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The Tribune 26 Dec 2016 Selection of India’s Army Chief a Sensitive Issue : Comments by Simranjit Singh Mann:

Image result for Indian Army Corps

 

The Tribune 26 Dec 2016

Selection of India’s Army Chief a sensitive issue

Comments by Simranjit Singh Mann:

 

 Shiromani Akali Dal (Amritsar) states that our party feels that the seniority of the generals should have been kept in place, as the other two were equally good. The armored corp and motorized infantry officers, at that level of army commanders, should not have fallen by the wayside.
            Lt. Gen. Rawat had an advantage over the others as he was at headquarters in Delhi as vice chief and had all the time to work around the political and bureaucratic rigmarole. Moreover, he was from the same battalion of the Gorkha regiment as Gen. Dilbag Singh, the army chief. Officers coming from the same regiment have a great camaraderie and an esprit de corps. Therefore Gen. Dilbag Singh obviously favored an officer from the Gorkha’s. That is a bit of good luck for Lt. Gen. Rawat and bad luck for the other two army commanders.
            When I was Aid de Camp to Punjab Governor Pavate, Gen. Manikshaw was invited to a luncheon by the Governor. A serving Brigadier who was deprived of his command on the border with Pakistan asked me whether he could travel with me to receive Gen. Manikshaw at the Chandigarh airport. Having received Gen. Manikshaw at the airport I let the brigadier sit with the General in the rear seat. The Brigadier who had lost his post during that war cribbed and told his boss that it was unfair to withdraw him from his post in the middle of the battle. Gen. Manikshaw replied that it was just his bad luck and could anyone have ever wondered whether he (Manikshaw) would ever have reached the top post. It was just luck that propelled him to the top, he emphasized.
            Therefore it is also luck that Lt. Gen. Rawat had made it to where he is now. However, it will definitely affect the morale of the officer corp. In future officers vying for the top slots would definitely kowtow to the politician and the bureaucrat. This will make a bad precedent and break the morale of the soldiers.
            When politicians and bureaucrats prefer loyalty over professionalism it does not work that way. Prime Minister Bhutto of Pakistan chose Gen. Zia ul Haq over other generals, but Gen. Zia ul Haq took his Prime Minister to the gallows. Similarly, the present Premier Nawaz Sharif in his earlier prime ministership appointed Gen. Musharraf as his army chief. However Gen. Musharraf was a little kinder than Gen. Zia. Musharraf like his predecessor also wanted to show his prime minister the gallows, but Saudi Arabia intervened and asked Musharraf to send Sharif to Arabia in exile. General’s at the top have a queer behavior and to exercise total and absolute power, can undo their creators and benefactors. Anything is possible in the Indian sub-continent.
            There is something to say about the Hindu polity. Whether it is the Congress Party or the BJP-RSS. They are both intolerant of the minorities, especially the Muslim’s and the Sikh’s. We have seen when the Hindu’s go on a killing spree of the two minorities; the army stoically remains in its cantonments. However when the Hindu ruling setup wishes to teach a lesson to these minorities the army happily goes into action as was the case in 1984- Operation Bluestar, the atrocious ingress into the Sikh’s holiest shrine the Darbar Sahib (Golden Temple) in Amritsar and the slaughter of thousands of Sikh pilgrims and the total elimination of the then young and spirited political Sikh leadership. The present scenario in Kashmir is the same as the Sikh’s have been facing since 1984.
It is a shame that the army is shy and cowardly in taking on an opponent its own size. Every time the Chinese cross over the McMahon Line, Gen. Dilbag Singh’s boys beat a quick retreat. Though Mr. Modi states that the next army chief is an infantry officer and knows all the hot spots on the eastern, western and northern borders, it is hoped he will face the challenge and not chicken.  
            One thing in common with Gen. Dilbag Singh and his successor is that they both come from a martial race. Gen. Dilbag Singh is a Jaat and Lt. Gen. Rawat is a Garhwali. We do hope the new Chief to be will bring his forces out of the barracks when the Hindu’s go on a killing spree.
Editor’s Note: Pakistan Think Tank invites articles from writers in India,/Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, Maldives & Myanmar

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The Big Power Game

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India’s ‘surgical strikes’ remain an enigma By Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar – October 2, 2016

Funny & Ticklish Surgical Strike

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India’s ‘surgical strikes’ remain an enigma

By M K Bhadrakumar – October 2, 2016

The Indian journalists must be compulsorily made to read the parting speech by Helen Boaden, Director of BBC Radio, as she resigned from her position last weekend, on how the scramble for ‘breaking news’ is degrading and destroying what used to be a wonderful profession. She valiantly makes a case for ‘slow news’. (Independent)

At issue here is the Indian media coverage of our “surgical strikes” across the Line of Control at Pakistan on September 29. India has been whipped into frenzy by the media. What happened is not good for health – of individuals or of the nation. Fortunately, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley interjected with perfect timing to take the mind away to the exciting vista of the “biggest disclosure” in independent India’s history by tax-evading crooks.

