INDIA-PAKISTAN: Rahul Bedi, in New Delhi, reports on the stand-off which has a million soldiers confronting each other along the Indian-Pakistan border
India accused President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan of "belligerent posturing" yesterday and further stoking tension between the two nuclear rivals poised for war, hours after Islamabad conducted the last in a series of short and long range missile tests.
"Gen Musharraf's speech was disappointing and dangerous," India's Foreign Minister, Mr Jaswant Singh, said at a news conference.
He was responding to the Pakistani President's nationwide televised address the night before, even as their armies exchanged heavy artillery fire in the disputed Jammu and Kashmir state that is at the heart of the tense military stand-off.
Nearly 60 people have died in the daily exchange of fire during the past fortnight since tension between India and Pakistan escalated. Thousands of border villagers have been evacuated from either side of the line of control that divides Kashmir between the rival claimants.
Mr Singh declared that Gen Musharraf's address was disappointing, as it merely repeated some earlier assurances that remain unfulfilled, and dangerous because through belligerent posturing tension has been added to, not reduced.
Describing Pakistan as "the epicentre of international terrorism", Mr Singh said Gen Musharraf's verbal denials that Pakistan was innocent of sponsoring terrorist attacks on India were "untenable and contrary to the ground situation".
He accused Pakistan of simultaneously holding the "pistol" of terrorism to India's head and threatening to use nuclear weapons, and dismissed holding any dialogue with Islamabad until it stopped training and financing insurgents and handed over 20 criminals wanted in India for heinous crimes.
In Monday's speech, much like the one in January, Gen Musharraf denied India's claims that Islamabad was sponsoring cross-border terrorism in Kashmir.
He declared that Pakistan did not want war, but was ready to meet any Indian attack with full force and his countrymen's last drop of blood.
"India is being penalised for its patience in exercising restraint in the face of Pakistan-backed terrorism," Mr Singh said, but declined to elaborate when Delhi's threshold of tolerance would be crossed.
Every time India suffers a terrorist strike the world community tells Delhi to exercise control and gives assurances that Pakistan was initiating steps to curb such attacks, but nothing had changed, he declared.
Over one million Indian and Pakistani soldiers have been massed on their common border since last December following the suicide militant attack on India's parliament, for which Delhi blamed Islamabad.
Both sides went into high alert earlier this month following the attack on a garrison in Jammu in which gunmen massacred 31 people, mainly soldiers' family members.
India blamed that attack too on Pakistan-backed insurgents, a claim Gen Musharraf denied in his address.
Mr Singh denounced Pakistan's threats of using nuclear weapons against India and reiterated Delhi's policy of no-first-use of weapons of mass destruction. "India is not talking about nuclear conflict now but Gen Musharraf and some of the ministers have spoken very casually about nuclear war," Mr Singh said. India, he said, has an "unambiguous no-first-use (of nuclear weapons) policy."
Last week Pakistan's railway minister and former head of the country's shadowy Inter Services Intelligence said Islamabad would exercise the nuclear option if its survival was at stake. "If it ever comes to the annihilation of Pakistan then what is this nuclear option for? We will use it against the enemy," former Gen Javed Asraf Qazi said.
Earlier, Gen Musharraf had issued a stark warning that he was prepared to use nuclear weapons in the event of war. "If the pressure on Pakistan becomes too great then as a last resort, the [use of] atom bomb (against India) is also possible," Gen Musharraf said in an interview to a German news magazine in April.
Mr Singh said the presence of US troops in Pakistan was not an "inhibiting factor" in the military stand-off, when asked if India was contemplating attacking Pakistan in the face of dwindling diplomatic and political options. "The physical presence of US troops in certain parts of Pakistan is not an inhibiting factor in policy determination," he added.