.
The two directors general of military operations were in touch with one another via their "hotline", as were local commanders along the Kashmir frontier in an effort to reach an understanding on adopting a humanitarian approach to civilians who may have strayed across the border in search of missing relatives or friends. Such transgressions normally lead to years in jail in the respective countries.
The multi-service integrated defence staff in Delhi is also believed to be readying an aid package for Pakistan, the modalities for which were being worked out by the two foreign ministries via their newly installed telephone hot-line.
An Indian soldier who had mistakenly crossed over into Pakistani territory in Kashmir following the earthquake has been allowed to return home, an unthinkable gesture in the past and made possible by the easing of tension between the two sides following 21 months of peace talks.
"This is an opportunity when India and Pakistan can forget their differences," N.M. Prusty, head of emergency relief at the international aid agency Care's India office said. This tragedy would provide both of them with an opportunity to share their concerns and offer help to each other, he added.
Meanwhile, the earthquake in Pakistan's highly militarised Kashmir region, also home to dozens of jihadi training camps, had "significantly depreciated" its capacity to bolster the 16-year-old Muslim insurgency for independence in neighbouring Indian-administered Kashmir. "The militant groups and their army handlers will now be totally absorbed in relief, rescue and rehabilitation efforts rather than attempted crossings into Indian Kashmir," former brigadier Arun Sahgal of the Centre for Strategic Studies and Simulation at the United Service Institution in Delhi declared.
Military sources said India's national disaster management centre had learned that around 1,000 Pakistani soldiers had died in the earthquake after their concrete-roofed bunkers along the Kashmir frontier in the Uri-Tangdhar sector collapsed.
Nearly 200,000 Pakistani army soldiers are based in Kashmir and in the adjoining Northern Areas.