All posts by webadmin

Dalhousie, February 20

In view of an avalanche advisory issued by the Snow and Avalanche Study Establishment (SASE), Manali, in Pangi and Bharmour of Chamba district in 24 hours, two helicopters of the Indian Air Force (IAF) today took off to carry out a recce of the valley.

DC Harikesh Meena said the recce was part of the recent discussions held with military officials to extend help for rescue operations during avalanche-like situation and other natural calamities, especially in the snowbound areas of the district. The helicopters, however, could not be able to land in the Pangi valley due to bad weather conditions.

The district administration was in constant touch with officials. — OC

Varinder Singh
Tribune News Service
Jalandhar, February 21

Without naming Punjab directly, the Government of Canada has advised its citizens to stay away from “border with Pakistan” in view of escalating tensions between India and  Pakistan.

India has jumped to the top of the list of countries prepared by the Canadian government and where Canadian citizens have been advised to either exercise a high degree of caution owing to constant threat of terrorist activities “throughout the country at all times”.

The Canadian government has advised its citizens to ‘avoid non-essential travel’ to a number of Indian states and areas including, the border with Pakistan (it means Punjab and Rajasthan), the border with Bangladesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Nagaland, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Manipur, Assam and Arunachal Pradesh.

The reason for travel advisory against travelling to these states has been cited as “due to conflict”. The government of Canada has regularly been updating its list of travel advice and advisories so as to keep its citizens aware about changing threat perceptions and circumstances prevailing in other countries.

One of the reasons for issuing and updating the travel advisories was that a lot of Canadians venture out on travel to other countries at the outset of spring season over there and the Canadian government wants that that the Canadians should themselves apprised about travel risks before chalking out any travel plans.

If India has spiralled to the top of the list of “dangerous places” for Canadians, China figures at its end after France, Madagascar, Indonesia, Haiti, Venezuela, Philippines, Jordan, Brazil, Tunisia, Jamaica and Thailand.

In case of France, the Canadian government has advised its citizens to “exercise a high degree of caution” mainly owning to the “current elevated threat of terrorism” apart from the ongoing large gilets jaunes protests on Saturdays in that country.

The Canadian government has asked its citizens to exercise a high degree of caution in Indonesia for “political and social tensions” and has advised them against travelling to Venezuela for “significant level of violent crime and unstable political and economic situations”.

Similarly, the Canadian authorities fear high crime rates and regular gang-related and other violence in Brazil could harm its citizens travelling to that country.

The ‘Kashmiris as terrorists’ equation is framing the attack in a communal context

Rajesh Ramachandran

The more Meghalaya Governor Tathagata Roy continues in office and attacks Kashmiris, the greater the damage to the nation. Unfortunately, his is not a lone voice. He merely lends a face, a name and the stamp of constitutional authority to a divisive agenda. The ‘Kashmiris as terrorists’ equation is a deeply dividing political ploy, which frames the Pulwama attack in a communal context instead of what it really is — a terrorist attack backed by an inimical neighbour. The Pulwama attack has suddenly replaced Ram temple or triple talaq as a political tool to gather mobs in the name of Hindutva. The processions exhibiting muscular nationalism being taken out in the wake of the Pulwama attack in residential colonies in many parts of North India have a communal ring to their slogans. The question now being asked is not why such anger over one terrorist attack, but whether this would turn into a landslide support for the BJP in the General Election round the corner.

Pulwama has been so completely politicised and communalised that the primary Opposition party feels compelled to question the Prime Minister for hugging the visiting Saudi Arabian Crown Prince. The underlying communal message is not lost on anyone. Sure, the Saudi prince chose to visit Pakistan before touching down in New Delhi, but the reaction would not have been the same had it been a European leader. The entire polity is allowing itself to get communalised. The Kashmiri terrorist is no longer just a terrorist but a Muslim, and all victims of terrorist attacks are being seen as Islam’s victims. There cannot be a worse proposition for a diverse, multi-religious nation than this agenda. When a Kashmiri is boycotted because he or she is a Muslim by a person occupying a high constitutional office, it is almost as if the British policy of a separate electorate for Muslims — which led to the creation of Pakistan — is getting re-enacted again, this time with the active help of Hindutva politicians.

