Monthly Archives: August 2018

Incendiary remarks by political and RSS leaders harm the Army’s secular traditions. We have regiments where soldiers of all faiths live and fight together. The leaders are ignorant of military ethos.

Gearing up: RSS men take part in a Path-Sanchalan in Ahmedabad recently. Reuters

The RSS is the BJP’s standing army, mobilised to win elections and bulldoze the opposition. While it might have requisitioned Ritu Beri to modernise RSS’s battle apparel, it is far from being a fighting force. Instead, it distorts the image of the Army. Take the several mindless statements, including an incendiary one, made by national leaders which have undermined the idea of India, image and integrity of the Army and even politicised it. Mohan Bhagwat, the RSS chief and Prime Minister Modi’s mentor, said that while the Army takes six to seven months to mobilise, the swayamsevaks are ready to go in three to four days. There were other insinuations in his statement: RSS could be a volunteer army in six to seven months to “help” the regular Army. Being a non-secular Hindu civilian organisation, such a force can have no place in the Indian Army. Rather, it better stick to its forte of helping the BJP win elections. Lt-Gen Danbu, Chief of Northern Command in Kashmir, said the Army does not recognise a soldier by his religion.The Indian Army is stitched together as a fighting force because it is professional, apolitical, secular and under civilian political control and, therefore, the last bastion of our Constitution and democracy. The most outstanding trait of the Army is that it is secular and derives its soul from the secular composition of the country. In regiments, soldiers take their oath of allegiance putting their hand on the Tricolour, Gita, Guru Granth Sahib, Quran and Bible. In all-India regiments under one roof or a tent, are a temple, gurdwara, mosque or church. You will not find this conjugation of religions anywhere in the world. So what the RSS can learn from the Army is that while one can be a blue-blooded Hindu and nationalist, one can also be a secular patriot. This is what will make the RSS truly all-India.On Muslims, the statement made by BJP MP Vinay Katiyar, which has not been contradicted so far, says: “Muslims should not live in India and should either go to Pakistan or Bangladesh.” Such statements do immeasurable harm to the Army’s secular traditions because there are regiments where Muslims, Hindus and other faiths live and fight together.  While polarisation may win votes for the parties, it will severely politicise the Army and damage its organisational cohesiveness, not to mention the fatal damage it will do to the internal security of the country.The redoubtable Praveen Togadia, chief of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, once very close to PM Modi when he was Chief Minister of Gujarat, is reported to have said that stone-pelters in J&K should be “bombarded”. This would imply carpet-bombing. He advocated the breakup of Pakistan into five parts. Neither idea has an iota of prudence or sense: both are urgings neither feasible nor implementable. India is facing considerable difficulty keeping together J&K in our possession as we have lost the local support of people. Stirring the pot across the border in PoK with an army of RSS volunteers which can be transformed into soldiers in six months, as claimed, will not be easy. But the idea first came from RSS pracharak, former Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar, famous for his remarks after the surgical srikes that it was he who instilled the Hanuman spirit into the Army. Can he do it with the RSS? Though, his original idea was different — to catch a terrorist, use a terrorist.Thus, it is clear that our political leaders and those from social organisations like the RSS do not comprehend the changing nature of war, especially cross-border terrorism which our soldiers confront 24×7. Pakistan got a bloody nose in the three and a half wars it has fought, so now it is using a low-cost, high-yield proxy war to compensate for its inferiority in conventional military strength compared to India. When Bhagwat, Togadia, Katiyar, Owaisi etc make absurd comments about the Army and the country, it is time to educate them about military ethos, war and deterrence on the one hand and the idea of India on the other.The National Defence College’s central theme is the general education of defence, diplomacy and conflict avoidance. A decade ago, a special capsule run for Members of Parliament was strangely discontinued. It should be resumed immediately. Besides visiting forward areas, elected representatives of the Parliament should spend 24 hours at or near a forward post on the LoC to gauge the heat and living conditions of our soldiers. Representation of the military in the Parliament is miniscule. Instead of wasting nominated seats on filmstars and cricketers who skip the Parliament in any case, professional veterans from the services, instead, will bring the realism of LoC into the House. Bhagwat is spot-on about one thing, though: that the Army is not combat-ready. And, it is underequipped as per the report of BJP’s Gen BC Khanduri’s Parliamentary Standing Committee on Defence. Bhagwat is Modi’s mentor. He can tell him that the military in the defence budget in 2018-19 has got a raw deal — the lowest ever as percentage of GDP (1.49) when China has four times as much. This year, that is why after the defence budget, talk in South Block was that Modi’s priority had altered from Jai Jawan Jai Kisan to just Jai Kisan.‘Five of seven soldiers killed in Sanjuwan were Muslims’Take the case of the recent Sanjuwan terror attack on a battalion of the Jammu and Kashmir Light Infantry in Jammu which bore the brunt of the terrorist attack. “Five of the seven soldiers killed in the attack were Muslims. No one is pointing this out. While Muslims are being called Pakistanis, and their loyalty doubted, we are also sacrificing lives,” said All-India Majlis e Ittahadul Muslimeen chief and Member of Parliament Asaduddin Owaisi.