But that crime thriller can make the “surgical strikes” go away only momentarily. According to news from Islamabad, a top aide to PM Narendra Modi contacted a key figure on Friday to convey to PM Nawaz Sharif India’s desire not to ‘escalate’. But then, Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar promptly undercut Modi the very next day by just recalled the Caesarean section by India to take out the little Bangladeshi infant out of the Pakistani womb. So, Jaitley is passe.

The war is wide open, again. Parrikar must be pleased with himself. In fact, he is only being true to himself. Remember his famous statement in June last year that the people of India were losing respect for the Indian Army, because it no longer fought wars? (DNA)

Meanwhile, the “surgical strikes” as such remain an enigma wrapped in mystery. The government has officially stated very little on the actual operation. Almost the entire Indian media coverage is based on off-the-record briefings or hearsay, or, worse still, the fiery imagination of journalists.Spin doctors had a whale of a time.

Two things must be said about Indian Army: one, it takes the business of war very seriously and will not make exaggerated claims; and, two, it is very precise with words. Especially so, the office of Director-General of Military Operations (DGMO), the transcripts of whose conversations with Pakistani counterparts I have had occasion to read in their dozens while heading the Pakistan Division in the Ministry of External Affairs.

However, in his entire presentation on September 29, DGMO Lt. Gen. Ranbir Singh actually said nothing to corroborate what the media reported. And he read out from a prepared text.

Troubling questions arise.

Not a single American lawmaker – and there could be quite a few who are within the orbit of Indian embassy’s influence – has spoken specifically about our “surgical strikes”. They only speak about India’s commitment to counterterrorism. These are of course Congressmen who are willing to speak up for India in real time, rain or sunshine. Why are they so aloof?

The US state department briefings too neatly sidestepped our “surgical strikes” and stuck to old mantras —  supreme importance of India-Pakistan engagement, etc. Nor did the White House readout on the conversation between NSA Susan Rice and her Indian counterpart Ajit Doval make reference to “surgical strikes”. (One could argue, perhaps, Doval couldn’t be expected to disclose beforehand an imminent James Bond-style operation, but then, Rice represents Washington’s ‘defining partnership’ with Modi government.)

To be sure, Americans have positioned military satellites above India that could spot a bat flying in the dark. And they must be knowing what exactly happened.

Again, Russians too have advanced capabilities. In fact, a Russian army contingent is conducting exercises in Pakistan. Yet, Russian official media tiptoed around our “surgical strikes”. The RT report pointedly noted, “He (DGMO Ranbir Singh) did not elaborate on the nature of the operations, or whether Indian troops had entered Pakistani territory.”

There were no references to our “surgical strikes” by the FO spokeswoman in Moscow, either. Maria Zakharova, in her briefing on September 29, touched on 12 different topics and took thirteen questions, but there was no take on “surgical strikes”.

Now, the unkindest cut of all is that United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon’s spokesman disclosed in New York on Saturday that the UN Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan “has not directly observed any firing across the LOC related to the latest incident (of September 29)”. We simply stonewalled the UN’s remark.

It is all becoming rather murky. In the absence of authoritative statements, Pakistani version gains the upper hand — namely, that there were no “surgical strikes” and that Indians simply hyped up artillery exchanges and are hiding heavy casualties.

Perhaps, MEA spokesman could at least contest the Pakistani version factually. It’s anyway ‘slow news’ already, as Helen Boaden put it.

