The BSF has deployed drone-mounted ground penetrating radars for the first time to detect underground tunnels used by terrorists to infiltrate from Pakistan into India through Jammu region, officials said on Sunday. – File photo
The BSF has deployed drone-mounted ground penetrating radars for the first time to detect underground tunnels used by terrorists to infiltrate from Pakistan into India through Jammu region, officials said on Sunday.
The officials said the indigenous technical gadget had been pressed into action at the International Border (IB) along areas of Jammu as part of the below-the-earth tunnel detection exercise carried out by the force.
The aim is to ensure no terrorist intrudes. In the past, tunnels have also been used to smuggle narcotics, arms and ammunition.
The BSF has unearthed at least five tunnels in the about 192 km of the Jammu front (of the international border) in the last three years. According to official data, two such cross-border tunnels were detected in 2020 and 2021 each, while one was found last year and all of them were detected in Indreshwar Nagar sector of Jammu.
Kargil War survivor & India’s first blade runner Major D P Singh inaugurates PGIMER’s new academic session
Major DP Singh (wearing turban) at the inaugural ceremony at PGIMER. (Express Photo)
PUNJAB EXPRESS BUREAU Chandigarh, January 7 “If you wish to give up any[1]thing, give up ‘giving up’ That’s the message I wish to give everyone and that’s the reason, I run every day.” This was the key take away from the highly in[1]spiring address by Major D P Singh, the Kargil War Survivor and India’s first blade runner as he spoke as the chief guest at the in[1]augural ceremony of the new Academic Session of PGIMER, attended by key functionaries, heads of the departments and newly joined residents keeping in sync with COVID ap[1]propriate behaviour here at Bhargava Auditorium, PGIMER on Saturday. “Losing a part of the body does not lead to dis[1]ability. Losing the will to fight our odds, does. Odds are in the head and not in the heart. Celebrate odds and be the winner,” stated Major D P Singh while he narrated his journey from being declared Dead” in an Army Hospital in July 1999 during the Kargil war to 14 years hence, returning as India’s first Blade runner, showing the world how the invincible spirit in a true warrior can make a handi[1]cap into a handy- capable person. Motivating the newly inducted doctors in an ex[1]tremely impassioned tone, Major D P Singh delved deep into the essential qualities of being suc[1]cessful as he highlighted, “Always, remember three important letters ‘ASK’ to be successful in life, which stands for attitude, skill, and knowledge. He further shared that ‘attitude’ is the most important aspect in life and that if one focuses on their goals with the right attitude, the other two fac[1]tors will automatically fall into its place. The humility personified Major D P Singh gave a very valuable life lesson to the new resident doctors as he aptly concluded,”Failure is important in one’s life as it teaches one to absorb shock and learn to adapt to difficult situations. So, don’t be scared of failures, lead the change and not wait for others to begin.” Earlier, Prof Vivek Lal, Director PGIMER while welcoming the Chief Guest recounted the deeds of valour of the bravehe[1]art as he said, “Major D.P.Singh’s journey from soldier during the Kargil War to marathon runner who overcame all odds – even cheated death – is stuff for celluloid.” The Director PGIMER urged the residents “to emulate Major D P Singh’s example of exemplary cour[1]age, unwavering commit[1]ment and ‘never say die’ attitude in the face of even worst of the circumstances.
Army not obliged to retain officers required to serve for specified term if they are found unfit, rules AFT
The Armed Forces Tribunal has ruled that there is no obligation on the part of the Army to keep an officer in service for any specified period even if he was, on his part, required to serve the organisation for the stipulated period after undergoing training at government expense.
A short service commission officer (SSCO) from the Army Aviation Corps, who underwent flying training after being commissioned, was required to serve up to 14 years, but was discharged after 10 years of service.
In his petition, he had contended that as per the policy in vogue, if he was not approved for grant of permanent commission on rendering 10 years of service, he could not be released before completing the mandatory 14 years’ service as SSCO. However, he was neither approved for permanent commission nor was his term extended by four years. He also challenged the proceedings of the selection board.
