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Here's another ProMED link. This is a case from January, 2001, also in India, where villagers ascribed the deaths of 5 children to smallpox, but a doctor who visited the village said that the children he examined were suffering from measles, not smallpox. (The article points out that measles and smallpox were only distinguished from one another during the Middle Ages.)

These various reports of smallpox are likely all to be false reports from isolated villages without physicians. It's possible that somebody is spreading rumors, however. (A major newspaper like Dawn surely knows better.)