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Narendra Modi runs a Website that justifies Gujarat Riots (GujaratRiots.com) through his IT Team by Mukul Sinha –

Narendra Modi runs a Website that justifies Gujarat Riots (GujaratRiots.com) through his IT Team

In the modern times, to carry out an organized religio-ethnic cleansing and then to get away despite the present day media watching every event is indeed a great feat by any Goebellian standards. Keeping aside the question as to who was the prime mover of the Gujarat pogrom, the recent pronouncements of the special courts trying the major cases of violence like Gulberg Society, Naroda Patiya, Best Bakery, Sardarpura etc would undisputedly establish that the violence was lead by the saffron brotherhood. In the Naroda Patiya case, even the minister of Modi’s Government Mayaben Kodnani and the VHP leading activist like Babu Bajrangi etc have been convicted. Yet despite these and many other irrefutable evidence, the concerted effort by the rioters to paint the violence as a spontaneous reaction of the angry Hindu masses to the “barbaric” attack of the Muslims killing 59 Hindus in Godhra has found many takers and paid handsome dividends to BJP which presided over the violence.

The perception of the common man to willy-nilly accept the action-reaction theory was primarily because of the voluminous propaganda material that the rioters threw at the common man without any effective counter by the other political establishments in the country. We have tried to research the mode and manner adopted by the saffron brotherhood to dominate the cyberspace, and to our shock and surprise, we discovered that Narendra Modi through his closest aides has created a network of websites to disseminate propaganda on variety of topics and subjects.

India272.com, GujaratRiots.com, NitiCentral.com, BJPOne.com etc – All these websites are being run by Rajesh Jain’s team who is officially appointed by Narendra Modi to run his IT campaign. Their common roots can be seen from the fact that each one of these websites reside on the same server with the IP Address 206.183.107.25. Rajesh Jain’s blog Emergic.Org is also one of these several sites sitting on this server. India272.com which is regularly endorsed by Narendra Modi on twitter also sits on this same server.

Modi Runs GujaratRiots.com through his IT Team
Modi Runs GujaratRiots.com through his IT Team

Having shown the above network of sites created under aegis of Modi, one of the websites which is immensely note-worthy for its distortion of facts is the GujaratRiots.comwebsite. The choice of the name itself is very diablolic since any netizen who searches for information on gujarat riots is likely to use phrases which includes the words “gujarat” and “riots”. As a result all the cursory searches will end up with visits to GujaratRiots.com site since it features very high in Google’s search results.

Gujarat Riots consistently ranks high on Google
Gujarat Riots consistently ranks high on Google

Thus by an ingenious choice of name, the saffron brotherhood gets a netizen into their website and is fed with false and distorted information. A example of one such distortion is an attempt by the GujaratRiots site to justify the complete inaction of Gujarat Police on 28th February 2002 when the mobs went on rampage in the area of Naroda and Gulbarg Society. The site states that as on the second day of the riots, i.e. March 1st 2002, when even the army could not control the situation in Ahmedabad, how could the police control it on 28th Feb1.

How fallacious this argument is can be seen from the fact that both Naroda Patiya and Gulbarg Society are within a radius of 2 kms and come under a single police zone number 4 headed by DCP Gondia IPS. The said zone also comes under the Sector 2 of Ahmedabad police led by then Additional Commissioner of Police – Shri MK Tandon. Both these IPS officers Gondia and MK Tandon were accompanied by large contingents of Armed Policemen along with Special Task Force with modern weaponry. Besides them, those areas are also covered by the local police led by the respective police inspectors of each area namely Naroda and Gulbarg (KG Erda).

From the deposition of KG Erda in Nanavati Commission, the police inspector of the Gulbarg area it is clearly seen that since 12:00 noon on 28th February, the crowd had swelled from 10,000 to 20,000 around 2:45 p.m and had surrounded the Gulberg society.

Quoting from KG Erda’s deposition in Nanavati Commission:

(On 28.02.2002) Till 12.15 pm a mob of around ten thousand people had already collected.When I again reached Gulbarg society at 2 pm there were twenty thousand people and at that time there were a total of sixteen police men…it is true that at 2.45 pm I had sent a message to the control room that a mob of ten thousand people had set fire in the area of Gulbarg society and surrounded it and that police has also been surrounded and requested for the SRP force to be sent.

At that time me and other six constables had got encircled by the mob and smoke was coming out from the houses in Gulbarg society.

During this period Erda had desparately sought for police reinforcement to disperse the mob and had made several phone calls to the Police Control room as well as Mr Gondia and Mr Tandon. The phone calls shown in the images below were obtained from the phone call data submitted in Nanavati Commission. The first image shows the desperate phone calls of KG Erda to the Police Control Room asking for police  reinforcement. The second image are the phone calls between Erda and DCP Gondia/Joint Commissioner Tandon.

