- RANCHI, India (AFP) - India
would wage a war with rival Pakistan if it exhausts all other options to
stem "cross-border terrorism" from Islamabad, Foreign Minister
Yashwant Sinha said.
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- "War is the last option after we exercise and exhaust
all other diplomatic options" to stem militant flow from Pakistan
into India, Sinha said Wednesday in Ranchi, capital of the eastern Indian
state of Jharkhand.
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- "Diplomatically, we have managed to corner Pakistan
in the international arena and further steps are proposed to expose the
latter for fanning cross-border terrorism in India," the foreign minister
told reporters.
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- Sinha said there was no need for India to provide any
further proof to the international community on the alleged existence of
militant training camps in the Pakistan zone of divided Kashmir.
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- "Undoubtedly the terrorist camps are there and it
is good that the world community has (already) realised it. We have convinced
the world players and even people here have now realised that," Sinha
said.
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- Five soldiers were killed Wednesday in a landmine blast
in Kashmir and a bus was blown up on Wednesday, a day after a third round
of voting for the state's assembly.
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- "We will beat terrorism with the support of the
people like we did in Punjab," he said in reference to a bloody drive
for a Sikh homeland that left 25,000 people dead from 1983 to 1992 in the
northern state adjoining Indian Kashmir.
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- India has accused Pakistan of sponsoring militants in
Kashmir, but Pakistan says it provides only moral and diplomatic support
to the "indigenous struggle" in Muslim-majority state, divided
between the nuclear-armed neighbours and claimed in full by both.
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- Sinha called the voter turnout in the ongoing elections
in Kashmir was a "very positive sign."
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- "People are against terrorism. Even Prime Minister
Atal Behari Vajpayee has said that terrorism is in its last stage,"
the foreign minister said.
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- India's Election Commission has placed the turnout in
the third round of voting at 41 percent. Around 600 people have died in
poll-related violence in Kashmir since the balloting was announced on August
2.
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- Pakistan has declared the Kashmir elections a "sham"
and no substitute for a plebiscite in which Kashmiris would decide the
disputed territory's fate.
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- Sinha's warning came a day after India's Deputy Prime
Minister Lal Krishna Advani launched a scathing attack on rival Pakistan,
saying the country was "the epicentre of terrorism."
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- Kashmir has been the subject of two of the three wars
between India and Pakistan since their independence in 1947.
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- More than 37,000 people have died in the rebellion against
Indian rule in Kashmir since it began in 1989.
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