Sure, religious secessionism and the two-nation theory are at the heart of the Kashmiri insurgency. It is impossible for India to accept another Partition, particularly when Hindus and Muslims live together all over the country. So, any attempt to divide the nation yet again in the name of religion will not get contained in just one province of the country. What is applicable to Kashmir will be applicable to the rest of the country. In that context, the Kashmiri religious secessionism has to be defeated ideologically, politically and militarily; whereas isolating Kashmiris because of their religion will only exacerbate their alienation and help in strengthening their resolve to claim separate nationhood in the name of that very religion.

Have these so-called Hindutva ideologues ever thought about the politicians of the Valley who carry the Indian flag, the policemen on the ground who procure valuable intelligence to defeat the next terror attack, the local bureaucrats who run the government, and those who join the armed forces to fight their own neighbours and the foreign jihadis? Of course not! With just one tweet, all of these Kashmiris have been equated to their own enemies. And all of them, already under pressure at home, have lost their credibility. While their wards, studying in Dehradun or Chandigarh or Gurugram or Jaipur, are forced to return home, they still have to fight the Islamist terrorists every day, all day. Our ruling dispensation and dominant political shouting matches have become so shrill that there is no interlude of sanity to listen to the wails of an ordinary Kashmiri caught among the foreign jihadi, Pakistani spymasters and Hindutva zealots.

India is not Israel. We are a composite culture or a compost dump of communities, where the more divisive we get the more difficult it is to forge a nation. A Pulwama may win an election for some but at what cost? There is every possibility of an Islamist radical from Karnataka or Assam triggering a similar attack. How would that attack get framed? Well, cartoonists have a great way of explaining these complex situations. R Prasad, in one of his recent cartoons in The Economic Times posed the question: Why should Kashmiris be treated differently from Chhattisgarhias? The biggest attack on the CRPF happened in April 2010 at Chintalnar village in Dantewada in Chhattisgarh, when 76 paramilitary soldiers were brutally killed by the Maoists. There was no exhibition of anger or public outpouring of grief or disbursal of relief by Bollywood to the families of the martyrs. In fact, they were not even being hailed as martyrs across the nation. Why?

Former PM Manmohan Singh had termed Maoists the gravest threat to national security. In fact, they have a history of undermining the nation even in 1971, when they supported Pakistan because China — their source of all wisdom — was supporting the rape and murder of lakhs of people of East Pakistan. Maoists are the ones who have always supported religious secessionism on various campuses, including the JNU. They made Afzal Guru fashionable and have continuously extended legal help to secessionist terrorists in jail. They had also openly worked for the Tamil Tigers all through the last Eelam war. Since universities have always been recruitment centres for all kinds of spy agencies, some of them could even have been working for one agency or the other.

Yet, they were never collectively treated as Andhraites (most of their leaders are from Andhra) or Telugus or Brahmins or Velamas because of Ganapathy’s caste or of Kishenji’s. Someone who wants to overthrow the Constitution should be dealt with as an insurgent. Let not his innocent neighbour be targeted, lest there should be no one to protect the neighbourhood.

Ajay Banerjee

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, February 17

An upgraded version of the Arjun tank, having better firing and mobility, has been accepted by the Army following month-long validation trials in Rajasthan.

The trials were completed in December last and a report has followed. The Army is looking at 118 pieces of the new version. In 2010-11, the first version of the Arjun had joined the Army and 124 pieces had been ordered.

The production of the new version, dubbed as Arjun ‘Mark 1-A’, is likely to commence within this year at the existing facility at Avadi in Tamil Nadu. It has a total of 14 upgrades over the existing version. These include an auto-target tracker, automatic gear system and improvement in suspension.

Only the missile firing ability remains to be validated, which will be done once the missiles, being developed by the DRDO, are ready. The DRDO missile programme has been a major success and firing of missile from a tank is being fine-tuned.

As part of the arrangement with the Army, the DRDO has promised to set up a system to maintain the Arjun within India. It will be an annual maintenance contract with one of the PSUs such as Bharat Earth Movers Limited.

The tanks, as part of the trials, have already done some 4,000 km of run. The upgraded Arjun has a 120mm rifled gun capable of firing a full range of high explosives, laser homing anti-tank (LAHAT) missile that had a tandem warhead, which is capable of defeating all types of modern armour.

In December last year, the Ministry of Defence had informed Parliament that the ‘Arjun Mark 1-A’ was being validated at trials. This was the first official confirmation that the ‘Mark 1-A’ will be an additional version of the tank till the ‘Mark 2’ version, somewhat lighter in weight, is readied and accepted.