Just do it: The Captain has got a shot at fixing things, he must seize it.

Nirmal Sandhu

It is budget time and also the time to question old certainties and make an honest effort to retrieve Punjab’s sinking economy. One year is enough for making political noises about past blunders. Now is the time to correct them. The state can do without another business-as-usual budget. The Punjab leadership keeps knocking at the door of the Centre for help. The easiest thing to do is to fling all the blame towards the Centre. Parkash Singh Badal has been doing that for years and politically profiting from “Central discrimination” before inviting a humiliating defeat by tying the state to an unreasonable Rs 31,000-crore loan on the Centre’s terms. A Central bailout is unlikely because of Punjab’s limited relevance in the political calculations of Narendra Modi and Amit Shah. During his recent Chandigarh visit, Niti Aayog’s Dr Rajiv Kumar reiterated Delhi’s message — clearly, bluntly and publicly: stop asking for funds. “You can leave the country’s food security to us”. There is a message in the snub.  Every budget presents the leadership a choice: use the taxpayers’ money to bribe voters in the hope of a favourable verdict in the next election or take hard, unpleasant decisions for long-term gain. Both Badal and Capt Amarinder Singh have so far chosen the path that suits them more than the state. They seem to be in politics to leverage power, not to unsettle a beneficial arrangement. The result is they have continued with absurdities experts disapprove of. Free power is the single big blunder that has (1) hurt Punjab’s agriculture, (2) depleted Punjab’s water resources by encouraging paddy cultivation, (3) added to farmers’ production cost by forcing installation of submersible pumps, (4) drove the state to rely on private power companies which dictated own terms, (5) curtailed industrial activity during the paddy season and (6) consumed resources that could have been used to modernise power plants and enhance generation capacity, and thus save jobs lost in shutting down unviable plants. Abandoning the age-old wisdom — teach fishing to a man instead of giving him a fish — they have made Punjabis freebies dependent.The damage caused by state neglect, diversion of resources to meet demands of vote politics and patronage of the private sector is not limited to power. It extends to public transport, education, health and highways with consequences of public sector jobs shrinking or disappearing and costs rising for all. Waiting for a waiver, farmers have stopped repaying loans. The Congress can take credit for adding cooperative societies and banks to the list of institutions turned dysfunctional by politics of appeasement.Every economic pundit has said a loan waiver is no solution to farmer distress. Yet this government, which has raised a battalion of advisers, has ignored this sane advice. There is no effort to look beyond the set framework. In recent years, Punjab has not thrown up a single big idea to solve any of its serious problems. Haryana is promoting sports and offering secured price for vegetable growers. Himachal Pradesh is known for its single-minded devotion to human development. Madhya Pradesh gives deficiency payments to farmers selling produce below the MSP. Telangana pays a flat subsidy of Rs 4,000 per acre every sowing season. There is little hope the coming budget will be any different. We have policy-makers who tend to shut the door when an opportunity arrives. The Chief Minister can go to Mumbai to woo private investment, but when Canada’s Prime Minister, with all the goodwill for Punjabis arrived, he had no economic agenda to talk of. Instead, he produced a list of nine wanted men and revived a dead issue called Khalistan. He could not get over the slight Canada dealt him by denying a visa.  North India in general and Punjab in particular can benefit from increased trade with Pakistan and countries beyond, but none of the Punjab leaders have cared to counter war-mongering by BJP foot soldiers. Trade is the best answer to terror and that requires greater opening up to Pakistan. But the Captain seems busy figuring out how on earth he tied himself in knots with those outrageous election-time promises on the advice of a clever poll strategist.“Politics is about promising, disappointing and managing disappointment,” says Prof Stephen Holmes of New York University. Holmes may not have heard of Capt Amarinder Singh but what he says sums up the Punjab CM’s practice of democracy. The Captain has spent one year reminding people how big a mess the Badals have left behind. The Chief Minister’s sense of surprise at the state’s Rs 2.08 lakh crore debt seems manufactured since all state debt figures, including Uday bonds, state guarantees and loans of public sector enterprises, have been in the public domain. In a TOI interview (February 27) he said: “The growth rate of the state in 2006-07 (when he was the CM) was 10.18%, which was higher than the all India average of 9.57%. By 2016-17, it had fallen to 4.20% of all India average of 7.5 per cent”. The Hindu report “No fresh taxes in Punjab Budget” (March 8, 2006) mentions Punjab’s likely growth rate at 5.5 per cent — almost half of what the Captain claims. This reminds one of what American politician-diplomat Daniel Patrick Moynihan has said: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not to his own facts”.Cost-cutting has started in Punjab but at the wrong end: closure of rural schools, bare minimum fixed salary for teachers, winding up of “suvidha kendra” and shutting down of power plants. Taxes, power tariffs and bus fares have gone up. There has been little sacrifice at the top. Hoping for a cut in wasteful government expenditure is like expecting a royal to live like Gandhi.Capt Amarinder Singh says he will retire once Punjab’s finances are put in order. That means no getting away from the lure of power. Why would he make himself politically redundant by seriously working for fiscal improvement? He praises Badal for memorials while his Finance Minister points to the absurdity of spending Rs 2,000 crore on memorials and denying Rs 20 crore to Panjab University.The budget offers a chance to the ruling political operatives to change the perception of being anti-change. It is time to go back to the basics: water, air, soil, education and health. The declining quality of water, air and soil has enormous ramifications for human health and family budgets. Substandard education has made youth unemployable. The budget can fund a credible rescue plan for each of these areas. It is time to move from extravagance to productive use of resources.

