India has placed its western coastal cities on alert, warning of attacks by militants striking from the sea; Pakistan, meanwhile, seeks to get foreign powers involved in the row over Kashmir, analysts have told RT.
On Thursday, police increased security at the ports of Kandla and Mundra in Gujarat state, on India’s northwestern coast, following the reports of possible “terrorist infiltrations” from Pakistan by sea. The Indian Navy had reportedly alerted its ships in anticipation of seaborne attacks. It comes amid renewed tensions around the disputed Kashmir region. There has been no official reaction from Pakistan to the reports.
Aleksey Kupriyanov, a senior research fellow at the Moscow-based Institute of World Economy and International Relations, told RT that it is difficult to say whether India’s enhanced security measures are “something based on actual intelligence data, or an attempt to warn off Pakistan.”
The researcher said that New Delhi fears not so much an open invasion by Pakistani commandos but militants from the Pakistani-controlled parts of Kashmir “who were taught how to use boats and had weapons training.” “The Indians are afraid that the 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai can be repeated elsewhere.”
In 2008, the Islamist militants from the Pakistani-based Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) used inflatable speedboats to reach India’s western coast and launch multiple attacks on downtown Mumbai, killing more than 160 people. Indian officials routinely accuse Islamabad of aiding the terrorists. Pakistan vehemently denies this.
Sreeram Chaulia, professor and dean at India’s O.P. Jindal Global University, noted that the coast of Gujarat “doesn’t have a potential for a flare-up,” since the majority of Indo-Pakistani hostilities take place along the Line of Control (LoC) in Kashmir.
Nevertheless, there is a threat of militants crossing the border at a time when Islamabad is actively seeking foreign help in its standoff with India over Kashmir, he said. “Pakistan has an incentive to do something daring and destructive to get international attention and [diplomatic] intervention.”
However, despite some sabre-rattling in the media, regular troops from Islamabad are unlikely to appear in its neighbor’s ports because that would prompt “the world bodies to come after Pakistan,” defense expert and retired Major-General of the Indian army, Harsha Kakar, stressed. “Any indication of a direct involvement of Pakistan could be very damaging” for the nation’s reputation overseas, Kakar said.
All experts RT spoke to agreed that neither India nor Pakistan want the existing tensions to spiral into a full-blown war. Kakar said that if more clashes happen, they will be “limited to parts of Indian state Jammu and Kashmir, where the border is disputed.”
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