2 major Indian ports on alert over ‘Pakistani trained commandos’ but will Islamabad attack?

At least two of India’s major ports were alerted over a potential intrusion by suspected Pakistani-trained commandos. Analysts told RT that New Delhi indeed fears this scenario but the alert may also be a warning to Islamabad.

Security was beefed up at the Kandla and Mundra ports in northwestern Gujarat state, police announced on Thursday. The measure was triggered by an intelligence report suggesting that groups of Pakistani commandos or militants supposedly trained by the Pakistani military may use sea route to cause “disturbance or terrorist attack” in the area, local media reported.

The developments comes amid heightened tensions between India and Pakistan over the disputed region of Kashmir. New Delhi recently revoked its decades-long autonomy in the name of better integration, increased security and economic development, triggering an outcry from Islamabad.

Attempt to 'warn off' Pakistan

Now, India fears that “Pakistan will sneak in through the international border and carry out an attack” elsewhere as the tensions between the two neighbors are running high, Sreeram Chaulia, professor of international affairs at Jindal Global University, told RT. “There is always a potential threat of infiltration through the international border. India has been alerted to that possibility.”

Essentially, New Delhi fears another terrorist attack similar to the one that took place in 2008, when Islamist militants from the Pakistani-based Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) used inflatable speedboats to reach India’s western coast and launch multiple attacks on downtown Mumbai, killing more than 160 people.

Aleksey Kupriyanov, senior research fellow at the Moscow-based Institute of World Economy and International Relations, agrees. It is not so much an open invasion by some Pakistani commandos but actions of the militants from the Pakistani-controlled parts of Kashmir “who were taught how to use boats and had weapons training” that New Delhi is concerned about, he told RT.

It is difficult to say whether India’s enhanced security measures are “something based on actual intelligence data, or an attempt to warn off Pakistan,” Kupriyanov added.

Full-scale war is unlikely

In fact, the analysts believe neither side is really interested in starting a full-scale military conflict right now. India has just started integrating Kashmir and would very much like it to go smoothly without any undue foreign interference, as Chaulia put it.

Pakistan is also in no position to start a war. Islamabad received a $6 billion bailout package from the IMF in May and it is still in an “extremely dire economic situation,” according to the analyst.

If one looks at it from a rational point of view, they are neither prepared for a war, nor capable of starting it.

Apart from that, sending any regular military forces to India might cost Pakistan dearly in terms of its international reputation and undermine its own efforts to garner support for its position on Kashmir, Retired Major General Harsha Kakar believes.

“[There is] no chance that Pakistan will send their military in there because the moment … anyone of them is caught or it is determined that it is the military, the world … would come after Pakistan,” he told RT.

What Pakistan might be really after is not an intrusion into India’s territory, which could be followed by retaliation from an economically and militarily superior neighbor, but an unconventional way to internationalize the Kashmir issue, the analysts believe.

Diplomatic efforts to elicit international reaction to India’s actions through the UN and various global forums have so far been futile, Chaulia said, adding that Islamabad is apparently now looking for an “unconventional Plan B”, which is basically to provoke India into some harsh measures and “then call for global intervention.”

Such developments might be a psychological war, Kupriyanov said, pointing to the earlier reports in the Pakistani media about a possible Indian incursion into the Pakistani-controlled part of Kashmir.

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