Panicked Indians flee Kashmir city on special train / Photo: Money SHARMA - AFP
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Panicked Indians flee Kashmir city on special train
Desperate crowds fought Saturday to board a special train ferrying people out of Jammu in Indian Kashmir and away from the worst fighting with Pakistan in decades.
Baton-wielding policemen blew whistles to try and restore order as people -- mostly poor workers from central and eastern India -- furiously elbowed each other and hurled abuses to get on board.
The train, sent by the federal government, took those lucky enough to secure a place to the Indian capital New Delhi, about 600 kilometres (400 miles) south of Jammu, free of charge.
Karan Verma, 41, originally from Chhattisgarh in central India, has been a mason in Akhnoor near Jammu for two decades and thought of it as home.
But now he wants out at any cost.
"There are loud explosions the entire night," he said. "There is no choice but to leave."
Some people lifted babies and young children and flung them to family members who had managed to beat the crowd and board.
"There should be more trains," said Suresh Kumar, 43, from Madhya Pradesh state, dragging his brother away from a fight with another passenger.
Nisha Devi, her three children and her husband could not get a space on the train to return to the distant eastern state of Bihar, their home province.
"If I got on that train, it would have been like walking into a death trap with the children," she said philosophically.
- Civilian deaths -
This latest bout of Indo-Pakistani fighting was touched off by an attack last month in Indian-administered Kashmir that killed 26 tourists, mostly Hindu men.
The nuclear-armed rivals have fought several wars over Muslim-majority Kashmir, which both claim in full but administer separate portions of since independence from Britain in 1947.
India accused the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba -- a UN-designated terrorist organisation -- of carrying out the attack, but Islamabad has denied involvement.
Pakistan said it launched counterattacks on Saturday after India struck three of its air bases overnight following days of clashes involving fighter jets, missiles, drones and artillery.
More than 60 civilians have been killed amid fears that the conflict will spiral into all-out war.
In a series of calls to senior officials in both countries, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio urged them to restore direct communication to "avoid miscalculation".
Teklal Padmani Lala clung to metal bars at the entrance of one of the compartments as the special train prepared to depart Jammu.
"I will go like this the entire way till Delhi," he said -- and further if he has to.
W.Thakur--MT