The Tribunal observed that though the policy makes it clear that the obligation imposed upon SSCOs who successfully complete flying training is that they are liable to work for a period of 14 years even if not granted permanent commission on completing 10 years’ service they cannot seek prior discharge or pre-mature release.
“It only imposes a liability on the officer who has completed the training. This cannot be construed or interpreted as consequential liability imposed by this policy on the Army also to keep an officer for a period of 14 years,” the Tribunal’s Bench comprising Justice Rajendra Menon and Lt Gen PM Hariz, ruled.
The Bench said that if the officer’s interpretation is accepted, there would be a situation which would create administrative and other obligations as a person not found qualified or meritorious enough for grant of permanent commission or extension of service for various reasons will be required to continue with all the disqualifications, which would render him unsuitable to continue in service.
“This could never be the intention or the mandate of the policy and therefore there cannot be any policy which would mandate an organisation to keep in service an employee who is found unfit to discharge his duties,” the Bench ruled.
The interpretation that an officer cannot be discharged or released by the organisation before the completion of his obligatory service is wholly misconceived and cannot be accepted, the Bench added.
“On the contrary, the policy only contemplated that having undergone training, an officer cannot seek pre-mature discharge but once his case is referred to the selection board as per policy, the mandate of the policy is that he can be discharged having found to be unsuitable for grant of permanent commission or extension in service,” the Bench said.
The Tribunal also did not find any fault in the proceedings of No.5 Selection Board which had considered the petitioner’s case for grant of permanent commission or extension in service.
Army personnel, aide held with 31-kg heroin in Fazilka; consignment smuggled from Pakistan
In a major breakthrough against trans-border narcotic smuggling networks, Punjab Police in a joint operation with Central Agencies and Border Security Force (BSF) have arrested an Army personnel and his aide after recovering 29 packets of heroin, weighing 31.02kg, from their possession, said Punjab Director General of Police (DGP) Gaurav Yadav here on Saturday.
The 26-years-old Army personnel, posted as sepoy in Pathankot, was arrested along with his aide Paramjeet Singh alias Pamma of Mahalam village in Fazilka. Apart from recovering heroin, the police have also recovered the Hyundai Verna car (UP 80 CD 0023) and two mobile phones from their possession.
In a well-coordinated operation with Central Agencies and BSF, DGP Gaurav Yadav said, Fazilka Police led by SSP Bhupinder Singh Sidhu launched a cordon and search operation in the area of Sadar Fazilka. “On checking of the Verna car, one of the occupants showed an Army ID card, and when police insisted for checking the vehicle they managed to flee in the car,” he said, adding that the police teams immediately strengthened all the naka points and managed to trace them at Gaaganke-Shamsabad road Nakabandi.
He said that on checking the vehicle, the Police teams have recovered 29 packets of heroin from the car.
The DGP reiterated that Punjab Police is committed to root out drug menace from the state as per the vision of Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann.
DIG Ferozepur range Ranjit Singh Dhillon said that during preliminary investigation it has come to fore that both the accused persons were escaping the border district after retrieving consignment of drugs pushed by Pakistan-based smugglers through border fencing with the help of a pipe. Further investigations are on, he said.
Meanwhile, a case has been registered under Sections 21-C, 23 and 29 of the NDPS Act at Police Station Sadar Fazilka.
Sikh mum in Canada couldn’t find a proper helmet for her boys, so she designed one to accommodate their turbans
A Sikh woman from Ontario has designed what she calls the first safety certified multisport helmet specifically for kids like hers wearing turbans.
When Tina Singh’s three boys started riding bikes, they needed helmets and it was a task for her to find one in the market to accommodate her sons’ turbans.
She said her kids have long hair, nothing fits them properly as they wear turbans, reports CBC Toronto.
She worked for over two years and made a helmet that was safe for her kids. She said it’s in production and certified for use with bicycles, inline skates, kick scooters and skateboarding for kids over five. “This is a big learning curve for me, it’s not something I’ve ever done before,” she said.View this post on Instagram
What makes her model unique is that it has a domed portion on top to accommodate a child’s hair, while still fitting the way a helmet should: two finger spaces above the eyebrow, creating a “v” shape around the ear and one finger space between the chinstrap and the ear, reports cbc.ca/news.
