Soldiers at the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir. File picture

Pir Bhadreswar, on the Line of Control, Sept. 1: A single bell chimes from this shrine in the Indian Army post overlooking the liquid-green Lam Khuirata valley and another prayer wafts across the Line of Control.

When bells toll here, it means one of three events — an infiltrator is trying to cut across the fence, a soldier is at the temple or a porcupine (or rabbit or jackal or goat or barking deer) has set off the alarm system.

Sunlight through the cumulus clouds hanging over Pakistan-occupied Kashmir in the afternoon marks out white-walled houses, brownstone huts and tinned-roof shelters amid carpeted fields of light green and blankets of dark green forests that drape the ridges and spurs of the mountains.

When the setting was torn last month, however, the alarm was not the tolling of the temple bells or from the anti-infiltration obstacle system.

It was the whistle of a mortar shell, followed by seven others on a rainy night, and the rat-a-tat of small arms.

The firing was from the cluster of houses that the Indian Army calls the village of Barbad Kas, bang on the Line of Control (LoC). On August 16, the mortars took out an abandoned Indian bunker between two small manned posts. Four days later, the action was repeated, this time taking out nothing. There was no casualty on both occasions.

In the records of the army and the defence ministry, the events are marked as the 26th and 27th instances of firing across the LoC this year. They hesitate to call it a ceasefire violation, knowing not if it was the Pakistan Army or some other non-state army that directed the bullets and the shells.

This post at Pir Bhadreswar — commonly known as PB — is 5,600ft in height, beyond the fence that runs along the LoC, a two-hour drive west of Rajouri. It is a strategic point for the Indian Army’s sentries for it affords a panoramic view of nearly 20 villages and a town in Pakistan-held Kashmir’s Kotli district.

In this cluster of sandbagged stone-and-mud shelters around an old shrine to a son of Lord Shiva, the alert status is always high. PB is on a line of mountains that the army calls the “mother ridge” and it is the best lookout for miles around.

The rain has stopped and the clouds clear just enough for Lieutenant Colonel T.J. Singh from Manipur, second-in-command of the 2 Sikh Light Infantry, to point out Khuirata, the largest Pakistani town, the Kas valley, the deserted Barbad Kas village and, just below us, the chilling sight of a frozen conflict.

Dutta and Ring Contour, two of the most forward posts of the Indian and Pakistani armies, face each other halfway down the Gora Gujran spur that runs from where we stand, locked in a conflict from the last century.

They are separated by less than 100 metres — the distance the fastest human (Usain Bolt) covered in 9.63 seconds, a time that is multiples of what a bullet might take — and a minefield in between.

For three months at a time, soldiers of the Indian Army take turns manning Dutta, mud and stone bunkers, with no electricity and lashed by whipping winds. They are always in uniform. The Pakistanis are often more relaxed, slipping into tracksuits and informals, fearing not from India what India fears here from Pakistan.

“We have been asked to hold fire and keep our heads down. We believe the ceasefire is on,” says an officer.

Last week’s cross-border firing was barely 2km west of Dutta across a spur in PoK named BMG after — what else but a weapon of war — the Bren Machine Gun.

For nearly four years, it has been a war-minus-the-shooting. The increasing instances of cross-border firing this year mean that tension is mounting in the frontline again.

Today, however, that is only half the picture of a war in which the two armies are locked.

In the four years of relative quiet, Jammu and Kashmir has been through its best period in two decades. The unrest in Kashmir and the rival one in Jammu have presented newer and more frightening possibilities.

In this western stretch of the LoC, south of the Pir Panjal, about 300km from Poonch at the northernmost to Akhnoor (in the southern), there has been not a single successful infiltration since November last year. The Line of Control runs for 778km.

One reason that infiltration attempts are increasing in the south — the latest one in Khanachak being on the International Boundary — is the walling-up of the LoC here. But now the 25 Division of the Indian Army that is tasked with the walling-up finds itself caught in a conflict behind its back.

The demography of the population from Jammu upwards to Poonch changes steadily from the almost totally Hindu to an almost wholly Muslim rural hinterland with minority pockets.

Gujjar and Bakerwal, near-nomadic Muslim tribes, so far taken as India-friendly, are now targets for jihadi propaganda that has mounted since the disruptions in Jammu by largely Hindu mobs.

“We have been warning of such activity,” says an officer at the division headquarters in Rajouri. “We had to pull out troops from the LoC for a short while — about 16 columns — and use them for law and order. But now it seems some sense has finally dawned on the civil administration,” he says.

For years, it has been said that the Indian Army is caught in a battle on two fronts in Jammu and Kashmir. But over the years, the army has learnt to cope with it. To a limited extent, it was because the flames fanned in the Valley have not singed this part of the state as much. Now that is a real scare.

Back in the 16 corps headquarters in Nagrota, the Brigadier General Staff, Brigadier Gurdeep Singh, admits: “We are stretched,” but adds quickly “there is no way we can dilute our positions along the LC (short for Line of Control).”

Across the stretch, army officers point to the Jammu unrest presenting a possible target for infiltrators — like those through Khanachak who took hostages in a house in Chinnore last week.

“If militants dressed in police uniform attack the protesters in Jammu, the stage will be set for a communal conflagration,” said one officer. “That is something we cannot afford.”

Here in Pir Bhadreswar — a name that stands for both a Sufi saint and a Hindu god — gusts from a strong west wind ripple through the small bells strung from branches of trees. Everyone who comes adds one more bell to the numbers for their mannat, wish. And the prayers that waft across the LoC mount by the hour.