NEW YORK, June 9: With Pakistani soldiers blocking Kashmiri fighters from crossing into the Indian side of the Valley, the militants maintained that they would defy any such orders and many fundamentalist parties have sworn to oust President Pervez Musharraf.

A report in the June 17 issue of Newsweek quotes militant leaders as saying “our men manage to sneak past the Indians, so how can the Pakistanis stop us?”, adding “we will continue to fight. God always creates ways for us.”

The weekly said that Gen Musharraf’s order was conveyed to two dozen commanders by a major-general from the Inter-Services Intelligence agency during a meeting at a Pakistani army base 25 miles from the front lines. But one commander of militants told Newsweek that the commanders denounced President Musharraf by name. “After ditching the Taliban, Musharraf has now betrayed the Kashmiri cause,” shouted one commander. “How can we accept this?”

The New York Times in a similar report said that the Kashmiri leaders maintained the Pakistani government appeared to be fulfilling a key condition laid down by Indian leaders, who have threatened to launch a strike into Pakistan unless infiltration into Kashmir is halted.

“We have not sent anyone across for the past month,” Hussein Rizvi, leader of Hizbul Momineen, one of the groups battling Indian rule in Kashmir told the New York Times. “Now we have two armies against us, the Indian and the Pakistani. Our problems have doubled.”

Rizvi, who claims that his group has hundreds of fighters in both parts of Kashmir, said he was able to send a small group of activists across the border in early May, just as the Himalayan passes had begun to clear of snow, but now he has given up even trying.

“We are trying to devise a new strategy,” he said in an interview with the Times on Sunday.

The Times said that the claims of difficulties by the Kashmiri militants fit into recent assurances by President Musharraf and statements from Indian leaders, who acknowledge a reduction in the number of fighters coming from across the border.

The paper noted that with the threat of Indian military action looming, the Pakistani government had begun to press the militants to declare a ceasefire inside occupied Kashmir, militant leaders said. But some groups, including Hizbul Mujahideen, have vowed to carry out new attacks against India.

The shift from the armed struggle comes at a great personal risk to Gen Musharraf, who has already inflamed the passions of a large segment of the population by joining the United States in its campaign against the Taliban and Al Qaeda and vowing to lead his country to a more moderate path. Next week, the country’s largest fundamentalist party is planning to lead a rally in Azad Kashmir that some people here believe is intended to mark the beginning of a campaign to oust Gen Musharraf, the paper said.

The Kashmiri militants themselves say they feel betrayed by the new efforts to block their movements into India.

“People are angry,” Sher Khan, a senior leader of Harkat Mujahideen, told the paper.

“We have reason to be angry.”

The paper said that this week, Gen Musharraf summoned Kashmiri leaders to his office to reassure them that he was not walking away from the Kashmiri cause, a deeply-felt issue for many Pakistanis. One of the Kashmiri leaders who attended that meeting said the president appeared concerned about the possibility of a takeover by fundamentalists.

“It will be difficult for him to survive,” Altaf Qadri, leader of the All-Party Hurriyat Conference, which represents 23 Kashmiri groups, was quoted as saying by the Times.