India will continue patrolling the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir according to laid down procedure despite the recent incident in which an Indian soldier was behead and another killed, top army sources said.
Every day -- and night -- the army initiates over 500 or more patrols along the 700-km-long LoC with Pakistan. Some of the patrols keep vigil ahead of the fencing but well within the Indian territory, some check the fencing and some observe Pakistani troop movement.
Although officially a ceasefire agreement exists between India and Pakistan since November 2003, the Indian defence establishment has said that there were increased violations by Pakistani troops in 2012, 117 of them as opposed to just 61 in 2011.
Defence sources attribute the increase to rising frustration in the Pakistan army because of its inability to push in militants into Jammu and Kashmir. Indian Army troops had killed 73 militants in J&K in 2012 and had not allowed the situation in the Kashmir Valley to spiral out of control.
India maintains that 42 terror camps are still active in Pak-Occupied Kashmir where militants are trained and armed by the Pakistani army and then pushed into Indian territory. Since India has put in place a three-tier counter-infiltration grid all along the LoC, Pakistani army has found it difficult to push the militants in. So very often, the Pakistani army resorts to heavy firing to engage Indian troops so that infiltrating militants can take advantage of the situation.
On Thursday evening too, Pakistani troops fired at five different locations in the Mendhar sector. India responded in a calibrated manner, defence sources said. Pakistan has claimed that one soldier was killed in the firing by the Indian side.
Meanwhile, army sources in Delhi say, the local Indian brigade commander in Mendhar has demanded a flag meeting with his counterpart but Pakistan is yet to respond to the proposal.
