India has evacuated 10,000 villages near the border with Pakistan on Friday, a day after carrying out ‘strikes’ along the frontier in Kashmir, escalating tensions between the nuclear-armed neighbours.
Authorities in northern Punjab state said they were evacuating villages within 10 kilometres (six miles) of the border following Thursday’s raids, which provoked furious charges of “naked aggression” from Pakistan.
Indian and Pakistani troops regularly exchange fire across the the Line of Control (LoC) in Kashmir, but sending ground troops over the line is rare.
Islamabad dismissed the talk of surgical strikes as an “illusion” and said two of its soldiers had been killed in small arms fire. Indian media and sources said Friday that an Indian soldier had been captured after “inadvertently” crossing the LoC in the Himalayan region, although officials on both sides of the border declined to comment.
Large-scale evacuations were organised in Punjab state, which neighbours Jammu and Kashmir, where thousands of people were being moved away from the heavily secured border. Images from the state showed people piling bedding and cooking equipment onto trailers and cramming into crowded buses as security forces stood guard.
The Punjab government said it was setting up special camps for evacuees in the area. The Indian army’s surprise announcement Thursday that troops had carried out strikes sent stocks sliding, but the country’s media broadly welcomed the move.
