The Indian Prime Minister, Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee, warned Pakistan yesterday that any attempt to alter the disputed border in northern Kashmir state using guerrilla fighters was an act of aggression and would fail.
In a television address, Mr Vajpayee accused Pakistan of using force to alter "unilaterally" Kashmir's 50-year line of control.
Though India was open to peace talks proposed by Pakistan, they must have a specific purpose, he said. "If it was to alter the line of control, then the talks would end before they have begun," Mr Vajpayee added.
A wave of nationalism is sweeping across India as its army battles the Islamic guerrillas in northern Kashmir state.
With few exceptions, Indians across the social and economic spectrum feel Pakistan is actively backing the guerrilla fighters, perched atop strategic ridges well inside Indian territory in Kashmir's remote Kargil region, and must be taught a lesson.
Pakistan denies supporting the infiltrators, though it admitted last week that they may have crossed its territory en route to Indian-held Kashmir.
"There is uniform support for the army's objectives in expelling the intruders," Mr Kuldip Nayar, a member of parliament, said.
The bodies of more than 57 soldiers who have died so far in the four-week conflict have been received with the reverence of war heroes. More than 40,000 people turned out for the funeral of a hitherto little-known soldier in the western town of Ajmer, 250 miles from New Delhi, while a similar number were present at the cremation of two Sikh army men in northern Punjab state last week.
"Nobody should shed any tears for these two shaheeds (martyrs)," the local village priest in Bhatinda district said as he performed the Last Rites. They died for their country.
This patriotic wave is also sweeping the southern Indian states of Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, more than 2,000 miles away from the conflict zone. Many of the officers killed while leading assault teams against guerrillas came from there.
Kashmir's decade-old civil war for an Islamic homeland has rarely impinged on the consciousness of a predominantly pacifist south. "But the arrival of dead bodies of soldiers over the past two weeks has activated nationalist feelings," Mr Nayar said.
Retired defence service chiefs and former senior civil servants appealed to the media to stop criticising the government and the military over the crisis. They said all recriminations should be "overtaken" by the immediacy of ousting the infiltrators.
India yesterday said 221 Pakistani soldiers had been killed in its month-long campaign in Kashmir as it stepped up attacks against Muslim rebels.
In a major shift, the army said the infiltrators in northern Kashmir were mainly men from the Pakistani army, "with a sprinkling of hired mujahedeen to give it a facade of jihad (Islamic holy war)".
