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The Rediff Special/ Ashok Banker

Pakistan plans to invade India in April 2000

Pakistan intends to invade India in April 2000, revealed a source within the Indian army. In fact, their capturing of Indian positions along the Line of Control in 1998 was only the first step in a carefully orchestrated campaign to take over Jammu and Kashmir completely.

They were not expecting India to react so effectively and to recapture the peaks so soon.

They were still continuing to fortify their positions and move in heavy arms, supplies and training instructors who have been asked to spread throughout India to create chaos when the time comes.

An estimated 1,200 such personnel have already infiltrated the country and are concentrated mainly in the Kashmir valley. Some have been able to travel to Assam and the northeast, others to Punjab, and a few have even managed to reach Gujarat and Maharashtra.

India's unexpected swiftness in taking back its positions was a setback to these plans. But the invasion is still expected to go ahead in April 2000 as planned, and Pakistan expects to capture Srinagar by May.

These and several other details of the Pakistan army's plans were revealed in a top secret file found in the possession of a Pakistani army officer who was killed in one of the many battles during the recent Kargil war.

"Like most of the other Pak army regulars, he was not in uniform," revealed an army source who was involved in the assault. "We identified him by certain items he was carrying. The file should not have been with him at all. It shows how over-confident they must have been."

The officer was probably trying to destroy the vital file when he was killed: The file was charred on one corner and a box of matches was found nearby.

The file itself is fairly ordinary in appearance. It is the contents that are explosive. The army source who revealed its existence said he had studied it thoroughly. "It contained a number of jottings of the officer himself, and it was obvious that he was not as confident of success as his superiors. He seemed to feel that India would offer stiff resistance to the invasion plan." Even a couple of letters by the officer to his superiors, his parents and his brother were in the file.

Other evidence seems to confirm the invasion plan. The peaks occupied by Mujahideen and Pakistani army regulars in autumn 1998 were found to be fortified more heavily than is usually required. Instead of a simple dugout, permanent three-layered bunkers reinforced with concrete were built by the Pakistanis. "So well hidden, you couldn't see them until you tripped over them." Huge caches of arms and supplies were hauled up the steep slopes to these positions.

At one bunker, an incredible 5,000 kg of atta was found, with an additional 2,000 kg of rice, plenty of pulses and grams, and enough ammunition to supply an entire company of soldiers for several battles. And yet, only 12 enemy soldiers were in occupation.

In other bunkers, colour television sets with dish antennas and electric generators were also found in addition to the food and ammunition supplies.

"The bunker in which we found the Pak army officer's body had a CTV that was tuned to Zee News at the time!" said the army source.

"They were preparing not just for the winter of 1998, but for the whole of 1999 as well. And in April, they were going to invade."

While official army sources have repeatedly denied even the existence of such fully-equipped bunkers and supplies, several officers and jawans involved in the actual combat agreed readily with these facts.

Confirmation also came from several local residents of Ladakh villages along the LoC.

One resident of a village along the LoC in Dras district had this story to tell. A former porter for the Indian army, this man had suffered two bullet wounds, one in the leg and one in the back, while carrying supplies to army base camps along the LoC. So when the Mujahideen came down from the mountains last August and entered his village, he was instantly suspicious.

To his surprise, they came to his house. "They had been told by some other persons in my village that I was with the Indian army," he reveals. "They knew I was aware of the routes to all the army base camps and positions."

The Mujahideen asked the porter to guide them to these positions and camps. When he refused, they offered him Rs 30,000 as a fee and a regular income thereafter if he joined them. He asked for time to think about it. Meanwhile, they took up occupancy in the village mosque, where they penned in some goats and chickens taken from their sympathisers in the village.

At the first opportunity, the porter rushed to the army unit at Drass and told his story. He was told to go home. When he persisted and tried to meet the CO of the unit, he was beaten up badly by some jawans. "They were not willing to take my word because they don't trust us Muslims. They think we are all militants," he said bitterly, recounting the incident.

Later, he tried to send a word to the Brigade HQ at Kargil. The now-famous Brigadier Surinder Singh was in charge there at the time. Apparently, the brigadier was just as unsympathetic as the rest.

The porter feared he would be killed by the Mujahideen for not assisting them. But they had managed to get others to guide them to the places they wanted -- for a fee, of course -- and had even supplied these spies with shortwave radio transmitters so they could keep in touch with the Pakistanis after they returned to the mountains.

The porter's tale is a common one. Speak to locals along the LoC and you will hear hundreds of such accounts of actual contact with the Pakistanis as far back as April 1998. Right until the onset of winter last year, the Mujahideen, helped by their sympathisers and paid helpers, moved freely about the region, mapping Indian army positions, strategic and tactical artillery targets, and transporting arms and ammunition to the Kashmir valley.

Some of them bought horses or mules to carry these supplies-available for Rs 3,000 to Rs 5,000 -- and walked alongside them all the way to Srinagar's outlying areas. And some even travelled by J&K State Road Transport Corporation Buses. Post-Kargil, the Indian army intensified security checks along the Leh-Srinagar route, but tons of lethal arms and ammunition had already passed through unchallenged. Today, these same weapons are being used by the militants in the Kashmir valley.

Even members of the Task Force in Kashmir Valley confirm the Pakistani plan to invade in April 2000. An officer in Rashtriya Rifles, one of the three paramilitary units responsible for maintaining the security in Srinagar, revealed that in several "interrogation" sessions, militants and their civilian associates had confessed to an elaborate Pakistani plan to capture J&K within a two-year period and to create havoc in Punjab, Gujarat and Assam over the next five years.

"Their intention was not just to infiltrate, it was to occupy," said this officer. He denigrated the actions of Indian army units in evacuating and then recapturing the peaks in Kargil, dismissing them as the "foolish" acts of "negligent" army higher-ups.

The bitterness that this officer and other Task Force commanders feel towards the Indian army units stationed in Kargil is understandable: They feel it is due to the alleged negligence of the Indian army up there that they are being systematically killed down here in the valley today.

"Who says the Kargil war is over?" asks a BSF major who lost two men in a direct assault by militants earlier this year. "The war is still going on. This is the real war, not the madness that happened over there. We are paying the price today. They are enjoying their PVCs and MVCs and getting their photos in the press."

Senior army officers discount the Pakistani invasion plan while indirectly acknowledging that the plan exists. Post-Kargil, they believe, we are well prepared for such an eventuality and Pakistan's hostile intentions will not translate into reality.

"They will never reach Srinagar," says a Commanding Officer stationed at Mushkoh Valley. "The Pakistani army is good, no doubt. But we are better."

Another senior officer close to Major General V S Budhwar points out: "We don't have incompetents like Surinder Singh in charge now. We've understood the situation and are equipped to react."

The lesson of Kargil may have been a bitter one to learn. But it may have saved a far more bitter possibility from occurring. The prospect of a full-scale invasion.

The Kargil crisis

The Rediff Specials

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