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Kargil Effect shaves 18 points off Sensex

The Kargil incidents continued to affect market sentiments on the stock markets, as the share prices registered a sharp decline due to a selling spree from market players, coupled with short-selling by local operators at the Bombay Stock Exchange today.

Dealers said Pakistan's shelling in Kargil on June 13, during Prime Minister Vajpayee's visit to the area, and his statement thereafter that India can go to any extent to protect her territorial integrity has created panic in the market.

The 30-share BSE Sensex opened at 3907.69 points, at least 60 points lower than Friday's close of 3969.36 points, crashed by 122 points, to below the 3900-mark to touch the day's low of 3830.15 points, before staging a smart recovery to 3951.87 points on heavy short-covering by operators towards the fag end of trading. The Sensex later closed at 3950.96 points, showing a net loss of 18.40 points from the previous close.

The broad-based BSE-100 index fell sharply by 14.80 points to 1712.77 from the previous close of 1727.57 points.

Analysts said the market is reacting to the happenings on the Indo-Pak border and therefore no one is in a position to analyse the future trends. The Foreign Institutional Investors and the domestic institutional investors were also seen to adopt a wait and watch attitude, he added.

Institutional deals were reported in Burroughs Wellcome, Dabur, Global Tele, Hindustan Lever, Infosys Tech, Novartis, Reliance Petro and Shree Cement. There were buyers only at the counters of L&T, Essar Oil, Unichem Laboratories and Orient Containers despite the bearish spell in the market, dealers said.

The BSE-200 and Dollex indices dropped by 3.13 and 1.45 points to 390.08 and 150.58 points from the previous close of 393.21 and 152.03 points respectively.

UNI

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