HT Correspondent

letterschd@hindustantimes.com

FEROZEPUR : A 70-feet Vijay Stambh will be established at Asafwala War Memorial, Fazilka, to mark the sacrifices of soldiers who attained martyrdom during the 1971 Indo-Pak war at the Fazilka Sector, said Punjab health & family welfare minister Balbir Singh Sidhu. Sidhu also paid homage to the martyrs during a special programme organised on Vijay Diwas.

“The state government will provide every possible help to the ‘Samadh Committee’ to build the Vijay Stambh at martyrs’ memorial,” said Sidhu.

The minister also honoured the family members of martyred soldiers and ex-servicemen and provided ₹5,000 each to 35 families of martyrs.

Thanking the committee for organising the event, he said it is because of brave soldiers that we sleep in peace and have our freedom and it is our duty to honour them and their families on such occasions. Deputy commissioner Manpreet Chattwal said that district administration is committed to provide financial help to the committee.

HT Correspondents

letterschd@hindustantimes.com

JAMMU : Rifleman Sukhwinder Singh, 21, of Mukerian was martyred when Pakistan resorted to unprovoked ceasefire violation on the Line of Control (LoC) in the Sunderbani sector of Rajouri district on Monday.

“Rifleman Sukhwinder belonged to Fatehpur village in Mukerian teshsil of Hoshiarpur district. He was a brave, highly motivated and sincere soldier. The nation will always remain indebted to him for the supreme sacrifice and devotion to duty,” said defence spokesman Lt Col Devender Anand.

“The Indian Army responded effectively inflicting substantial damage to the Pakistan army,” he added.

Though the Indian Army claimed it to be an infiltration bid that was foiled, sources said half a dozen members of the border action team (BAT) of Pakistan army, comprising commandos of the special service group and terrorists, attempted to inflict casualties on the Indian Army posts in the area.

Another soldier, havaldar Chougule Jotiba Ganpati, was martyred in Pakistan shelling in Gurez sector of Bandipora district in Kashmir on Monday.

MOTHER UNAWARE

Relatives have so far not shared the news of rifleman Sukhwinder’s death with his widowed mother Rani.

A spokesman of the Indian Army had rung up the family on Monday evening to inform them of their son’s martyrdom but held back the news when Sukhwinder’s mother came on the line. Later, he called up another relative and informed that Sukhwinder had made the supreme sacrifice in the line of duty.

Villagers started pouring in to extend condolences to the family but no one was allowed to reach the martyr’s mother who stays in a house at a distance from the main habitation.

The martyr’s brother, Gurpal Singh, 22, said, “I don’t have the heart to disclose the unfortunate news to her. Sukhwinder’s body will reach tomorrow (Wednesday). Before that, may be one of my aunts will break the news to her.”

Gurpal, who is unemployed, said their father, Avinesh Kumar, had died a few years ago and Sukhwinder was the sole breadwinner. He said Sukhwinder had joined the 18 Jammu and Kashmir Rifles in 2017.

(With inputs from Hoshiarpur)

J&K cross-border shelling: Slain soldier’s mortal remains to reach native village in Mukerian today

This is the second death of a soldier from Mukerian subdivision in past one month. On November 19, Dimpal Kumar (21) of Saidon village had died in Siachen glacier after an avalanche hit the area.

ukhwinder is survived by his mother, Santosh Kumari, and 22-year old elder brother.

The mortal remains of Rifleman Sukhwinder Singh (21), who was killed in cross-border shelling on Monday at Sunderbani sector in Jammu’s Rajouri district, will reach his native village Fatehpur in Mukerian sub-division in Hoshiarpur on Wednesday afternoon. The family was informed about his death only on Monday late.

This is the second death of a soldier from Mukerian subdivision in past one month. On November 19, Dimpal Kumar (21) of Saidon village had died in Siachen glacier after an avalanche hit the area.

Sukhwinder, meanwhile, is survived by his mother, Santosh Kumari, and 22-year old elder brother.

His uncle, Swaran Singh, said that Sukhwinder’s father, late Avinesh Kumar Singh, had died in 2007. He was employed with the Punjab State Electricity Board. Sukhwinder’s mother had looked after both the children who were very young, added Swaran Singh.

Sukwinder had joined Army two-and-a-half years back after doing his Class 12 from Government Senior Secondary School, Talwara. His brother has also done Class 12 and is now looking for a job after finishing his studies. The family owns around a half-acre farmland.

“We were first informed by the Army officials that he got injured and then we got a call that he was killed in the shelling and a shell hit him in his head,” said Swaran Singh, adding that they were told that Sukhwinder was part of a patrolling team when the mishap took place.

He recalled that Sukhwinder, who had joined the Indian Army in April 2017, has come home last month and had returned on November 22 after spending two weeks’ at his native village.

Station House Officer (SHO) Talwara, Inspector Bhushan Sekhri, said that they informed the family after getting the information from the district authorities.

According to the press released by the Army authorities, Pakistan carried out an unprovoked ceasefire violation on the LoC in Sunderbani sector and Army responded effectively inflicting substantial damage to Pakistan Army. It is further said that Rifleman Sukhwinder Singh was a brave, highly motivated and sincere soldier, adding that the nation will always remain indebted to him for his supreme sacrifice and devotion to the duty.

Rezaul H Laskar

letters@hindustantimes.com

New Delhi : France and other permanent members of the UN Security Council on Tuesday thwarted an effort by China, acting on behalf of Pakistan, to discuss the situation in Kashmir, people familiar with the matter said on condition of anonymity.