KG Erda's calls to Police Control Room
KG Erda’s calls to Police Control Room
KG Erda's calls to Gondia and MK Tandon
KG Erda’s calls to Gondia and MK Tandon

While on one hand a massive crowd was surrounding the Gulberg Society making Erda desperately ask for police reinforcements, on the other the hand the analysis of the locations of Joint Commissioner Tandon establish that he along with his task force had come to the Naroda/Gulbarg area around 12 noon and had hurriedly gone away with his task force to a distant area called Revdi Bazar and hung around there  till 4 p.m. despite there being no major rioting in those areas.  By the time MK Tandon went back to Gulbarg Society at 4 p.m, the mob had already burnt down the entire society along with 64 men, women and children including Ehsan Jaffrey with only Erda and his few policemen being silent spectators to the whole massacre. Similarly DCP Gondia reaches Gulbarg only at 4 p.m. when the society had been already burnt down. This clearly shows how Police along with their task force moved away from areas of rioting.

MK Tandon's Location Graph
MK Tandon’s Location Graph
Gondia's Location Graph
Gondia’s Location Graph

It can therefore be seen as how Narendra Modi through GujaratRiots is trying to mislead the nation by providing distorted account of Police Action and much more. Truth Of Gujarat therefore finds it necessary to go into details to disabuse the wrong perception being created by the saffron brotherhood to justify violence that was nothing but an organized pogrom against the Muslims.

We will deal with the other ‘myths’ being circulated by GujaratRiots.com site and demystify them in the coming days.

Update:
Continuing our research into Modi’s IT conspiracy, we found many more websites running on the same IP Address, all promoting one man – wanting us to believe that all the websites springing up are spontaneous support for him – Infact they can all be tracked back to one man – Rajesh Jain. Read More At: – Modi Appointee Rajesh Jain Spamming the Cyberspace With NaMo Lies

Update2:

India272.com promptly changed its IP Address from 206.183.107.25 to180.149.244.132 after our exposure. You can see that the change was detected on 06 Oct 17:38 GMT i.e 11:08 p.m. IST. We published the post at 8:08 p.m. IST. Is Modi feeling shy now?

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Indian army rejects homegrown missile in blow to ‘Make in India’

May 7, 2016 5:50 pm JST

Indian army rejects homegrown missile in blow to ‘Make in India’

YUJI KURONUMA, Nikkei staff writer

Indian soldiers display Akash missiles during the full-dress rehearsal for the Republic Day parade in New Delhi on Jan. 23, 2009. © Reuters

NEW DELHI — The Indian army reportedly plans to import missiles from abroad rather than continue buying a less-advanced locally developed system, prioritizing combat capabilities over government efforts to promote domestic manufacturing.

Not up to snuff

 
 

“There were technical, research-oriented issues” with India’s Akash system, a Ministry of Defense official told the Nikkei Asian Review. The military has finished testing Israeli, Russian and Swedish alternatives, with Israel’s Spyder in the lead, the official said.

The ministry’s Defense Research and Development Organization had worked on the Akash surface-to-air missile system for around three decades, intending to supply the army, navy and air force. The army has ordered two regiments’ worth, and the air force has ordered 15 squadrons’ worth, for a total of 250 billion rupees ($3.75 billion). The army had been expected to buy more, as it needs to deploy six missile regiments along the borders with Pakistan and China. The Akash has a range of 25km.

The army has informed the R&D agency that it will not order any more Akash systems, a source said. The Akash requires eight to nine seconds to fire, compared with just four to five seconds for the Spyder, making the homegrown system more likely to fail to intercept targets in border areas where response time is limited. Its lack of the latest guidance technology was apparently also a concern to the army.

Contract negotiations with Israel “will be started sometime later,” a ministry official said. The military expects to negotiate the price of the Spyder down to a level on a par with the Akash.

The Akash’s technical weaknesses owe to more than a decade of development delays. The navy has avoided the Akash, citing stabilization problems, and the air force is unlikely to put in any more orders.

Security analyst Rajeev Sharma argued that the capabilities of the R&D agency, which is tasked with developing more sophisticated military technology, are lacking. The Akash is “meeting the same fate as Arjun,” the indigenous tank developed by the DRDO over 20 years, “which has no more buyers now due to its weaker features,” Sharma said. The government replaced the agency’s head last year.

Arms race

Pakistan and China, which have locked horns with India in South Asia for years, have been building up their militaries. Pakistan is strengthening its aerial forces, marketing the JF-17 fighter jointly developed with China to Asian countries including Myanmar and Sri Lanka while seeking to buy F-16 jets built by American defense contractor Lockheed Martin.

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