The killing of five Indian soldiers by militants on May 5 in the Rajouri-Poonch sector, once again highlights the failure of our security machinery to protect our jawans. Its agents who are posted in that sector, failed to detect the explosive device that was planted and triggered by the militants in the path of these soldiers.
Just a fortnight ago, on April 20, five soldiers were ambushed and killed in a similar way by a Kashmiri militant organization called People’s Anti-Fascist Front (PAFF). Soon after its operation, it posted messages online mocking at the Indian jawans: “You walk into our ambushes. We will kill you, we win. The world knows we are here.” After the catastrophe, security agencies are now looking into “possible angles of hiding militants floating a tip-off and laying a trap for security forces to inflict a major damage.” (Re: The Hindu. May 6, 2023)
After the Pulwama attacks in February 2019, we expected that the Indian security and intelligence agencies would be more alert in preventing such humiliating tragic deaths of our jawans at the hands of Pakistan-sponsored terrorists. But to our dismay, we find that Pulwama has been followed by a series of similar assaults on our soldiers – the latest being the May 5 incident. The repetition of such happenings raises doubts about the efficacy of these agencies.
Flaws embedded in Indian security and intelligence agencies
Julius Caesar in Shakespeare’s play said: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.” It is about time that the Indian state , instead of blaming the `stars’ situated in Pakistan, takes a look at its `underlings’ – the personnel who man its security and intelligence agencies within India.
The recent revelations by Satya Pal Malik, former Jammu and Kashmir Governor, during an interview with the Wire news portal (April 16, 2023), are a damning indictment of the role of the Indian intelligence and security agencies during the Pulwama attack in February, 2019. According to Malik, despite his requests, the Home Ministry denied aircraft to transport the CRPF personnel. They were thus compelled to pass through roads – which again were unmanned by security forces. As a result, they became vulnerable to the attacks by the militants. Apart from this security lapse, there was a prior intelligence lapse. Malik admitted that according to later findings, a car had been moving around the Pulwama area with 300 kg of explosives for 10-12 days, without being detected and apprehended by the intelligence and security agencies. Malik regretted: “Forty venerable soldiers were sacrificed due to sheer incompetence.”
The mystery behind the Pulwama attack
The sequence of events, as narrated by Malik, raises the question whether it was `sheer incompetence,’ or a well-designed indifference to the fate of the CRPF jawans ? Were they meant to be sacrificed according to a cold-hearted calculated plan by the rulers in New Delhi ? It is significant that when Malik complained about security lapses, Prime Minister Modi warned him: “Chup raho” (Be quiet). Was there a hidden agenda behind Modi’s stance then ? Let’s remember, he was going to face the Lok Sabha polls a month later in March. The Pakistan-sponsored terrorist attack in Pulwama offered him a big opportunity to rally Indian public opinion behind his air force’s retaliatory strikes in Balakot in Pakistan territory. Was he following a wait-and-strike strategy – seducing the Pak-aided terrorists to launch an attack on the CRPF jawans in Pulwama who were left unprotected ? Once the attack took place, it provided Narendra Modi with the best opportunity of hyping up nationalist sentiments in favour of his next step – the Balakot air strikes. It was this that boosted his popularity, as evident from his resounding victory in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls.
Narendra Modi’s return to power in 2019 was thus at the expense of the lives of forty CRPF jawans who were made sacrificial lambs to pave the way for his second victory. His tactics comprised of dual acts of omission (refusal to provide security for the CRPF jawans) and commission (the Balakot air strikes.)
Indian security personnel suspected as Pakistani agents
But soon after the Modi government’s much vaunted act of success in its foreign policy by achieving military victory in Balakot, it had to face embarrassing situations within its homeland, which exposed not only the lapses of its domestic security and intelligence agencies – but also the complicity of some of its senior officials with Pakistan intelligence agencies and their terrorist outfits.