China pushed for a meeting of the UN Security Council behind closed doors — the second such effort since an earlier meet on the Kashmir issue on August 16. At that time, China’s attempt to have an open and formal meeting of the Security Council was rebuffed by members of the body, which agreed to hold only “closed consultations”.

The people cited above said France and other permanent members of the Security Council conveyed to China the body was the not the best forum to discuss the Kashmir issue, which ought to be handled bilaterally by India and Pakistan. Non-permanent members of the council, such as Germany and Poland, too, showed no inclination for a discussion on Kashmir, they said.

The Chinese side subsequently withdrew its note seeking the meeting on Kashmir, the people added. “Kashmir will not be discussed in the Security Council today (Tuesday),” said one of them, a French official.

“Our (France’s) position has been very clear — the Kashmir issue has to be treated bilaterally. We have highlighted this several times recently, including in New York,” this person added. The closed consultations on August 16 marked the first time the Security Council took up the “India-Pakistan Question” — the UN’s term for the Kashmir issue — since 1971. Pakistan has been lobbying with China to take up the Kashmir issue in the Security Council since India revoked the special status of the erstwhile state of Jammu & Kashmir on August 5 and decided to split it into two Union territories.

In a letter sent to the Security Council on December 12, Pakistan foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi expressed concern about a possible escalation of tensions in Kashmir. According to Reuters, China’s UN mission had written in its note to members of the Security Council: “In view of the seriousness of the situation and the risk of further escalation, China would like to echo the request of Pakistan, and request a briefing of the Council… on the situation of Jammu & Kashmir.” The discussion would not have involved a vote.

The nationwide student protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) have acquired a scale and intensity that is reflective of India’s deep democratic resilience. Some complex questions about the constitutional validity of the Act have been raised by citizens, particularly the young. A placard summarised the core of the student protests in a pithy manner: “We support Gandhi’s India and reject Savarkar’s India.’ One hopes that there would be an empathetic dialogue with the students in keeping with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s exhortation that debate and peaceful dissent are the way ahead, even as the Supreme Court deliberates over whether the CAA is ultra vires of the Constitution or not. Embedded in the CAA-related developments of the last week are two elements specific to the Army that merit objective scrutiny for their long-term national security implications and the integrity of Indian democracy.

On December 11, when the first protests broke out in the Northeast, the Army was called in. This may have been done as a precautionary measure in the event the police were unable to deal with the unrest. Consequently, two columns of the Army were deployed in Assam and Tripura, while another was kept on stand-by. However, the situation appears to have stabilised and no further Army deployments have been requisitioned as “aid to civil power”. This is to be welcomed.

Concurrently, Lieutenant General Anil Chauhan, the Army commander of the Eastern Command, made a statement about the CAA that raised eyebrows for its political overtones. Speaking in Kolkata on December 14, he observed: “The current government is keen on taking hard decisions that have been pending for a long time.” He further added that the CAA was passed “despite reservations from a couple of Northeastern states”.

Both elements merit a recall and contextualisation apropos the Indian experience of the last 72 years. “Aid to civil power” is a duty that the military has to carry out, as and when called upon to do so by the civilian authorities. The more common of these is humanitarian assistance and disaster relief tasks.

In recent decades, the primary duty of the military — defending the nation from external threats, and managing low-intensity insurgencies — has been rendered more complex by the transmutation of the internal security (IS) challenge with the arrival of religious radicalism and jihadi terrorism. Pakistan’s support to such terrorism and the penchant of its deep-State to fish in troubled waters was noted in Kashmir in early 1990 and continues.

Hence, the conclusion, that, for India, the external and internal strands of security are now braided in an inextricable manner and the security establishment has been dealing with an opaque proxy war for decades. Kashmir and Khalistan have become symbols of such manifestation and the Army has set up special Rashtriya Rifle (RR) units to deal with this complex challenge.

Given India’s geography, regional politics, and the distinctive South Asian demographic density, borders have become porous and dealing with the steady influx of illegal immigrants or refugees has been an abiding socio-political and security challenge for Delhi. This peaked in 1970, when almost 10 million refugees from East Pakistan sought shelter from the persecution and genocide that ensued at the time. The Northeast was flooded in a visible manner and the “outsider” problem has continued to fester. The illegal immigrant morphing into an armed infiltrator or emerging as a militant, jihadi terrorist is a concern for security, and the post-9/11 global anxiety is common to many nations. Hence, the genesis of the CAA is not devoid of latent security concerns. Lieutenant General SK Sinha, a former army vice chief and later governor of Assam, was among the first to articulate these concerns in relation to the Northeast.

How this matter will be resolved in an equitable and sustainable manner is an issue that calls for astute political initiatives, imbued with integrity and commitment to the national interest, that are framed within the spirit of the Constitution. This has remained both elusive and contested as the current student protests demonstrate. In the interim, it may be useful to recall the muddy politics-security linkage. Former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and the Congress nurtured the rise of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. While this initiative may have given them short-term electoral advantage in Punjab, the nation paid a heavy price by way of the negative impact this opportunistic policy had on the internal security fabric and the collateral damage to the fauj.

Yes, the military must stand by to provide “aid to civil power”, when called upon but excessive tasking of the Army will blunt its salutary effect in domestic exigencies. An apolitical and professional military is vital for democratic integrity and it would be prudent if top military commanders refrain from making public statements that stray into the political domain. The CAA must be negotiated with the citizen, and it is desirable that the soldier remains outside this mediation.

C Uday Bhaskar is director, Society for Policy Studies, New Delhi

The views expressed are personal