JK News Today Commentary
Union Home Minister Amit Shah’s reflection on the improved internal security situation is a mirror image of the achievements made in the past 10 years of the Modi government but at the same time it lists two sets of challenges: to preserve the ground covered so far, and to move ahead and make it 100 percent from the current status of 70 percent..
On Tuesday while speaking at the 50th All India Police Science Conference at Raksha Shakti University in Gandhinagar , the Home Minister noted significant achievements made with regard to the internal security in the country , recording 70 per cent decline in violence , particularly in J&K, North-East and Naxal-hit areas . This was a reaffirmation of the commitment of the government to uproot all sorts of violence from the Indian soil.
The internal security is an ever changing phenomenon. It doesn’t stay frozen in a particular time frame, nor can the response be static. Home Minister is right in calling for fresh assessments and analysis of the situation in a bid to build upon the 70 per cent decline in violence in the past 10 years – 2014 to 2024- as compared to the immediately preceding decade in the time frame of 2004 to 2014.
Generally, it is believed that comparison between the two decades is based on facts and figures. Statistics substantiate this claim. It is not that the security forces started doing something which they could not in the previous decade, especially in reference to Jammu and Kashmir; it is about the change in approach toward tackling terrorism and violence with which it manifests itself.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah have time and again proclaimed that the government of the day is committed to its policy of “zero tolerance toward terrorism”. This policy needs a proper understanding, particularly when it is viewed with regard to Kashmir.
Zero means zero. It leaves no scope for its emergence once it is decimated to zero. This is a clear messaging that the system will not leave the fight in between. It will be fight unto finish. It is meant for terrorists to receive the message that they would face their end in totality. They would not be spared at any cost, and it is also a fight directed against the motivators, sympathizers and facilitators of terrorists. That is message that their ecosystem too would be razed to the ground – to zero level.
The problem of the internal security in J&K is three-dimensional: it is Pakistan sponsored in various forms – actual training and arming of the terrorists – foreign as well as the youth lured from J&K itself – to wage a war against the State of India, political inertia at the level of the central government until 2014, and internal factors in which the unrest was fuelled by misplaced and illusionary narratives.
The Modi government undertook multi-dimensional measures based on the single-minded approach of “Zero-tolerance of terrorism” to bring decline in the incidents of violence. . Security forces were given a free hand – zero shackles – to deal with terrorists and their over ground and behind the curtain supporters. That is that there was only one direction – they don’t’ have to be caged by any counter narrative from the political leaders whose narration kept the things fluid.
On the external front, the Government did not hesitate, rather it demonstrated, in taking the fight to the home of the enemy. Pakistan knows what happened to it in September 2016 when the Indian army launched a surgical strike across the LoC in response to the terrorist assault on Uri garrison in which 20 soldiers were killed, and also how Indian bombs demolished Jaish-e-Mohammad’s terror training center in Balakot in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in February 2016 in response to the Pulwama terror attack in which 40 CRPF personnel were killed. These cross-border strikes at the terrorist camps and training centers not only conveyed a very clear message to Pakistan that it cannot get away with its acts of terror in J&K , but also to the terrorists and their apparatus within that the Government will decimate them and their sources across the border.
After having achieved this success, the only task remains is to consolidate the success and achieve what more remains to be done in achieving the complete success against all elements of terrorism .The path is clear and so is the message.
