NEW DELHI: A Parliamentary Committee on Home Affairs has flagged that the terror attacks in Pathankot, Uri, Nagrota, Pampore and Baramulla have exposed the Intelligence agencies that failed to provide actionable inputs and asked the Union Home Ministry to conduct a post facto analysis to check repeat of such attacks on defence installations.
The Committee also highlighted the possible failure of the Army and the BSF in foiling infiltration attempts along the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir as a result of which there is a spurt in infiltration.
“The Committee takes note of the fact that more than a year has passed since the Pathankot attack occurred, however, the investigation of that attack has not been completed by NIA, Moreover, no analysis seems to have been done into the failure of the intelligence agencies to provide credible and actionable inputs regarding attacks at Pathankot, Uri, Pampore, Baramulla and Nagrota. The Committee feels that these attacks have exposed the deficiencies of our intelligence agencies. The Committee, therefore, recommends that the Ministry should instruct the NIA to complete the investigations of these at the earliest so as to identify the loopholes in the intelligence set up in the border areas,” noted the Committee on Border Security Capacity Building and Institutions under the sub-head “Infiltration and Cross-Border Terrorism.”
When the Department-Related Parliamentary Standing Committee on Home Affairs led by former Union Home Minister P Chidambaram sought to know the “increasing trend” of attacks on the establishments of Armed Forces in recent times and the reasons why intelligence inputs regarding these attacks were not received by the Intelligence Bureau, Union Home Secretary Rajiv Mehrishi said that MHA was not the sole agency for intelligence gathering and Ministry of Defence also has its own intelligence agency and both make a collective effort to gather and share intelligence.
On a query from the Committee as to why no post facto analysis of intelligence failure was done after Pathankot attack and why the Government failed to learn from the past failures as the terrorists perpetrated successive attacks during 2016, the Home Ministry submitted that Defence Ministry has constituted a four-member committee comprising senior officers from Army, Navy and Airforce to review security arrangements of Defence installations in the country. The Home Ministry also told the Committee that security guidelines have been issued and probe into Pathankot, Uri and Nagrota attacks have been handed over to NIA.
Terrorist incidents and infiltration attempts in J&K
Incidents 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016
Terrorist violence incidents 220 170 222 208 322
Civilians Killed 15 15 28 17 15
Security Forces killed 15 53 47 39 82
Militants killed 72 67 110 108 150
Infiltration attempts 264 277 222 121 364
Net Infiltration (Estimated) 121 97 65 33 112
“The Committee feels that such a huge rise in the number of infiltrations justifies the apprehensions that the Indian Army and the BSF may have failed to foil some of these attempts. The Committee recommends that the Government must carry out a thorough investigation into the sudden spurt in the increase in the infiltration attempts along the LoC from across the border and find out the vulnerabilities along the LoC that are being apparently exploited by the infiltrators,” the report said, adding its apprehension that infiltration through tunnels might become a major modus operandi and technological solutions should be explored for tunnel detection.