India considers tunnel network on Pakistan, China borders

[Naveed Yaseen]

JAMMU: India is considering building deep tunnels along its borders with China and Pakistan in Indian-held Kashmir (IHK) to protect its troops from nuclear, chemical and biological attacks, officials said.

“The Northern Command has mooted a proposal and the same will be discussed at army commanders’ meeting in New Delhi today”, Defence spokesman Colonel DK Kachari said on Monday.

Relations between India and its two nuclear-armed neighbours have improved in recent years, although serious differences remain over their vast Himalayan borders.

The written proposal says “the use of tunnels would help in evading enemy satellites from gauging the exact troop strength and their position in the forward areas”.

Another Indian army official, who wished not be named, said China has already started a large-scale tunnel project on the border between India and China’s Tibetan region. Both India and Pakistan claim Kashmir in full but rule in parts.

Border disputes have plagued relations between India and China for decades, and led to war in 1962, but both sides are forging new ties amid soaring trade and business links.

India says Beijing is illegally holding a slice of Kashmir, while China lays claim to large tracts of the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, and says parts of it once belonged to Tibet. Although India and China have signed a treaty to maintain ‘peace and tranquillity’ along the disputed frontier and agreed to find a political solution to the row, talks over 3,500 kilometres of disputed frontier have made little progress.

India has been pursuing closer relations with the United States, identifying a civilian nuclear deal as the cornerstone of that friendship, a worrying development for China.

But Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has called a China-India relationship an ‘imperative necessity’. India and Pakistan opened a trade link across Kashmir for the first time in six decades in October, a step aimed at reducing tension over the de facto border.

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp...2008_pg1_4