The helmet also received a passing grade from the international testing company SGS this December.
While Singh’s helmets are for children, the issue of whether to exempt turban-wearing Sikh motorcyclists from wearing helmets has made headlines in recent years.
In 2018, Ontario’s Progressive Conservative government joined Alberta, BC, and Manitoba in allowing Sikhs to ride motorcycles without helmets after calls by Sikh motorcycling groups and federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh.
The previous provincial government, under Premier Kathleen Wynne, refused those calls, saying the move would pose a road safety risk
In a 2008 court case, a judge ruled against a human rights challenge to Ontario’s law after a Sikh motorcyclist refused to pay a fine for not wearing a helmet over his turban, saying it was against his religion to do so.
India, Japan to hold maiden bilateral air exercise
India and Japan will hold their first bilateral air exercise from January 12 to 26, in reflection of the growing defence ties amid increasing concerns over China’s military muscle flexing in the Indo-Pacific region.
The exercise ‘Veer Guardian-2023’ involving the Indian Air Force (IAF) and Japan Air Self Defence Force (JASDF) will be held at Japan’s Hyakuri air base.
The IAF said on Saturday that its deployment at the exercise will include four Su-30 MKI jets, two C-17 aircraft and one IL-78 plane.
The JASDF will be participating with four F-2 and four F-15 aircraft, it said.
“To promote Air Defence cooperation between the countries, India and Japan are all set to hold the joint air exercise, ‘Veer Guardian-2023’,” the IAF said in a statement.
India and Japan agreed to step up bilateral defence cooperation and engage in more military exercises, including holding of the first joint fighter jet drills, during the second ‘2+2 Foreign and Defence Ministerial’ dialogue in Tokyo in September.
The IAF said the upcoming exercise will be another step in deepening strategic ties and closer defence cooperation between the two countries.
“The inaugural exercise will include the conduct of various aerial combat drills between the two air forces. They will undertake multi-domain air combat missions in a complex environment and will exchange best practices,” the IAF said.
It said experts from both sides will also hold discussions to share their expertise on varied operational aspects.
“Exercise ‘Veer Guardian’ will fortify the long standing bond of friendship and enhance the avenues of defence cooperation between the two air forces,” it said.
Lauding the role of the Sikhs in the history of India, Lt Gen Syed Ata Hasnain (retd) referred to the airlift of the 1st Sikh Battalion from Delhi to Srinagar in October 1947 and said, “It was the Sikhs who pushed the invaders west of Uri (Kashmir)”.
He was speaking on the second day of the three-day Sikh History Congress at Khalsa College in Delhi University’s north campus.
Lt Gen Hasnain, who had commanded the Srinagar-based 15 Corps of the Army, went on to make references of former western Army Commander Lt Gen Harbaksh Singh, former Eastern Army Commander Jagjit Singh Aurora and Honorary Capt Bana Singh in the military history of independent India.
He termed Lt Gen Harbaksh Singh as a ‘great battle commander’. During the 1965 war with Pakistan, the Army Chief asked him to withdraw towards Jalandhar as the Pakistan buildup was bigger. The general refused to comply with the orders of the Army Chief and pressed forward and reached the outskirts of Lahore.
Honorary Capt Bana Singh climbed a wall of ice to reach the Pakistani post of Quaid at 23,000 feet on the Siachen glacier. In a hand-to-hand combat, the Pakistan troops were eliminated and the post is now held by India and renamed ‘Bana-post’.
Harbans Kaur Sagoo, Director, International Centre for Sikh Studies, established by the Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee (DSGMC), shared insights on how the places associated with Baba Banda Singh Bahadur in Delhi were identified from Persian sources.
There is a demand to deploy machines along the checkposts that can scan the trucks plying on the Jammu-Srinagar highway without physical inspection. The modus operandi of the infiltrated terrorists is to hide in truck cavities. A random search of the trucks makes detection a low probability exercise.Besides, a political class and civil society transcending the religious and ethnic ties is a prime catalyst in mounting a collective societal deterrence against terrorists in the Rajouri-Poonch area.
