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Amritsar (AFP) India: Pakistani troops will continue an aggressive military ceremony at a border crossing with rival India because it is a tradition and attracts tourists, officials said Saturday. Indian border guards announced in November they would tone down their ceremony performed every evening at the Wagah border post amid warming relations between the nuclear-armed South Asia rivals.
But the chief of Pakistan's paramilitary frontier force said here the furious goose step and slamming of gates by his soldiers when the border closed for the night was an important tradition.
“It is not hostility but a tradition to pay utmost respect to the flag and it will continue,” said Major General Javid Zia, who is meeting with his Indian counterparts in the northern Indian city of Jalandhar, 80 kilometres (50 miles) from here.
Pakistan's junior information minister Tariq Azim, on a visit to New Delhi, told reporters the ceremony was a “tourist attraction” that drew thousands of people to both sides of the border.
During four days of talks, Zia said he had discussed the speedy release of Indian and Pakistani nationals arrested for inadvertently crossing over the border into each other's territories.
“Now both the nations have decided to make arrangements for the early repatriation of all such innocent civilians… since on both sides, innocent civilians after crossing the international border are lodged in jails,” he said.
Many civilians and fishermen straying across land and maritime frontiers are captured and imprisoned as India and Pakistan suspect them of being informants or spies, Indian officials say.
Zia said talks had also centred on curbing the smuggling of narcotics across the borders.
India and Pakistan have fought three wars, two of them over Kashmir, since the subcontinent's 1947 independence from Britain.
New Delhi accuses Islamabad of lending support to an Islamic rebellion in Indian-administered Kashmir, where violence since the start of the insurgency in 1989 has killed at least 44,000 people. Islamabad denies supporting the insurgency.
