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National security document half-baked

Lt Gen DS Hooda’s (retd) document “India’s national security strategy” is half-baked — it hides problems more than highlighting those that plague Kashmir as “India’s biggest internal security challenge”.

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Arun Joshi

Lt Gen DS Hooda’s (retd) document “India’s national security strategy” is half-baked — it hides problems more than highlighting those that plague Kashmir as “India’s biggest internal security challenge”.

The document dwells on two all-too-familiar factors for the 30-year-long conflict: Pakistan that sends infiltrators and resorts to ceasefire violations, and the growing anger and alienation of people in Kashmir.

There is much more than all this that has kept militancy alive in Kashmir with new dangerous dimensions where the fear of the Army has disappeared and the resistance to the idea of India is the new fostered ideology in Kashmir alongside radicalism and social media.

Gen Hooda’s document is shy of talking about the hanging of the Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru in February 2013 and the eruption of massive street protests and intense stone throwing following the killing of militant commander Burhan Wani in specific terms. It has dealt with the Kashmir issue in a typical textbook manner rather than focusing on the grim realities.

The failure of the system exhibited in over reliance on military might, and hesitation in exposing the nexus between politicians and the ever-expanding overground network of militants have been left untouched.

The document does talk about locals joining militant ranks and picking up guns, and funerals of militants becoming the recruitment ground, but it misses the crucial points – the impact that the 2016 situation had on the psyche of the young generation that is of the rebels against the system.

The Army’s own reluctance to conduct the security audit that it was advised to undertake time and again particularly after the terror attack at the Pathankot airbase in the opening days of 2016 and also after a series of ambushes and targeting of the security vehicles between Khannabal-Srinagar stretch of less than 50 km from South to Central Kashmir brought about the devastation now known as the Pulwama terror attack in which more than 40 CRPF men were killed on February 14.

To look at Pulwama and other terror attacks in isolation or merely as intelligence failures or vicious machinations of Pakistan – that they are for sure - do not help in improving the situation. The Kashmir situation has not been diagnosed properly, at best it is a garrison view.

It is a wise observation that “surgical strike” and the “aerial strikes” would not make Pakistan change its behaviour. But that is not something new, as a decisive defeat and dismemberment of Pakistan in 1971 did not make Rawalpindi change its aggressive support to the elements of instability in J&K.

The alternative to strikes is the engagement with Pakistan, but on what terms? Islamabad refuses to abide by Simla Agreement of July 1972, nor has it adhered to Islamabad declaration of January 2004 in which the then Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf had reassured the then Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee that he “will not permit any territory under Pakistan’s control to be used to support terrorism in any manner”. The new rules of engagement have not been spelled out in the document.

Kashmiris have lost faith in the system. From Farooq Abdullah to teenagers, one can count the betrayals that Delhi has heaped on them all these years. And, the suggestions for dialogue and a rehabilitation policy are old wine in new bottles.

Gen Hooda, under whose watch the September 2016 “surgical strike” took place, and the 2016 turbulence propelled to international level , echoes of which were heard in the United Nations General Assembly, has not shed much light on Kashmir and its place in meeting the national security challenge.

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