Vinod Bhat
NEW DELHI, May 17 : Union Minister Dr. Jitendra Singh said here today that “Operation Sindoor” has changed India’s discourse, both politically as well as diplomatically and the whole world is witness to this.
The Minister, who is a Member of Parliament from the Udhampur constituency of Jammu & Kashmir, also observed that the Indus Water Treaty had been done in haste because the then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was inclined to appease Pakistan. As a result, the treaty fell short of doing equitable justice to the two countries, he added.
Addressing a gathering in the Constitutional Club here after releasing the recently published book “Kashmir Chronicles” written by Vijay K Sazawal, Dr Jitendra Singh said after the surgical strikes following the Pulwama attack, India had heralded the change in its defence strategies with Prime Minister Narendra Modi allowing full freedom to the Forces to act as per the circumstances depending upon the professional wisdom and discretion. This, he said, was quite in contrast to the practice followed before 2014 when only limited freedom was allowed to the Forces and for a bigger strike they had to wait for the political nod from New Delhi.
Operation Sindoor is a sequel to the change in the hitherto prevailing practice, said Dr Jitendra Singh and also reaffirmed that India’s defence section hereafter is going to be active and not reactive following a strike by the adversary. At the same time, Operation Sindoor also established that India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi is no longer given to knee jerk responses but enjoys the prerogative to decide the timing and place of responding to an adversary’s aggression.
Dr Jitendra Singh also said that in the present times of technology driven warfare, Operation Sindoor provided an opportunity to India to showcase before its countrymen and also the rest of the world its defence prowess based on the latest warfare technologies. But what is more significant, he said, is that all this technology and the technical knowhow in warfare was acquired and developed only in the last 10 years after Prime Minister Narendra Modi took over in 2014. He said, defence purchases had virtually come to a halt and new defence equipment had virtually been stopped developing before 2014. All the technologies and equipment have been developed only in the last 10 years and any one is free to verify this with facts and figures. Even the TOTs-the Transfer of Technologies and some vital equipment development happened only in the last 10 years. At the same time, he pointed out that while the defence budget went up many times, India which was an importer of defence equipment has now turned into an exporter with its export going up several times.
Operation Sindoor, said Dr Jitendra Singh, also provided an opportunity for the Modi government to vindicate all the spade work that had been done over the last ten years at two levels, (a) in the warfare against the hostile country and (b) in the protection of its border rea residents. For example, he said, he can authenticate from his personal experience because a large span of International Border is a part of his Lok Sabha Constituency where nearly 2,500 family bunkers with all the living amenities, almost like a one room apartment, were built. At the same time, he added, roads were constructed up to zero line whereas the UPA government had adopted a policy of not constructing roads near the borders and at the same time to bring ease of living and given equal level playing field to the border dwellers mobile towers were also built up to the zeroline. All this came to utility during the few days of the warfare witnessed, which had raised the morale of the border dwellers very high because they were confident that any air attack on them would get defused before reaching the land.
Before concluding his talk Dr. Jitendra Singh emphatically declared that the next destination for India is going to be the Viksit Bharat of 2047 when independent India would celebrate its 100th birthday and the next agenda for India would be to retrieve the Pakistan occupied Jammu & Kashmir which also is possibly only by PM Modi.
Earlier, the author of the book Dr Vijay K Sazawan spoke in detail about his personal experience both as a Kashmiri Pandit living in exile and also the perspective of Jammu & Kashmir viewed by him over the last several years as well as USA perspective vis-à-vis Jammu & Kashmir.
Brig (Retd.) Brijesh Pandey as the defence expert spoke in detail about the defence aspects with relation to Jammu & Kashmir. Dr Kuldeep Ratnoo, Director, India Policy Foundation delivered the welcome address while Girdhari Lal Raina, former MLC delivered the Vote of Thanks.
