INDO-PAK STRIFE CONTINUES

Indian defence forces continued to shell and air strike Pakistan-backed infiltrators in the border areas with Pakistan in north India. Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee at the time of writing had issued a warning to the Pak insurgents that if they didn't move out on their own they would be thrown out by the Indian army. He added that the country was open to war but he would prefer Pakistan to take effective steps to de-escalate the tension. The toll on both sides is in the hundreds officially, though it could be in thousands unofficially.

The terrorists had over the past few months captured and illegally occupied observation posts on the Indian side of the border with its neighbour in the high mountains while Vajpayee was trying to make peace with his Pakistani counterpart Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. The two countries had a few decades ago demarcated what would be Indian and Pakistan territory along what has come to be called the line of control (LoC).

The Indian government during the week released a taped telephone conversation between two chiefs of the Pakistan army, which, it says, proves that the Sharif government was kept in the dark by the Pakistan armed forces about the plan to encroach on Indian territory. Indian officials also raised a protest over the treatment meted out to six soldiers who had been captured and tortured in a gruesome manner before being killed by the Pakistani army. Pakistan foreign minister Sartaj Aziz paid a short visit but the talks fetched no solution as his government refused to budge from its position that the LoC was not clearly demarcated between the two countries.

At the time of writing Indian external affairs minister Jaswant Singh was in China to pursue bilateral talks with the Asian power. Earlier, Pakistan's Aziz had also jetted to China to Beijing to discuss his country's stand on the Kargil issue.

Meanwhile the ban on Pakistan TV continued to get support from the cable TV trade on the whole in India, though some cable operators in Srinagar complained they had been attacked and that grenades were hurled in their headends for blacking out PTV. Indian media critics have also chastised the Indian government for banning PTV (see voices). Not that the Pakistan government has been sitting still: it too is selectively blocking India's viewpoint in the media. It has also alleged that an army patrol has gone missing close to the area of conflict.

The US has said that the matter has to be resolved between the two countries and that the LoC should be respected. As have several other European nations. The US has gone ahead and lifted the economic sanctions - while retaining technological and scientific restrictions - that had been imposed on both India and Pakistan when they had conducted nuclear bomb tests last year.