nirmalssandhu@gmail.com

Smoke billows from the hills after shelling by Pakistan in Rajouri. File photo

Amir Karim Tantray

Tribune News Service

Jammu, March 6

In all, 10 soldiers and a Border Security Force (BSF) jawan have been martyred along the Line of Control (LoC) in J&K since January 1 this year.Also, Pakistan violated the ceasefire agreement over 400 times. In two months, three more BSF jawans were also martyred along the 198-km-long International Border, which falls only in the Jammu region.The violence has spread from the Akhnoor sector of Jammu district to the Tangdhar sector of Kupwara district, thus involving a major portion of the LoC, which has caused great inconvenience to the people living nearby.Though the month of January and first two weeks of February witnessed shelling and firing on the LoC in the Jammu region only, but thereafter places such as Uri and Tangdhar falling on north of Pir Panjal in the Kashmir valley also witnessed exchange of heavy artillery.Meanwhile, the Pakistan army targeted particularly Akhnoor, Sunderbani, Nowshera, Bhimber Gali, Krishna Ghati and Poonch sectors along the LoC in the Jammu region and Uri and Tangdhar sectors of the Kashmir valley.The Army has been claiming that Pakistan army resorts to unprovoked ceasefire violations along the LoC every time, which most of the times is aimed at facilitating infiltration and at times giving cover fire to their Border Action Team members. However, the Army has responded to the violations and has caused extensive damage to the Pakistan army.

official data reveals…

• According to the government, the Pakistan army violated the truce agreement 351 times till February 21 this year
• After February 21, the Pakistan army continuously violated the agreement and the number has gone beyond 400
• Three more BSF jawans were martyred along the 198-km-long International Border, which falls only in the Jammu region