Luv Puri
Journalist and Author
ON February 19, 1998, just hours before then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee was to embark on the Lahore bus journey, which was supposed to be a curtain-raiser to the Vajpayee-Sharif peace initiative, terrorists killed 20 villagers in Rajouri and neighbouring Reasi districts of J&K. The design of the terrorists was to shrink the PM’s domestic political space and sabotage the peace initiative.
Also ReadThe recent egregious killings of six villagers in Dangri village of Rajouri district on January 1 seemingly lack any viable or sustainable grand design that could succeed. But the killings revive the blood-stained memories of equally brutal attacks and mass murders to the south of Pir Panjal that divides the Kashmir valley from Jammu. The killings defied simplistic conclusions, but that doesn’t mean past lessons cannot be invoked to buttress the state’s counter-terrorism capacity and save innocent lives.
Jammu & Kashmir’s hilly Rajouri-Poonch area in terms of geography and ethnicity is a mirror image of the areas across the Line of Control. The area largely remained free from militancy-related incidents that impacted the Valley till the mid-1990s. The reason was obvious as militants kept a low profile in the area. The heights and meadows of vast and heavily forested Pir Panjal mountain range that nestles Rajouri-Poonch provided natural hideouts and shortest route to south Kashmir after infiltration from across the Line of Control.
The reality changed as the security forces tried to nip the problem at its root and initiated sanitising operations in the hinterland. In September 1997, militants engaged the Army positions around Thana Mandi, falling in Rajouri, directly by occupying the heights of Ratan Pir and fired mortars. It took the Army a week to clear the area. In contrast to relatively religiously polarised societies in militancy-infested areas of Doda, Bhaderwah and Kishtwar, the killings in the Rajouri-Poonch belt didn’t follow any pattern.
All religious and ethnic communities were harmed by terrorists in the Rajouri-Poonch area. On July 1, 1999, nine Hindu villagers at Mendhar in Poonch district were killed. The terrorists tried to exploit conservative local resentment over an inter-religious marriage. This was preceded by killings in the Budhal area of Rajouri on September 24, 1997, in which eight Hindus were killed. This led to migration from the hills to Rajouri town. Terrorists also beheaded two Hindu priests on the Surankote-Poonch road on August 28, 2001.
The Muslim community suffered equally. The first major terrorism-related incident in Poonch was the killing of 20 members of a family in the Sailan area of Surankote. The incident was a direct response to the intra-terrorist group infighting when a terrorist of a particular ethnicity was killed by terrorists of a different ethnic group on August 3, 1998. The lone survivor of the massacre was Mohammad Shabir Sheikh, a teenager at that time. He had told the author that he escaped the massacre as he had gone out of the house to relieve himself. He hid himself in the nearby bushes as he saw his family members being killed. Sheikh told me that just two years after the massacre of his family, a group of terrorists approached him to join them so that he could take revenge. Insecurity and vengeance often drove recruitment in militant ranks in the late 1990s.
One of the unsung heroes of the local resistance in the Rajouri-Poonch belt that gave a death blow to terrorism in the area was late Haji Mohammad Qasim. He and his men fought against Lashkar terrorists in the Marrah area of Surankote in the last quarter of 2003. The area, situated in the hinterland and hard to access, was virtually controlled by terrorists. Giving up their lucrative marble business in Saudi Arabia as economic migrants, Haji and his men mobilised locals to fight the Lashkar terrorists. With arm training from the security forces, they succeeded in evicting terrorists from the area. There were acts of revenge as he lost clan members, but they held ground. In one of the many field trips to his village, Haji, who died a few years ago, told me that the entire community was aghast against the diktats of terrorists and it just needed a spark to enable the resistance
The last three decades of violence in the area imparts specific lessons. First, the recent incidents in the Rajouri-Poonch area, including a suicide attack on August 11, 2022, in which five soldiers were killed, reflect the need for a more astute knowledge of the local milieu. In the Kashmir valley, it is easy to spot Punjabi-speaking infiltrators from the local Kashmiri-speaking population and the experience of 1947, 1965 or even the last three decades bears that. In the case of the areas to the south of Pir Panjal, it is difficult to distinguish a Punjabi speaker from the locals because of the linguistic affinity.
