INDIA/PAKISTAN: India and Pakistan carried out tit-for-tat expulsions of 10 senior diplomats at the weekend, deepening the chill between the nuclear rivals who came close to war last year.
On Saturday, Pakistan gave India's acting High Commissioner Mr Sudhir Vyas and four colleagues 48 hours to leave for their alleged "involvement in activities incompatible with their status".
It was responding to India expelling, a day earlier, Pakistan's acting High Commissioner in New Delhi, Mr Jalil Abbas Jilani, who has been accused of funding separatists fighting the Kashmiri insurgency in the north for a Muslim homeland. Four other Pakistani High Commission staff were also expelled for spying.
The two countries halved their diplomatic staff of around 110 each during last year's military standoff, following the December 2001 suicide raid on India's parliament - Delhi blamed it on Pakistan-backed Kashmiri militant groups. Both sides mobilised over one million troops along their common frontier. These were withdrawn last October. Periodic expulsions thereafter have reduced the staff in the respective missions to 47 officials each.
"It [the expulsions\] is simply an act of retaliation. It is unfortunate that Pakistan has chosen to react in this way," said India's Foreign Office spokesman Mr Navtej Sarna. His Pakistani counterpart, Mr Aziz Ahmed Khan, declared in Islamabad that India deliberately wanted to keep bilateral relations tense.
India, which has refused to hold any form of dialogue with Islamabad to reduce tension until it stopped fuelling Kashmir's 14-year old civil war, said it was not "downgrading" Pakistan's representation in Delhi and would grant a visa to the diplomat appointed to replace Mr Jilani.
But security sources dismissed this as "mere posturing " aimed primarily at the international community. " Any normalisation of diplomatic relations, however feeble, will be linked to the levels of violence in Kashmir in summer when high mountain passes between the two sides become negotiable, allowing militants to cross freely into Indian territory," a senior officer said.
India blames Pakistan for backing Kashmir's civil war which has claimed over 40,000 lives. But the Pakistani President, Gen Pervez Musharraf, said last year his country had stopped fuelling the insurgency and blocked all cross-border movement of Islamabad-backed terrorists into the region.
India and Pakistan have fought two of their three wars and an 11-week-long border engagement since independence in 1947 over Kashmir, which is divided between them but claimed by both.