PAKISTAN/INDIA: The once bustling Indian village of Manihari, 800 yards from the border, has been reduced to rubble by the barrage of Pakistani artillery and mortar shells that rained down on it for nearly two hours earlier this week.
Mounds of freshly-harvested wheat still burnt yesterday, while slippers, utensils and half-cooked food were strewn among the debris indicating a speedy exit by all 313 families following the pitiless shelling.
The mangled remains of two bicycles and a tractor trolley blocked a narrow alleyway, which cows and mangy mongrels tried squeezing past foraging for food in the ghost village in the Sambha sector, 40 miles from Kashmir's winter capital Jammu..
"We dropped whatever we were doing and simply ran," Kunjalal Sharma, the only Brahmin in the village of lower-caste Dalit farm labourers said. He said his wife staggered up from her sick bed and somehow managed to crawl to safety a mile up the road. His three-year-old daughter, traumatised by Wednesday's shelling, was still not able to sleep.
Sharma returned home to try and transport some of his wares to the relief camp 10 miles way. But despite lucrative offers, no tractor owner was willing to hire out his services.
Scores of villages along a 40-mile border stretch in the Sambha and Hira Nagar sectors are empty, tractor-trolleys having ferried all valuables to safer locations. Officials said more than 40,000 villagers have fled to rudimentary camps set up in nearby towns beyond the range of Pakistani artillery guns.
"We have become refugees in our own country," an 80-year-old widow said at the crowded Marheen Camp, 30 miles from Jammu. "The army should fight Pakistan and bring an end to this cross-border firing that has plagued us for the last 13 years and made life a living hell," she added to the cheers of others rendered homeless.
"We cannot live in constant fear like rats. Pakistan needs to be severely punished," a retired corporal from nearby Gajnal said. "This torture has gone on long enough. There will be no resolution without a fight."
Security officials in Jammu admitted that all corresponding villages on the Pakistani side had been emptied by relentless Indian shelling. A determined Pakistani thrust, like in the 1965 and 1971 wars, they fear could sever a vital bridge link between Jammu and crucial forward posts near Sambha.
"We are locked in a battle of wits with Pakistan, where one false step can be the last," said a senior officer at Akhnoor's "chicken's neck" area, 25 miles from Jammu. Surrounded on three sides by Pakistan, it is militarily vital for India. In this area India lost the strategic territory of Chamb to Pakistan that forced an ignominious defeat after fiercely fought tank battles.
"We want to leave but have nowhere to go," said Shankari whose 30-year-old son died after being hit by a stray bullet as he slept, fired from a Pakistani post 200 yards away.
"We live in constant dread and want this tension to be sorted out one way or another." If it meant war they were ready, she added.
