NEW DELHI: Nearly a fortnight after the surgical strikes in September 2016, Pakistani snipers took out sepoy Sudesh Kumar of 6 Rajput regiment who was on patrol along the LoC in Rajouri. A week later, they struck again, killing BSF jawan Gurnam Singh with a shot to the head in Hiranagar sector, Jammu. Two bullets from a Pak sniper caught rifleman Sandeep Singh Rawat in the neck, killing him instantly as he stood guard along the fence in the Kupwara sector.
In the last four months, over a dozen Indian soldiers have died at the hands of Pakistani snipers. A shortage of the lethal lone wolves, outdated technology and absence of specialised training programmes are fraying India’s edge in covert border warfare. Lack of official acknowledgment in the form of awards and citations is a deterrent to getting fresh recruits.
Indian snipers use only technologically obsolete Russian-made Dragunov rifles of 1960s vintage along the LoC. Acknowledging its slipping edge, an internal report of the Army HQ stated, “Snipers are force multipliers to any infantry battalion. The high standard of sniper training and their imaginative employment leads to decisive and out-of-proportion results.”
The Army started its hunt to replace the Dragunovs around 2012, but the infantry is yet to get new, up to date weapons. Indian Army has two snipers per battalion deployed at the Line of Control.
Little training and outdated equipment have led to India’s slipping sniper edge over Pakistan. Pakistani shooters use modern sniper scopes on their Austrian Steyr SSG .22 rifles. Crawling through thick vegetation, they take up position to monitor Indian troop movement and choose targets. Pakistan snipers are posted permanently at border outposts, while before the surgical strikes they were requisitioned on operational requirement.
“To achieve effective results out of the precision fire of a sniper rifle, it is important that the forced incidental errors due to environmental factors be reduced to minimum,” the Army’s internal report said. It identified hi-tech sniper scopes for small teams to be regularly deployed in counter-terror ops in the plains and high altitude areas up to 20,000ft, such as Siachen, where light and wind factors play an important role in shooting accuracy.
“These sniper detachments operate in conditions where judging distance and cross wind error component adversely affects the external ballistics before the bullet strikes the target. The new sniper scope with inbuilt distance and cross wind component correction will help the sniper to engage with precision,” the report stated while stressing on the need for institutionalised training for Indian snipers.
The Army is compensating the gap by using conventional styles of target engagement and distance assessment. “Third generation telescope sights are accurate to an extent in measuring distance but it requires extensive training at long range. Laser range finders and hand-held thermal imagers are being used to measure accurate distance.
However, it imposes the penalty of additional battle load on the sniper detachments,” the Army report added by saying that optical refracting telescope with variable magnification sites are being used by many armies. However, these sights don’t cater for high-speed cross winds and rarefied air in high altitude areas.
Even the BSF, in view of the rising incidents of sniper fire from Pakistan, has taken preventive measures such as placing nets in border outposts and Observation Posts. A 10-metre high embankment will be built along the LoC too.