Fix accountability

Attack on Nagrota base exposes defence weakness, again

Exactly two months after India’s so-called “surgical strike” along the Line of Control to “avenge” the attack on a military base in Uri came a savage reminder that all is not well on the western front. In what appear to be coordinated attacks, terrorists targeted an army camp at the XVI Corps headquarters in Nagrota near Jammu and a Border Security Force (BSF) patrol at Chamliyal in the Ramgarh sector of Samba district. The two attacks resulted in the death of seven army men, two of them officers, in Nagrota and the injuring of four others, including a BSF DIG, in Chamliyal. This is the biggest strike since the Uri attack in September, which claimed the lives of 19 defence personnel. The latest terror attack follows an alarming pattern since 2015, with more than 10 such episodes of varying intensity involving many deaths. The Uri attack was the most deadly but several others stand out, such as the attack in Pathankot in January, when four militants entered an airbase, and in Gurdaspur in July 2015, when militants lay siege to a police station. 

In sharp contrast to the ease with which terrorists from across the border hit India’s military installations is the delusion that afflicts India’s defence leadership. Just two days ago, according to reports, Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar, addressing the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) Vijay Sankalp Rally in Panaji, boasted that Islamabad “pleaded (with New Delhi) to stop” India’s counter-attack after three other soldiers lost their lives recently. The truth is, far from quietening things down, the much publicised surgical strikes in late September have led to repeated violations of ceasefire across the border. The boldness with which terrorists seem to be singling out military targets is astounding. To reach the attack site in Nagrota, the terrorists managed to evade no less than a dozen checkpoints. They were attired in J&K police uniforms and entered the military premises by scaling a wall before proceeding to fire indiscriminately and heading towards an accommodation where no less than army majors, along with women and children, were housed. Barring a valiant fightback, the Nagrota episode could well have become a massive hostage crisis. How did all this happen? The defence establishment is clueless. 

At one level it is true that it is impossible to rule out a sundry fidayeen attack, but lately these attacks have been taking place with chilling consistency and that too on military targets. And there is a reason for it. The government has neither fixed accountability for any failure nor taken any corrective measure to address known weaknesses. Reports suggest how there has been hardly any follow-up to the wide set of recommendations suggested by a tri-service committee, led by former vice chief of army Lt General Philip Campose, in the wake of the Pathankot airbase attack. Even after the response to Uri, instead of focussing on taking action against those guilty of lapses and plugging such security gaps, the attention was on cornering some fleeting moments of glory. For instance, just like in Uri, when the intelligence agencies had sent a specific written warning of an attack involving a Pakistani Border Action Team and trained jihadis a week in advance, in Nagrota too there was an intelligence warning 10 days ago of an imminent strike on a high-value military target in Jammu. This attack also discredits the Indian Army’s claim that the September strikes had demolished all terror launch pads along the LoC. The point is committee findings will not help unless they are acted upon and unless officials and ministers in the defence establishment are made to realise that the buck stops with them.