India's Modi says a wilted Pakistan resorts to terrorism

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrives Tuesday for a visit to Kargil in northern India near the Pakistani border.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrives Tuesday for a visit to Kargil in northern India near the Pakistani border.

NEW DELHI -- Pakistan has lost the strength to fight a conventional war and resorts to terrorism, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said two weeks before diplomats from the nuclear-armed neighbors meet to revive peace talks.

"The neighboring country has lost the strength to fight a conventional war but continues to engage in the proxy war of terrorism," according to a statement Tuesday on Modi's website, after he addressed soldiers in the border-state of Jammu and Kashmir. "Indian armed forces are suffering more casualties from terrorism than from war."

The statement puts at risk peace efforts that began when Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif attended Modi's inauguration in May. Pakistan violated a cease-fire agreement along a disputed border 19 times since Modi took power after 523 incidents in the northern state over the past three years, Indian records show.

"It is a broad contour of this government's policy to Pakistan by drawing unambiguous attention to the proxy war unlike the reticence of the previous establishment," said C. Uday Bhaskar, director at the Society for Policy Studies in New Delhi. "It is a message that for talks to succeed India needs a commitment that Pakistan stops support to terrorism."

Modi's governing Bharatiya Janata Party has said it would "deal with cross-border terrorism with a firm hand," a reference to attacks by militant groups that India accuses Pakistan of supporting.

The groups include Lashkar-e-Taiba, which is accused of carrying out a 2008 assault in Mumbai, India's financial capital, that left 164 dead.

Pakistan, which has received $28 billion in U.S. military and economic aid since 2002 due to its support for U.S. counterterrorism efforts, denies supporting militant groups.

The nations' foreign secretaries are scheduled to meet in Islamabad on Aug. 25, the first contact since Sharif's discussions with Modi in May. India and Pakistan resumed peace talks three years ago after they were shattered by the militant attack on Mumbai -- formerly known as Bombay.

Tasnim Aslam, a spokesman for Pakistan's foreign ministry, didn't immediately reply to an email seeking a response to Modi's statement.

The countries have fought two of their three wars since 1947 over the disputed region of Kashmir, which is divided between them and claimed in full by both.

Since 1988, more than 14,000 Indian civilians and 6,000 security personnel have been killed in violence in the region, according to the South Asia Terrorism Portal, which doesn't have similar figures for Pakistani deaths.

Both India and Pakistan regularly accuse the other of violating a cease-fire along the border, known as the Line of Control.

On Monday, Pakistan summoned a senior Indian diplomat to lodge a protest against what it claimed was a cross-border firing incident by Indian soldiers that left a Pakistani civilian dead.

Modi has been courting South Asian neighbors since taking office. He has visited Bhutan and Nepal and Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj was in Myanmar this week after a trip to Bangladesh last month.

"India is committed to strong armed forces," according to Modi's statement. "Peace and security is a pre-requisite for development."

Information for this article was contributed by Unni Krishnan and Khurrum Anis of Bloomberg News and by Shashank Bengali of the Los Angeles Times.

A Section on 08/13/2014

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