Satya Pal Malik’s damning revelations

For a government that is given to going after university students shouting protest slogans, the revelation of shocking security lapses leading to the massacre of 40 CRPF jawans in Pulwama in 2019 should be hugely embarrassing.

That the revelations come, not from a sociology sophomore, but from the then governor of the then state of Jammu & Kashmir should be a sobering reminder to every citizen that schoolboy taunts of ‘go to Pakistan’ are not an adequate national security policy.

The lapses pointed out by Satya Pal Malik indicate an alarming neglect of basic protocols during movement of troops: A CRPF request for air transport was denied by the Union Home Ministry for mysterious reasons. Then, violating all movement manuals, the paramilitary force decided to go ahead with the movement in a huge convoy of 78 vehicles.

To make matters worse, Malik says, some 8-10 roads linking to National Highway 44 in the incident area remained unsecured while the convoy was passing through. It was in this vulnerable stretch that a Scorpio loaded with 200 kg of explosives joined the convoy and blew up in contact with a personnel carrier, killing 40 jawans and the bomber himself. Even more glaringly, the bomb-laden Scorpio had been moving around that vicinity for 10-12 days prior to the blast but had not caught the attention of intelligence agencies.

When Malik brought these failures to the notice of the Prime Minister and National Security Adviser, his instructions were to keep quiet. For these facts were not convenient to the line the Union government had decided to take, which was to blame Pakistan for the incident and leave all Indian lapses to a later consideration.

Now it is not rare for governments to use an unfortunate incident like the Pulwama attack for propaganda purposes while pursuing serious enough investigations into any lapses that might have occurred. In the Pulwama case, the CRPF did investigate the incident but it is not certain that it detected the kind of lapses now being revealed by the then governor of the state.

If it too was prevailed upon to ignore the flouting of force movement protocols and the intelligence failure to detect threats, then that is, first, an injustice done to the families of those 40 jawans who laid down their lives serving the nation, and, second, a betrayal of trust reposed in them by the Indian citizen.

This whole episode calls into question this government’s attitude to national security lapses. Yet, despite Malik’s startling revelations, no BJP spokesman has rushed to TV channels, as they normally do, to address the questions arising from it.

Why did the Home Ministry refuse to provide air transport for the CRPF jawans, and why did it hasten to provide it subsequent to the Pulwama massacre? Why were link roads not sanitised before such a massive movement of personnel? And why was the governor of the state told to keep quiet when he offered to provide important inputs?

As terror incidents and security failures go, Pulwama was not the first such incident. The attack on Parliament in 2001 and the Mumbai terror attack in 2008 too could not have happened without serious security failures. If there’s one lesson the BJP-led government in New Delhi must learn from all those incidents, it is that propaganda is not policy, and ‘go to Pakistan’ is a taunt, not a response.