Vijay Mohan

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, March 5

Dashing hopes of ex-servicemen embroiled in legal battles over disability benefits, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) today stated in Parliament that it would not withdraw appeals pending in such cases before the Supreme Court.In June last year, the MoD had issued orders to the defence services headquarters restricting the filing of fresh appeals against the orders of the Armed Forces Tribunal (AFT) or the high court in cases where the law has been settled.In a large number of cases where illness, disability or death was initially held “neither attributable to nor aggravated by military service (NANA)” by the sanctioning executive authority, the AFT or the HCs had granted relief to the affected individuals. Many of such orders were also upheld by the Supreme Court, but the MoD continued to file appeals against such judgments even on issues where the point of law has been well settled. There are thousands of cases pending before the apex court as well as the HCs and the AFT that pertain to disability.“The Ministry of Defence do not propose to withdraw such pending appeals in the Supreme Court….It is the considered view of the ministry to await the orders of the Court in Civil Appeals filed in ‘NANA’ cases,” the Minister of State for Defence, Dr Subhash Bhamre, said in the Rajya Sabha today while replying to a question by Rajeev Chandrasekhar, an MP from Kerala.Service and legal experts said the MoD’s statement contradicts the spirit of the national policy of reducing litigation and PM’s statements on excessive litigation.

Morena (MP): Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) jawan Manoj Tomar has been forced to carry his intestine in a polythene bag wrapped around his waist since he was injured in a naxal attack in Chhattisgarh’s Sukma district in 2014.

Tomar, a resident of Morena in Madhya Pradesh, has been running from pillar to post for four years to get assistance for the costly treatment.

Alleging apathy, Tomar said that the way he has been treated has left him devastated and shattered. How can they treat me like this, after serving the nation for 16 years? He asked.

“What is the meaning of my being alive like this? I am no different from my buddies who were killed. I am not able to do anything for my family. I am not saying that I was not provided treatment, but that is not enough,” Tomar said.

“To complete my treatment, now I am forced to make rounds — at times at AIIMS or on occasions at bungalows of various ministers pleading for help,” he added.

I have no hope of getting any help from the government, he claimed.

Tomar was part of a CRPF battalion which ambushed by naxals in Jiram valley of Sukma district in 2014. Tomar was hit by seven bullets in the belly while all 11 fellow jawans in his party died in the assault.

While he survived, Tomar could never recover completely as portion of his intestine remained outside his stomach while he lost vision in one eye. Since then, he has been forced to carry his intestine in a polythene bag tied to his waist.

US diplomat for South and Central Asia, Alice Wells, was speaking to a Washington audience. Thinkstock

Washington, March 10

India has played a responsible role in the economic development of Afghanistan, the Trump administration said noting that the trilateral India-Afghan-US cooperation is not aimed at Pakistan.“India, we’ve seen over the last several years, play a responsible role in the economic development and reconstruction of Afghanistan. And that role has been appreciated by the government of Afghanistan,” senior US diplomat for South and Central Asia, Alice Wells, told a Washington audience.Early this month, Wells was in Kabul to attend the Kabul process meeting. On the sidelines of it, she participated in the India-US-Afghanistan trilateral, which again raised eyebrows in Pakistan.The trilateral meeting, she said, was to review how the three countries could better work together on development trade and investment priorities.“But that does not imply that we would support or think that there’s any manipulation of Afghanistan so that it can be used against Pakistan,” Wells said in response to a question at the US Institute of Peace, a US-Congress supported top American think-tank.Pakistan, she said, had an important role to play in a peace process, and in stabilising Afghanistan.“We believe Pakistan can help change and shape the calculus of the Taliban. We are engaged with Pakistan on how we can work together as well as address Pakistan’s legitimate concerns through a negotiated process,” she said. PTI

Tribune News Service

New Delhi March 7

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley will contest Rajya Sabha elections from Uttar Pradesh, Health Minister JP Nadda from Himachal Pradesh and Petroleum Minister Dharmendra Pradhan from Madhya Pradesh, the BJP’s central election committee announced today.Jaitley is currently a Rajya Sabha member from Gujarat and Pradhan from Bihar. The list of eight senior party leaders for the coming Rajya Sabha elections from various states includes seven Union Ministers and party general secretary Bhupendra Yadav.The other, besidfes Jaitley and Pradhan, will contest from the states they have been elected from. Social Justice Minister Thawarchand Gehlot will contest from Madhya Pradesh, Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad from Bihar and Nadda from Himachal.Union Ministers Parshottam Rupala and Manusukh Mandaviya will contest from Gujarat and Bhupendra Yadav from Rajasthan.The term of all seven leaders ends on April 2.

Infantry Combat Vehicles (ICVs), also known as Armoured Personnel Carriers, lie at the heart of Indian Army’s operations in any war against Pakistan.