The development shows that the MoD is ready to keep on improving the Arjun, be addition of more power or wanting the weight to be reduced. The Army was okay with the ‘Mark 1-A’ version, but wants the next version to be lighter than its present weight of 68 tonne. Most modern European tanks are of the same weight, and tank-transporters (specialised trucks) for Arjun are available to ferry it.

The ‘Mark 2’ will have to be lighter by some 3 tonne. This may require some modification in the hull of the tank for the final contours to emerge.

A shroud of sadness descended on the country as the news came in of the death of 40 CRPF men in a suicide bomb attack. The nation as one joins the shattered families in their hour of grief. But repeated rhetoric of a muscular kind has now been shown to be inadequate in addressing national security concerns. The daily kill count in the Kashmir valley and the extended political celebration of the surgical strikes, recently made into a testosterone-laden blockbuster movie, were insufficient to neutralise the consequences of a disastrous coalition experimentation, repeated governance failures and the sidelining of alternative political voices in the Valley.

The unrelenting security operations with no political solution on the horizon may well have given way to complacency in the Kashmir’s security infrastructure, leading to a grave intelligence lapse that permitted the accumulation of several hundred kilograms of explosives used in the attack. Pakistan is, of course, behind this attack. But we cannot forget that it was a local youth who rammed the car into the CRPF convoy. Continuing counter-insurgency strikes in the Valley are creating a contrarian conflict, which can only be addressed through a political process. The government and people of India cannot win this battle without winning the hearts and minds of the local population.

If the huge cache of explosives establishes the scale of intelligence failure, we need to ask how could 2,500 security personnel be ferried without following the standard operating procedure? We cannot afford to shed more blood in vain. If choppers are the answer, let the government bring in a more expensive alternative. The maximum losses of security forces have happened on the Anantnag-Brijbehara-Pampore axis, yet there has not been sufficient surveillance to deter this murderous mayhem that reduced the CRPF bus to a mangled heap. Pakistan’s deep state will try every dirty trick in its book but we should be militarily prepared to stop, expose and hit at its resources like Masood Azhar. Simultaneously, we should create an atmosphere of political engagement to address the angst of the Valley’s youth.

File photo of Jaish chief Masood Azhar .

Washington, February 16

The US on Friday asked Pakistan to “freeze without delay” the funds and other financial assets of the UNSC-designated terrorist networks and their leaders.

It also said it fully supports “actions to prevent” the outlawed Jaish-e-Mohammed “from conducting future attacks”.

The Pakistan-based JeM has claimed responsibility for the terror attack in Jammu and Kashmir’s Pulwama district on Thursday that left at least 42 CRPF soldiers dead and five others critically injured.

A State Department spokesperson told PTI, “Pakistan outlawed Jaish-e-Mohammed in 2002.  However, the group still operates in Pakistan. The US designated JeM as a foreign terrorist organization in December 2001, and we fully support actions to prevent them from conducting future attacks.”

In addition, the UNSC designated JeM on its 1267 ISIL (Da’esh) and Al-Qa’ida Sanctions List in 2001, the official noted.

“We expect Pakistan to uphold its responsibilities pursuant to UN Security Council resolutions to deny safe haven and support for terrorists and to freeze without delay the funds and other financial assets or economic resources of individuals and entities on the UNSC 1267 sanctions list,” the spokesperson said in response to a question.

The official, however, did not divulge if the US has taken up the issue with the Pakistani leadership directly after the Pulwama terrorist attack.

In various statements and on social media, the Trump administration has asked Pakistan to deny safe haven and end support to terrorist organisations.

The spokesperson also refrained from making any comment over China blocking India’s move to designate Jaish chief Masood Azhar as a global terrorist.

“Our views on Masood Azhar and Jaish-e-Mohammed are well known. The JeM has been responsible for numerous terrorist attacks and is a threat to regional stability,” the spokesperson said.

“UN Sanctions Committee deliberations are confidential, and as such we do not comment on specific matters,” the official said. PTI

New Delhi, February 15

The CRPF on Friday said it won’t “forget and forgive” but will “avenge” the death of 40 of its personnel in one of the worst terror attacks on its troops in Jammu and Kashmir.

The country’s largest paramilitary force put out a tweet from its official handle saying, “We will not forget, we will not forgive.”

“We salute our martyrs of Pulwama attack and stand with the families of our martyr brothers. This heinous attack will be avenged,” it said in the social media post.

