India tells Pakistanis to leave after Kashmir terrorist attack.
India has told all Pakistani nationals to leave the country by the end of the week after it accused Islamabad of being linked to a terrorist attack that killed 26 men in Kashmir.
The announcement was the latest escalation in a week of deteriorating relations between the two nations. India announced that it was suspending visas for Pakistani nationals as it told them to leave the country by April 27.
Although there are no precise figures for the number of Pakistanis in India, the decision will lead to the exodus of thousands of people if it is enforced. Pakistan in turn closed its airspace for Indian airlines and called Delhi’s suspension of a 65-year-old bilateral water-sharing treaty “an act of war”.
India has blamed Pakistan for offering “cross-border support” to militants who killed 25 Indians and one Nepali man on Tuesday. The attack happened in Pahalgam in Indian-ruled Kashmir, a restless region in the north of the country whose cool, green mountainous landscape has recently become a tourist destination.
The Indian news agency ANI reported that 28 Pakistani nationals returned home from India over the closed Wagah-Attari border crossing on Thursday. Another 105 Indian nationals crossed back into India, the agency quoted Arun Mahal, a Punjab Police Protocol Officer, as saying.
India and Pakistan control separate parts of Kashmir, and both claim it in full. The region has been restless for decades as a violent separatist insurgency has waxed and waned.
The tourists were killed by five militants who emerged from the pine forests around a meadow. It was the worst massacre of civilians in India since the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks.
On Wednesday, Narendra Modi, the Indian prime minister, vowed to punish those responsible for the attack and “pursue them to the ends of the earth”. He summoned Pakistan’s top diplomat and said that he would downsize Pakistan’s high commission in Delhi, expel its military diplomats and close the main land border between the two countries.
India’s accusation that Pakistan supports the militant group, which calls itself the Kashmir Resistance but which Delhi believes is a front for the Pakistan-based militants Lashkar-e-Taiba, has prompted outrage across the border. The Indian foreign minister said his country had found evidence of “cross-border linkages”.
The Pakistani foreign minister, Ishaq Dar, challenged India to produce evidence of his country’s alleged involvement in the attack. “India has repeatedly engaged in the blame game. If there is evidence of Pakistan’s involvement in the Pahalgam incident, we urge them to share it with us and the international community,” Dar said. Pakistan has said in the past that it provides diplomatic but not military support to insurgents in Kashmir.
Perhaps most inflammatory move so far in the tit-for-tat exchange has been India’s suspension on Wednesday of the Indus water treaty. The treaty was signed in 1960 and sets out how the Indus river system, which runs between the two nations, is managed, splitting between them the control of six important rivers.
The treaty has been credited with preventing a full-scale conflict between the two nations over water resources. About 80 per cent of Pakistan’s irrigated water supply comes from the river system.
Maria Sultan, a defence analyst based in Islamabad, told The Times: “This is serious brinksmanship by India and it can spiral out of proportion if India does not recognise that water is a red line. Violation of the Indus water treaty or any efforts to reduce Pakistan’s water supply will be termed as an act of war.”
She was echoing Pakistan, which has said that any attempt to stop or divert the water “will be considered as an act of war” and will be “responded to with full force across the complete spectrum of national power”. Times.
.jpeg)