India and Pakistan tensions spill over into contest over whose flagpole is bigger

Nationalist rivalries are on show at border crossing where soldiers in elaborate uniforms perform flag ceremonies each night

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t a remote, monsoon-soaked border checkpoint, Indian soldiers will mark Independence Day by raising the country’s tricolour on a mast that towers above a Pakistani flag flying just across the frontier – part of an ongoing vertical duel in South Asia’s fraught politics.

Call it flag warfare: a contest not of weapons but of height, waged by two nuclear-armed neighbours that only three months ago fought a four-day battle which threatened to escalate into full-scale war.

This year’s flagpole frontline is Sadqi, a quiet patchwork of wheat fields in northern Punjab state’s Fazilka district. India’s Tiranga, or tricolour, will fly from a new 200-foot (61-metre) galvanised-iron mast. Across the barbed-wire frontier at Sulemanki, Pakistan’s green-and-white Parcham-e-Sitāra-o-Hilāl flutters from a 165-foot (50-metre) pole.