Let us take a few cases. Salwinder Singh, former SP (Superintendent of Police) of Gurudaspur in Punjab has been found to have been in complicity with Pakistani agents behind the Pak attack on the Pathankot airbase on January 2, 2016.
On January 11, 2020, a Jammu and Kashmir police officer Davinder Singh was arrested when he was found ferrying the terrorist Naveed Babu of the banned Hizbul Mujahideen, from Kashmir to Jammu. Incidentally, this same Davinder Singh was at one time posted in the sensitive anti-hijacking unit of the Jammu and Kashmir Police at the border. During his posting there, he obviously got into touch with his Pak counterparts who offered him better financial benefits than those he enjoyed as a poorly paid Indian police officer. Since then, apparently he had been operating as a mole planted by Pakistan in the Indian police force in Kashmir – aiding the Pak-sponsored terrorist groups.
The next case is related to the arrest of Talib Hussain Shah in July, 2022 in Rajouri in Kashmir. He is accused of being a Lashkar-e-Taiba commander. Yet, according to official documents, all these years, he was in charge of the BJP’s social media wing for minorities. (Re: The Wire, 3 July, 2022). How did the ever vigilant BJP-controlled security and intelligence agencies fail to detect his past background – or his present secretive operations of which he is being accused ?
To come to the latest case, on May 23, 2023, the Maharashtra Anti-Terrorist Squad arrested in Pune, P.M. Kurulkar – a senior official in the Defence and Development Organization (DRDO). He has been hauled up for passing on secrets to a Pakistani intelligence operative, who happens to be a woman – and thus caught up in a `honey-trap.’ Over the last six years, some 20 serving and retired army staff were arrested on the charge of spying for Pakistan’s deep state ISI. Apart from the conventional `honey-trap’ where the ISI uses its women spies as baits to seduce Indian armed personnel and tease out secrets from them, the latest sophisticated tools like social media and internet inducements are also being employed by the ISI and other foreign spy agencies to exploit weaknesses of some defence and research personnel. (Re: The Times of India editorial, May 23, 2023).
Is India’s security in safe hands ?
Given these revelations, we must express our serious misgivings about the efficiency of two high profile ministers of the Union cabinet. Our Home Minister Amit Shah’s braggadocio that terrorism has been wiped out in the north-east has proved to be a false claim, as evident from the recent events in Manipur. The Indian intelligence apparatus which he controls, has been ruptured by the ISI, and it is now honeycombed with many secret passages that have been carved out by the ISI with the help of Indian spies who help it to launch terrorist attacks in Jammu and Kashmir. The recent revelations, as described earlier in this article, expose Amit Shah’s utter failure to carry out the responsibility of safeguarding India’s security, the task that he was entrusted with as a Home Minister.
Similarly, the performance of Defence Minister Rajnath Singh needs to be demystified. Despite all his swagger in public – rolling up his kurta sleeves to display his muscles and announcing that every inch of soil in India is protected by our jawans – what is the ground reality at the LAC ? China continues to occupy large chunks of land which are claimed by India to be its own. That Indian army officers are deputed by his ministry to negotiate with their Chinese counterparts at the border crossings every now and then, is a recognition of the fact that all is not that hunky-dory in our defence sector. After all these years, marked by armed confrontation, negotiations and exchanges of vitriolic diatribe between the two countries, Rajnath Singh has not been able to recover the territory that India claims to be its own.
While their boss Prime Minister Narendra Modi jets all around the world and manages through a well organized media campaign to win accolades from global leaders, these two poor colleagues of his languish in his backyard in India, and have to face public opprobrium for their utter incompetence.
Sumanta Banerjee is a political commentator and writer, is the author of In The Wake of Naxalbari’ (1980 and 2008); The Parlour and the Streets: Elite and Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century Calcutta (1989) and ‘Memoirs of Roads: Calcutta from Colonial Urbanization to Global Modernization.’ (2016).