Second, an objective review of the current fencing capabilities along the 740-km Line of Control and 190-km international border is required. Just a few days before the Rajouri killings, on December 28, 2021, a truck on the Jammu-Srinagar highway was intercepted as a result of random checking and four terrorists, who were hiding in the truck, were killed. The driver managed to escape. He had apparently picked up the terrorists after they had infiltrated from the plain India-Pakistan border.
Another instance that came to light in the police investigation was a foiled bid to target Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s rally in J&K on April 24, 2022. According to the police, a truck driver had transported two terrorists after infiltration from the Samba sector and another person had sheltered them. These incidents reflect that some terrorists are managing to sneak in from the international border.
In this connection, there is a demand to deploy machines along checkposts that could scan the trucks plying on the Jammu-Srinagar National Highway without physical inspection. The modus operandi of the infiltrated terrorists is to hide in truck cavities. A random search of the trucks makes detection a low probability exercise and enhances risk to the lives of the security personnel.
Third, apart from strengthening the counter-terrorism grid, a political class and civil society transcending the religious and ethnic ties is a prime catalyst in mounting a collective societal deterrence against terrorists in Rajouri-Poonch, an area which is vast and hilly. In the face of recent developments, a detailed review of counter-terrorism is required which factors in the new realities and also draws from the three decades of counter-terrorism experience of J&K.
Home Ministry declares PAFF, TRF as terrorist organisations as militancy spikes in Jammu province
As militancy is spreading to relatively peaceful areas of Jammu province, the Ministry of Home Affairs banned the People’s Anti-Fascist Front (PAFF) and The Resistance Front (TRF), which have been involved in major terror activities after the abrogation of Article 370 in 2019.
Home Ministry said that PAFF is a proxy outfit of Maulana Masood Azhar-led Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) while the TRF is the proxy outfit of the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT), which emerged in 2019 and targeted civilians.
“PAFF was involved in terror acts and is regularly issuing threats to Indian security forces, political leaders, civilians working in Jammu-Kashmir from other states and is involved, along with other organisations, in conspiring pro-actively physically and in social media to undertake violent terrorist acts and Jammu-Kashmir and other major cities in India,” the MHA notification said.
The TRF on Saturday warned of terror attacks on people whose names it has released on the “hit list” two days after it was declared as a banned organization by the Home Ministry
The MHA said that TRF is recruiting youth through the online medium for the furtherance of terrorist activities, recruitment of terrorists, infiltration of terrorists and smuggling of weapons and narcotics from Pakistan into Jammu and Kashmir.
The MHA also designated Pakistan-based TRF commander Sheikh Sajjad Gul as a terrorist under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act 1967.
The government also designated Mohammed Amin alias Abu Khubaib, who belongs to Jammu and Kashmir but currently lives in Pakistan, as an individual terrorist
Khubaib is acting as the launching commander of Lashkar-e-Taiba and is playing a vital role to revive and accelerate terrorist activities of LeT in the Jammu region, the MHA said.
He has been involved in coordinating terrorist attacks, supply of arms or weapons and explosives, and terror financing in Jammu and Kashmir from across the border.
Also, Arbaz Ahmad Mir, a Lashkar-e-Tobia operative who is currently based in Pakistan, has been designated as an “individual terrorist”. The MHA said Mir was the main accused in the targeted killing of Rajni Bala, a school teacher in Kulgam in May last year.
Both TRF and PAFF have been involved in multiple attacks including the killing of Kashmiri Pandits and migrant labourers while threatening journalists after the abrogation of Articles 370 and 35-A on August 5, 2019.
After the abrogation of Article 370, militant activities and smuggling of weapons through drones have increased in Jammu province.
Six civilians including two children were killed by the militants earlier this week in a targeted attack in the Rajouri district.
