New Delhi: General (Retired) Shankar Roychowdhury, a former chief of the Indian Army, said that the primary responsibility for the deaths of CRPF jawans in the Pulwama terror attack rests “on the government headed by the Prime Minister, who is advised by the national security adviser”.
The 18th Chief of Army Staff, speaking to The Telegraph, was reacting to former Jammu and Kashmir governor Satya Pal Malik’s revelations in an interview with The Wire. Malik said that the 2019 Pulwama attack – in which 40 jawans were killed after a car laden with explosives rammed into a CRPF convoy – was the outcome of government incompetence and negligence.
“The primary responsibility behind the loss of lives in Pulwama rests on the government headed by the Prime Minister, who is advised by the national security adviser [NSA}. This was a setback,” General Roychowdhury told The Telegraph. He said that NSA Ajit Doval should “also get his share of the blame” for the intelligence failure behind the ambush.
A convoy of 78 vehicles carrying over 2,500 personnel should not have taken a highway that is so close to the Pakistan border, General Roychowdhury told the newspaper.
Malik told The Wire that both the CRPF had requested to be flown instead of travelling by road from Jammu to Srinagar, but the Union home ministry – then headed by Rajnath Singh – did not provide them with aircraft. If their request was granted, the deaths could have been prevented, the BJP leader said.
General Roychowdhury agreed. He said, according to The Telegraph, “A CRPF convoy moving along the interstate highway between Jammu and Srinagar was ambushed by a group of Mujahideen in Pulwama. If the troops had travelled by air, the loss of lives could have been avoided.”
Also Read: Pulwama, Modi, Corruption: Full Explosive Transcript of Satya Pal Malik’s Viral Interview
Malik also claimed that when he told Prime Minister Narendra Modi about the failures that led to the attack, the latter told him to “stay quiet”. He said that NSA Doval also told him to remain silent.
The former Army chief said that all large bodies of vehicles and convoys moving along the national highway are always vulnerable to attack. He said that the area where the Pulwama terror attack had occurred had always been a very “vulnerable sector”.
“The road that goes along Samba (31km from Satwari airport) in Jammu is always vulnerable owing to infiltration that happens by tunnelling,” he told The Telegraph. “The more traffic you pump along the interstate highway, you expose them to risks because the border is not very far away from Pakistan all throughout,” said the general, who commanded the 16 Corps in Jammu and Kashmir between 1991 and 1992.
General Roychowdhury also agreed with Malik’s statement that the terror attack was the result of an intelligence failure. Malik said that while the RDX, an explosive substance, which was used in the attack came from Pakistan, the fact that a car that was “roaming around” in Kashmir for days before the attack and could not be located was an intelligence and security system failure.
“It’s a slip-up that the government is trying to wash its hands of. I strongly believe that the troops should have been ferried across by aircraft, which are available with the civil aviation department, Air Force or BSF,” the former army chief told Telegraph, adding, “Failure has no claimants.”