NEW DELHI:  If India were to go to war with Pakistan right now, its soldiers would be at risk on a very basic front -the vehicles that carry them into the battlefield are outdated – at least three decades old – and are not equipped with modern night vision devices, a key vulnerability in modern warfare.

Eight years ago, the government cleared the acquisition of more than 2,000 Infantry Combat Vehicles (ICVs) for the army – the deal is worth Rs. 60,000 crore.

But a series of delays and a tangle of red tape have meant that even now, not a single new vehicle has been ordered, let alone entered service. As a result of the delays, the army continues to fight with Russian- designed BMP-2 ICVs, unreliable and prone to technical snags because to keep them running, their engines have been overhauled beyond their prescribed limits.

Documents accessed by NDTV lay out the serpentine process within the Defence Ministry where different wings have been unable to reach a consensus on how the project is to proceed. Worried at the consequences of the delay, G Mohan Kumar, the last Defence Secretary, documented his concerns. In a file noting in April last year, Mr Kumar warned that “raising doubts over the evaluation methodology or changing it at this stage will not be consistent with the established procedure.” His own ministry, he said, was “delaying inordinately [the] acquisition of critical equipment for the army.”

Infantry Combat Vehicles (ICVs), also known as Armoured Personnel Carriers, lie at the heart of the army’s operations in any war against Pakistan. A key element of army combat teams, each ICV carries 10 fully-armed soldiers into the battle-field. ICVs often follow tank formations which are meant to strike dagger-like blows across the border as the army fights deep inside enemy territory. Highly mobile and equipped with anti-tank missiles, ICVs support tank operations and also accompany artillery formations, bridge-laying tanks, and air defence units. They are designed to protect the soldiers they carry within against all small-arms fire but cannot withstand the impact of a tank shell.

The army’s saga to acquire a new Infantry Combat Vehicle began in in October 2009. The new ICVs were to be made in India in a bid to encourage indigenous manufacture of key weapon systems. The army issued an Expression of Interest – which solicits quotes and bids – in 2010 to Tata, Mahindra Defence Systems, Larsen & Toubro and the government-run Ordnance Factory Board.

Then the delays began -and kept piling up. In December 2012, the army’s Expression of Interest was withdrawn because of a reported difference of opinion in how the army’s experts and the Defence Ministry’s team evaluated the proposal that had been submitted by defence manufacturers. Unable to find common ground, the main file on the ICV project was returned to the army four years after the process first began. The instructions given were to wait for a new set of government guidelines meant to specify rules for private sector Indian defence manufacturers. According to a document accessed by NDTV, “This decision was likely to delay the project by another 2 years.”

Under intense pressure from the army which realised that its existing BMP-2 was utterly obsolete, the Defence Ministry agreed to a fresh Expression of Interest in April 2014. 10 Indian companies responded to this following which it took the Defence Ministry another year to decide how it intended to evaluate the prototypes provided by each firm.

Five private firms and the government’s Ordnance Factory Board said they wanted to be considered and the Defence Ministry submitted an evaluation report on each proposal on November 25, 2016.

In late 2016, in perhaps the biggest setback to the ICV project, those reviews or evaluation reports were rejected by the Defence Ministry’s Director General (Acquisitions) because the “the methodology for selection was at variance with [the] Defence Procurement Procedure 2008,” the government manual being used to process this deal.

This recommendation was overruled by Mr Kumar, the Defence Secretary, claiming that “the option of scrapping the present process and issuing a fresh expression of interest may not be in our best interest considering that this will put us back by a few years and render all effort so far made infructuous thus delaying inordinately acquisition of critical equipment for the army.”

He could not have stated the consequences more baldly. Two meetings of the Defence Production Board were held late last year. Since then, one of the firms competing for the order has raised questions about three competitors. With a formal complaint lodged, a panel of independent experts was formed in November. Senior Ministry sources have told NDTV that no decision has been taken on how to proceed with the army’s Infantry Combat Vehicle project.

The phenomenally slow process to clear the acquisition of one of the most basic fighting systems of the Indian Army exemplifies all that is wrong with India’s weapons procurement process. In a classified briefing to Prime Minister Narendra Modi in November last year, Dr Subhash Bhamre, the Minister of State for Defence, said India’s weapons-buying is frequently crippled by “multiple and diffused structures with no single point accountability, multiple decision-heads, duplication of processes, delayed comments, delayed execution, no real-time monitoring, no project-based approach and a tendency to fault-find rather than to facilitate.”