‘Ceasefire' extended till Sunday, claims Pak; no word from India yet
NEW DELHI: India and Pakistan on Thursday decided to continue their
confidence building measures
(CBMs) to gradually reduce the high alertness levels between the rival militaries ranged against each other on the
as well as the international boundary on the western front.
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After Indian director-general of
military operations
Lt General Rajiv Ghai and his Pakistani counterpart Major General Kashif Abdullah reached the understanding on May 10 to cease
cross-border hostilities
, the CBMs are being strengthened to ensure neither side 'fires or initiates any aggressive and inimical action', an officer said.
Pakistani foreign minister
Ishaq Dar
told the media that the
Pakistan Army
had agreed to extend the ceasefire with India till Sunday during a phone call between the two DGMOs on Thursday.
There was, however, no clarification from the
on this.
India has repeatedly stressed that Operation Sindoor has only been 'paused' and the armed forces are maintaining full operational readiness to respond to any misadventure from Pakistan.
India had earlier asked Pakistan to desist from any further aggressive action along the western front and reduce the number of its troops and heavy weapon systems mobilised in forward locations.
Both sides had agreed to consider immediate measures to ensure troop reduction from the borders and forward areas during the May 10 understanding. After the Pahalgam massacre, Pakistan has moved several reserve Army formations, tanks and Chinese-made SH-15 self-propelled 155mm howitzers closer to LoC and IB. India, of course, had made 'mirror deployments' of its forces, as reported by TOI earlier.
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The Hindu
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How will Israel-Iran conflict impact India?
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Time of India
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Time of India
an hour ago
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Sam Dalrymple was set for a career in particle physics, until a family trip to Afghanistan to visit the remains of the Bamiyan Buddha rerouted him into history. He started a virtual reality project connecting Partition survivors which, in turn, inspired, his debut book ' Shattered Lands ' tracing the unravelling of the Indian empire. In an interview with Sunday Times, he talks about why our complex pasts shouldn't be ignored Several years ago, you co-founded Project Dastaan connecting those displaced by the 1947 Partition through virtual reality. Was it Dastaan that sparked off this deep dive into five partitions or something else? Dastaan was very much the origin of the book. In 2018, my college friends and I began reconnecting individuals displaced in the 1947 Partition of India, the largest forced migration in history, to their ancestral villages through VR. 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Both the LoC and the entire stretch of the India-Pakistan Border from the Arabian Sea to Sri Ganganagar — collectively 81% of the present India-Pakistan border fence — result from the decisions of seven local princes and have nothing to do with Radcliffe. Thirty-six per cent of the border with East Pakistan (modern Bangladesh) was made by another ten. Had states like Jodhpur joined Pakistan, or had states like Bahawalpur joined India, the border would look very, very different. The chapter on the Arabian Peninsula ties a global moment — the British withdrawal from Aden (now in Yemen) — to a personal story about Dhirubhai Ambani. How did that shape the trajectory of Reliance? We often forget today that Aden was the Dubai of the 1960s. It was the great business hub of its time, and this remained the case right until 1967 when the British pulled out and the revolutionary NLF took over. Dhirubhai Ambani had worked in Aden until the late 1950s, and after the British evacuation from Aden, he found himself perfectly placed to hire his dispossessed colleagues and found use of 'a ready-made source of educated managers, accountants and salesmen, drilled to European standards'. He had just ended a business partnership with his cousin and gone solo, forming a new company called the Reliance Commercial Corporation. Reliance ballooned in the years after the fall of Aden, underpinned by a generation of Indian-origin Adenis versed in free market capitalism rather than Nehruvian socialism. Given that your book comes out against the backdrop of India-Pakistan tensions, what is the perspective you hope readers will take away? So often we treat the hostility between India and Pakistan as inevitable. Even President Trump chimed in, telling reporters aboard Air Force One that India and Pakistan had been fighting 'for a thousand years, probably longer than that.' But this really isn't the case. These divisions were formed within living memory — as were the divisions between India and Bangladesh, Burma and Yemen etc. Today, the region's borders have become so embedded in our subconscious that it is easy to forget there were other possibilities for a post-colonial South Asia. Several prominent nationalist figures including PM Nehru and Burma's founding father Aung San had once spoken of an 'Asiatic federation' in the 'not very, very distant future', a 'United Nations of South Asia' encompassing India, Pakistan, Ceylon and Burma. Long after the British departed, many still hoped the new borders might prove temporary. Yet in every single one of these countries, govts have made sure to paper over the shared cross-border heritage of their peoples. The last decade has witnessed the decline of globalisation, the strengthening of borders and the resurgence of nationalism across the world. India's partitions are a dire warning for what such a future might hold. Your dad, historian William Dalrymple , sparked a lot of debate recently saying that academics don't make their work as accessible as popular historians. Where do you stand on this? I don't think they have to stand in opposition at all. We obviously need both.