The force said that “in memory of the martyrs of the terrorist attack”, all formations of the Central Reserve Police Force observed two minutes of silence and the force flag will fly half mast on Friday.

The toll in the attack has risen to 40 even as a full Court of Inquiry has been ordered by the CRPF headquarters in Delhi.

The over 3-lakh personnel strong paramilitary force is deployed as the lead combat unit against terrorism and insurgency in the Kashmir Valley and has deployed about 60,000 personnel (as part of 60 battalions) in the internal security grid of the state. — PTI

United Nations, February 14

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres “strongly” condemned the terror attack against security personnel in Jammu and Kashmir’s Pulwama district, perpetrated by Pakistan-based terror group Jaish-e-Mohammed, calling for those behind the attack to be brought to justice.

In one of the deadliest terror attacks in Jammu and Kashmir’s three decades of militancy, a Jaish suicide bomber rammed an explosives-laden vehicle into a CRPF bus in Pulwama district, killing at least 39 personnel and leaving many critically wounded.

“We strongly condemn today’s attack in Jammu and Kashmir’s Pulwama district and express our deepest condolences to the families of those who lost their lives and to the Government and people of India,” Guterres’s spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said at the daily press briefing here Thursday.

Responding to a question by PTI on the terror attack, Dujarric said, “We of course wish a speedy recovery to those injured and call for those behind the attack to be brought  to justice.”  When asked about New Delhi’s appeal to the international community to support India’s proposal to list terrorists, including JeM chief Masood Azhar, as a designated terrorist under the UN Security Council’s Sanctions Committee and to ban terrorist organisations operating from territories controlled by Pakistan, Dujarric said the “issue of listing of terror organisations is one that is in the hands of the Security Council”. – PTI

May derail capacity enhancement, modernisation and maintenance under way; major deals coming up

The shortfall in Defence allocation in the interim Budget 2019-20, especially in its capital allocation, has left the Services worried as it threatens to derail the capability enhancement and modernisation underway. This comes at a time of fast-paced developments in the region, and China’s rapid advancements will only leave India further behind in terms of military capabilities.

Significant shortfall

A look at the numbers reveals the shortfall is so significant that, for the Navy and Air Force, the capital allocation does even meet the committed liabilities, that is, payments for deals already contracted. The Army, meanwhile, is looking at a shortfall in its non-salary revenue expenditure.

“The Services have conveyed their concerns to the Defence Ministry. Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman is taking up the matter with the Finance Ministry to address it,” a Defence official said.

For instance, the Indian Air Force (IAF), which has signed major deals in the last two years, including for the 36 Rafale jets and S-400 air defence systems, and is beginning to induct platforms like CH-47F Chinook heavy lift helicopters and AH-64 Apache attack helicopters, has committed liabilities of ₹47,400 crore. In contrast, the entire capital allocation is ₹39,300 crore and the projected capital requirement is ₹74,895 crore. Similarly, for the Navy, the committed liabilities for the coming year stand at ₹25,461 crore, while the total capital allocation is ₹22,227 crore.

The Defence allocation in the interim budget was ₹3.18 lakh crore, and Defence pensions stood at 1.12 lakh crore. Of this, allocation for revenue expenditure (net) is ₹2.01 lakh crore and capital expenditure (net) is ₹1.08 lakh crore. The share of the three Services in the overall defence budget stands as follows: Army–54%, Navy–14% and Air Force–22%.

However, the Army, with its large size, has a huge revenue burden compared to the other two Services, and a significant part of it goes for salaries. For the coming year, the Army has a total shortfall of ₹12,000 crore, of which ₹6,300 crore is under the capital head and around ₹5,500 crore is non-salary expenditure.

The Army has also embarked on its biggest reorganisation drive since independence and that would also entail some financial requirement.

Recently, to shorten procurement cycles, the Vice Chiefs of the three Services and Army Commanders were given greater financial powers for emergency procurement of spares and essential items, but the money for them goes from the revenue stream.

Scarce revenue

Similarly, no separate allocation has been made for the project to strengthen perimeter security of military installations. These eat into the already scarce revenue component effecting training and routine maintenance activities. Another concern is the large proportion of vintage equipment in the Army and even the IAF, which is in urgent need of replacement. For instance, last year, the Army had stated that 68% of its equipment is vintage.

The three Services are pushing through several procurements on a priority basis, many of which were to reach a decisive phase in the coming year, but there are no funds left for their conclusion.