India Expels Envoy After Massacre

India ordered the expulsion of Pakistan's High Commissioner to New Delhi last night, raising the stakes as military tensions escalate between the nuclear-armed rivals.

But Indian officials signalled privately that they were not planning 'full-scale war' against Pakistan despite last week's provocative massacre in Jammu in which 34 people died - seven of them children. The officials pointed out that the United States opposed any conflict; American servicemen were stationed at strategic Pakistani air bases; and that India's enormous military machine was not ready.

However, some analysts believe that India is merely postponing war for these reasons. The expulsion is unlikely to satisfy restless hawks within the Hindu nationalist BJP party who have demanded an immediate attack on Pakistan.

'Enough is enough. We should teach Pakistan a lesson,' one BJP hardliner told India's parliament during a debate on the massacre.

Diplomatic relations between the two nuclear-armed rivals are now at their worst since their last war in 1971 and Western intelligence reports warn that the subcontinent is sliding dangerously close to full-scale conflict.

Yesterday's diplomatic rift came after a high-level security meeting between India's Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, his senior Cabinet Ministers and military and intelligence chiefs to draw up a response to the attack.

Both London and Washington have pressed the Indian government not to launch a military strike in Kashmir. The US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, telephoned India's Foreign Minister, Jaswant Singh, on Friday pleading for restraint. The Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, had also delivered the same message to New Delhi. The White House is now rushing its heavy-hitting Deputy Secretary of State, Richard Armitage, to the region.

The latest crisis began on Tuesday when three heavily armed Islamist militants on a suicide mission took a bus to an army base at Ratnuchak, near Jammu, and launched a killing spree. Of the 34 dead, most were the wives and children of soldiers.

India immediately held Pakistan 'directly responsible' for the attack and promised some form of 'punishment'. Two Pakistan-based militant groups, the only two which endorse suicide missions, were blamed. A bar of Pakistan-made chocolate found on one of the militants was used as evidence of Islamabad's involvement.

A fully-fledged conflict has crept ever nearer since December, when India and Pakistan stood on the brink of war after two devastating militant attacks in Kashmir and at the parliament building in New Delhi. Hundreds of thousands of troops took up positions on either side of the heavily mined border.

India signalled its anger by recalling its High Commissioner in Islamabad, V.K. Nambiar, and halting bus and train services to Pakistan. Flights between the two countries were banned and the border was all but closed. Nambiar never returned to his job.

Yesterday Foreign Minister Singh said that the Pakistani High Commissioner in New Delhi, Ashraf Jehangir Qazi, should now leave too 'for the sake of parity of representation'.

Qazi - whose effervescent daughters were a fixture on Delhi's party scene - has been effectively ignored since December anyway. Indian government officials refused to meet him and dealt only with his deputy.

But the expulsion cranks up the increasingly fraught relations between two countries which have already fought three wars since independence in 1947.

Pakistan's military regime was quick to dismiss any involvement in Tuesday's attack, scoffing at the chocolate bar evidence. 'Saying that the three people that they killed were there at Pakistan's behest is such a stupid argument it doesn't even merit a response,' said Major-General Rashid Qureshi, Pakistan's top military spokesman.

Qureshi said Pakistan was ready for talks, but felt it was being pushed towards conflict. 'They are looking for a fight. Time and again they are upping the ante, upping the rhetoric. It is a very conscious decision on their part to increase tension. We will try to resolve everything peacefully, but if we are attacked we will defend ourselves.'

For the second successive day soldiers on either side of the Line of Control, the front line that divides the disputed mountains of Kashmir, opened fire on each other. Thousands of villagers, particularly on the Indian side, have fled from their homes in the past week.