Pak bid to fuel separatism in Valley keeps border hot: BSF

Pakistan’s “implicit bid” to fuel separatism in Kashmir is keeping the India’s border with the neighbouring country “alive and dangerous”, the top commander of Border Security Force (BSF) said on Thursday.

“Pakistan’s strategy of waging proxy wars, neighbouring areas flourishing as markets for arms and drugs, systematic use of fake Indian currency notes for funding terrorism and an implicit bid to fuel separatism in Kashmir has kept this (Indo-Pakistan) border alive and dangerous,” BSF Director General DK Pathak said at a BSF conference organised on ‘Border Management in India Challenges and Options.’ 

He added the “slow withdrawal of NATO forces, increasing interest of China in both Pakistan and Afghanistan and the ever-changing jihadi landscape of this region and beyond has challenged us to review our strategies”.

BSF guards the International Border (IB) along Pakistan as a fully-independent unit but works under the operational command of the Army at the Line of Control (LoC) in Kashmir. Pathak said similar challenges, but of a different nature, were facing the country’s largest border-guarding force in the eastern theatre, where it is responsible for securing the 4,096-km Indo-Bangladesh border. “The dimensions of challenges on India-Bangladesh and India-Pakistan borders are dynamic and diversew," he said.