Border residents bear brunt of India-Pakistan standoff

A five-year-old schoolchild recovers in a hospital after beeing injured by a landmine in Srinagar

BIKANER, India (CNN) -- The blood-soaked bandage around farmer Gurmeet Singh's leg looks gruesome but he can wiggle his toes, meaning the limb can probably be saved.

This makes the 35-year-old "lucky" among a growing number of victims claimed by landmines strewn along both sides of India and Pakistan's 2,900 kilometer-long border.

The Indian Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) estimates that up to 25 Indian villagers have been killed -- and many more mutilated -- since December when, amid high tension, minefields were extended down from Jammu and Kashmir to the farmlands of Punjab and desert state of Rajasthan.

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A report in the Hindustan Times newspaper puts the number of soldiers killed during laying operations at 50 between December and February alone.

This toll is sure to rise, says ICBL coordinator Dr Balkrishna Kurvey, as rain and sandstorms move the mines and wash away the small red triangle warning signs. His group is running education programmes in the villages on identifying and staying safe around the "inhuman weapon."

Balbir Singh, who is tending to Gurmeet on the floor of the main public hospital in Bikaner, Rajasthan, says his brother was recently walking to their border village when he stumbled into the minefield.

"He had consumed so much alcohol that he went the wrong way and then he met with the mines," Balbir says.

Explosion

The loud explosion woke a large number of people who crowded around the edge of the field where they could only watch as Gurmeet tried to crawl to safety dragging his bleeding left leg.

It was the army that finally extricated him and provided transport to hospital.

Gurmeet, a father of three, remembers little, but weakly protests against claims he had drunk too much: "No, no. It was a dark night, no light, I wrongly went there."

India and Pakistan (together with large powers such as the United States, Russia and China) have refused sign the 1997 Ottawa Convention banning the use of anti-personnel landmines.

Minefields were extended to farmlands during the height of the military standoff between India and Pakistan

And the army is not keen to discuss the issue now with spokesman Brigadier Shruti Kant simply noting: "We confirm the use of landmines in view of national security."

Balbir says that within weeks of last December's attack on parliament, blamed by New Delhi on Pakistani-backed militants, hundreds of soldiers descended on their small border village, known as simply 1BM.

Mined fields, sectioned off with a few strands of wire and the occasional red triangle danger sign, now extend for several kilometers back from the border with cows, deer and dogs being regularly killed.

It is the same in the next state up, the Punjab.

Compensation

There in the Amritsar district alone -- one of three touching the border -- District Revenue Collector S.P. Garg has so far dispensed compensation for three deaths and four serious injuries as a result of mine blasts.

In one village near the Wagah border crossing, Joginder Kaur, 46, fared worse than Singh, losing her lower leg after she hit a mine in a field that she says did not have signposts.

Having recently returned home from two and half months in hospital, Kaur now spends most of her time sitting listlessly on a string bed dangling a new plastic foot, shaped like a schoolgirl's sandal.

"It is hard to do any work," she says. "I do not feel well."

But she appears to be meeting the tragedy with serenity: "what happens, happens according to God," she says.

A peaceful resolution to the border tension is what she prays for now. "In Pakistan it is the same situation. Ordinary people do not want war. Politics is crazy everywhere."