India fears the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan will be a boost to rebels in New Delhi-controlled Kashmir, a largely Muslim-populated region where tensions are mounting.
During this week’s G20 summit in Rome, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi urged the international community to make greater efforts to ensure that Afghanistan does not become a haven for “radicalization and terrorism”.
Since the Taliban came to power in mid-August, Kashmir has seen an increase in tension, with rebel attacks on civilians, security forces attacks on insurgent hideouts and infiltrations across the India-Pakistan ceasefire line .
Clashes between rebels and government forces today left six people dead in the Indian part of Kashmir, officials said. Two militants of the Resistance Front, including a commander, were killed outside the city of Srinagar.
Hours later, armed men killed a street vendor and another worker, and two soldiers lost their lives in a shootout near the dividing line between Indian and Pakistani Kashmir.
The administration of Kashmir has been divided between India and Pakistan since their independence from the United Kingdom in 1947. The two countries, however, claim the entire region, located in the Himalayas, as part of their territory.
For more than three decades, rebel groups have faced the Indian army and are demanding the independence of Kashmir, or its merger with Pakistan.
India does not openly link the responsibility for the increase in violence to the rise of the Taliban to power in Afghanistan, but it has increased its patrols near Pakistani Kashmir, residents of the region and officials of the security forces told AFP.
– Risk of infiltration –
Modi, who also expressed his concerns to US President Joe Biden, declared in September at the UN General Assembly that no country should be allowed to use Afghanistan “for its own selfish interests.”
This comment was perceived as an allusion to Pakistan, the main supporter of the Taliban, since they commanded Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001.
Pakistan, however, has yet to recognize the new Taliban government, but India accuses Islamabad of helping Pakistani Islamist groups Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad, responsible for numerous attacks in Kashmir, a charge Pakistan rejects.
India supported the Afghan communist government until its overthrow by mujahedin (Islamic fighters) in 1992. In 2001, New Delhi helped the United States and its allies to overthrow the Taliban regime. Now, with the return of Islamists to power, India fears new infiltration of weapons and fighters into Kashmir.
“Taking lessons from the past, we can say that when the previous Taliban regime was in power, we had foreign Afghan terrorists in Jammu-Kashmir,” the Indian-controlled region, declared the Chief of Staff of the Indian Army, the General Manoj Mukund Naravane. “Now we have every reason to think that this will happen again,” he added.
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