As Indian elections begin, Pakistan fears that tensions with its nuclear rival will worsen

BALAKOT, Pakistan – The rocky trail that leads to the war that almost broke out between Pakistan and India winds through alpine meadows dotted with grazing cows. In a pasture is a huge crater bomb, filled with broken blocks. Higher up, almost hidden behind the crest of the ridge, is a building low in blocks.

Wednesday, a rhythmic snoring emanated from the structure. Inside, dozens of boys huddled on wooden benches, swaying and singing to memorize the Qur'an. A religious teacher told the night of February 26, when a series of booms awoke everyone. An Indian military aircraft has dropped four bombs nearby, according to Pakistani officials.

"It was after 3 am when we heard the sounds. There was total confusion, "Mohammed Ajmar, 34, told foreign journalists. He said that he had been teaching at Madrbada Talim al-Qur'an since 2012. The remote site visit, organized by the Pakistani Army's Public Relations Bureau, was the first authorized since the beginning of the year. bombing.

Indian officials said the building was a training center for Jaish-e-Muhammad, a group of Pakistani activists alleged to have carried out a bombing on February 14 in Indian-controlled Kashmir. located nearby. India said its airstrike had killed "a very large number" of militant fighters in the center. Pakistan said that the Indian plane had missed its target, that no human had been injured and that the building was a seminar without any other purpose.

No matter what happened on that ridge, rumors continued to disrupt relations between the two nuclear-armed rivals as elections unfold Thursday in Indian national elections that could see its Hindu nationalist leader, Narendra Modi. re-elected for a second term.

Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, in an interview on Tuesday with foreign journalists, expressed his concern and sadness at the deteriorating relations with India. He added that the Modi government unleashed national hostility against Muslims, a minority of more than 200 million people, and that the very idea of ​​"Muslim" was attacked.

Nevertheless, Khan added that if Modi were to be re-elected, his "right-wing" government might actually be more likely to reach a settlement on Kashmir, which the two countries have affirmed since their partition in 1947. The party of Opposition, he says, could be "too scared" to act decisively on the issue.

Foreign journalists were invited to interview the prime minister and military officials, as well as to visit the site of the Indian air strike, on the eve of Indian elections and at the heart of an internal economic crisis that has left Pakistan in search of international support.

Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan attends a military parade to mark Pakistan's national holiday in Islamabad last month. (Anjum Naveed / AP)

Despite Khan's hopes for peace in Kashmir, some Pakistani and international experts have predicted that if Modi's ruling party was strong enough, India would likely continue to adopt a stern tactic in its contentious part of the territory. new protests from Kashmiri Muslims. Modi has threatened to revoke several laws granting the Kashmiris certain special rights, such as property.

"Kashmir continues to burn and remains a nuclear flash point," said Michael Kugelman of the International Center for Woodrow Wilson Scholars in Washington.

Last weekend, the Pakistani Foreign Minister said that there was "reliable evidence" that India could attack Pakistan in the next two weeks and "organize" another bombing. in the disputed territory of Kashmir to justify such military action. Indian officials have called the complaint "absurd" and "aimed at stirring up war hysteria".

Kugelman said that little will probably change if Modi is re-elected. "We can expect to see the same types of repressive policies in Kashmir", as well as anti-Muslim rhetoric and policies that could give Islamist militants a "pretext for attacks on India", did they -he declares.

According to officials, the government has also begun to work for the integration of Islamic seminaries into the public education system, forcing them to modernize their programs and register with the government. Such actions could help alleviate Indian fears while complying with an international task force that exerts a strong influence on foreign lending – and threatened to blacklist Pakistan in May. does not do more to fight against religious extremism.

"The scope and scope of some of these groups are such that one of them, namely Jaish-e-Muhammad, has almost brought two Southeast Asian countries with the 39, nuclear weapon on the brink of war, "said Rustam Shah Mohmand, former Pakistani diplomat official, wrote Tuesday in an essay of the newspaper Express Tribune.

Mohmand and others feared that the crackdown would soon subside, pointing out that previous efforts had been in vain. This is largely due to the fact that some militant groups enjoy broad public support, particularly from those who oppose India and support the Kashmiri Muslims in the region.

Even some skeptics of the past, however, have stated that Khan and the current leaders of the military seemed to be resolved to implement the proposals contained in a vast national plan against extremism adopted but ignored by the previous government.

India and the United States have repeatedly accused Pakistan of continuing to harbor extremist groups, which it once fed to fight proxy wars in India and Afghanistan. Military officials, however, said they saw these groups as a serious threat to Pakistan's stability, economic development and foreign relations.

In March, General Qamar Bajwa, the chief of the army staff, ordered the army to take measures to crack down on militant groups banned by the United Nations. At this week's news briefings, army spokesman General Asif Ghafoor said that Pakistan had defeated and defeated the Pakistani Taliban, whose forces had were chased from the northwestern border region following military raids in 2014.

"Now that we have eliminated the kinetic threat, we want to eradicate extremism and the roots of terror," he said.

Although military officials promised to react forcefully to any new Indian aggression, they also suggested that their traditional dominance over foreign and security policy would be profoundly altered. They spoke of the importance of loyalty to civil authority and took up several of Khan's comments word for word.

The Prime Minister, in turn, spoke Tuesday of a "new consensus that there should be no armed militia" in Pakistan, and he said that he had "full support" of the army and powerful intelligence services. "We have decided and we have the political will to act," he said.

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