Brain-dead Bozos

Posted on July 29, 2015 by Bharat Karnad

Am I the only one who has noticed the usual major foul-up — par for the course for such incidents in India — at the Dinanagar police station, in Gurdaspur district in the terrorist attack Monday? Every police agency in sight — and the nearby army units included rushed like mad and acted like the perfect brainless dolts. If the three attackers — fidayeen fashion — were intent on killing as many people as possible and dying in the process, then obviously they succeeded. But was the gunning down of the terrorists necessary considering they were holed up in a police station, were surrounded, and had no means or avenue of escape? Wouldn’t it have been advisable, with the idea of establishing the Pakistan hand in this latest atrocity, to wait it out, engage the three killers just enough to have them expend their ammunition and whatever other ordnance (grenades) they came loaded with, and then apprehended them for interrogation to generate irrefutable evidence??? The fact that even if one member of the strike team — Kasab — was caught alive in the 26/11 Mumbai attack provided clinching proof of Pak ISI’s complicity, making it hard for Islamabad to wriggle out of the corner. With the Gurdaspur intruder-killers killed, however, no amount of GPS tracking record will do other than buttress Islamabad’s argument that this was another inside job by a homegrown team of malcontents. Once the ammo kits were exhausted it is possible the three would have killed themselves with cyanide pills, assuming they carried them to terminate a botched up operation as this certainly was, and as a last bit of suicidal action. But this would have been preferable to their being killed and the Punjab Police SWAT unit tasked with the job thereafter jumping up and down and hollering like a bunch of overgrown school boys with an adrenaline rush! It was all so laughably unprofessional! On Monday even as the action was unfolding Rajasthan Patrika asked me about it, and I said that the first order of business was to catch them alive by any and all means. That, of course, didn’t happen. After all these years of precisely this kind of mindless actions by the police and army, it is time GOI drafted Standard Operating Procedures for such situations. Every last policeman down to the local thana level in every damned locality of the country ought to be drilled in following some the simple rules of conduct and engagement aimed, in the main, at catching and preserving the perpetrators of such attacks for interrogation and generation of incriminating evidence. Boy, the Indian Police, the State Police, and the State and Central Govts seem like such a bunch of bozos who learn nothing, and never will. The subsequent piece of news from the Punjab authorities that none of the men killed were Sikhs was a little too pat for comfort. The Akali govt’s attempts to curry favour with the diehard miniscule minority of Khalistan supporters and sympathizers in order to win over their wealthy supporters safely away in California, Canada, and elsewhere in the West is reprehensible. This element too has gone uncommented upon and, so far, unprobed.

About Bharat Karnad

Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi, he was Member of the (1st) National Security Advisory Board and the Nuclear Doctrine-drafting Group, and author, among other books of, 'Nuclear Weapons and Indian Security: The Realist Foundations of Strategy', 'India's Nuclear Policy' and most recently, 'Why India is Not a Great Power (Yet)'. Educated at the University of California (undergrad and grad), he was Visiting Scholar at Princeton University, University of Pennsylvania, the Shanghai Institutes of International Studies, and Henry L. Stimson Center, Washington, DC.
This entry was posted in Asian geopolitics, domestic politics, guerilla warfare, Indian Army, Indian Politics, Internal Security, Pakistan, Pakistan military, society, South Asia, Terrorism, US.. Bookmark the permalink.

9 Responses to Brain-dead Bozos

  1. Yudhvir Mahajan says:
    July 30, 2015 at 2:53 pm

    I am someone who was born and brought in the narrow streets of that small town called Dinanagar and it hurt me when it was attacked. But that’s not the point. If they were so brain washed to have audacity to cross the boarder and get locked in a police station, they would have already presumed themselves dead. I saw their photographs, 18-20 yrs, semi literate and seemed from lower strata of their society. Their bank accounts must have been credited heavily before they left. No effort of security forces would have caught them alive. In an effort to catch them alive, there could have been more damage to us. A better way to answer ‘them’ would be different. And there are hundreds of ways of doing that, directly or indirectly.

    Reply
    • Bharat Karnad says:
      July 30, 2015 at 6:58 pm

      But where was the harm’, as I argued, in waiting out these killers? At most they’d have killed themselves but, more likely, considering their lives were on the line, they’d have surrendered, and India would have secured a bonanza of evidence.

      Reply
  2. Siddappa says:
    July 30, 2015 at 8:39 pm

    Thanks for getting the indigestible out of our mouth & minds.
    Standard Operating Procedure & it being known to the last person in the hierarchy.

    Funny, Not one Home Minister at any level doesn’t bother to get this basic thing done.
    First Catch them alive,
    If not, Allow them to die themselves
    Last, Kill them

    Might be, some one was in a hurry to get a promotion or update his service record.

    (with apologies, for being politically incorrect) Makes me wonder, if we should take all those Sardarji jokes a bit seriously.

    Reply
  3. Basavaraj says:
    July 30, 2015 at 9:23 pm

    In my opinion what they did was right! Every terrorist attack on India is either directly or indirectly planned and funded by pakistan, no matter how many evidences or witnesses you give them they always gonna deny it. The whole process of accusing and accepting would take a year or even more to be accomplished. And after this even if you cry in front of US all they do is talking and paper signing which eventually results in nothing. I believe that only a vicious action delivers the message of intolerance in situations like these. On the other hand if you try to be diplomatic they’ll find other ways to conceal their identity and still keep attacking again and again. so I believe that India should grow into powerful country by actually acting and not just by talking.

    Reply
  4. Raj says:
    July 31, 2015 at 6:44 am

    I wholeheartedly agree with your view pt.
    1. The security of our country is handled in a lackadaisical manner with turf protection being more significant than actual conduct of the operation. In this case, the Punjab Police stated that it was their operation. Sad day for all.

    2. We do not even have a integrated communication system where all SF elements in one geographical area are in radio communication with each other. The police, CAPFs and army units operate different equipment.

    3. We need an integrated response strategy which cuts across security forces and their controlling HQs. The rules of engagement must be laid down that in case of any such eventuality, the nearest available SF units are used instead of calling NSG or any other detachment and thus save precious time. Mumbai casualties in 2008 would have been much lesser if the army units present there were used were quickly pressed into service instead of waiting for NSG to arrive. It was a Home Ministry turf and thus lives were lost due to faulty procedures and egos.

    4. The moot question however is, will the controlling Bureaucracy let such a integrated response strategy be in place??

    Reply
  5. Rituraj Rao says:
    July 31, 2015 at 9:41 am

    On another note, the following news item mentions that Rafale was offered to PM Modi for $200 million per piece in his French visit. That offer had an added 20% discount which means the original offer to UPA government was $ 250 million per piece in 2014. That also means the original deal of 126+63 options = 189 X 250 million = $ 47.3 Billion. The total cost of developing Rafale aircraft was near-about the same amount so French decided to extract all of it from the Indian contract. The UPA morons and majority of the paid defence media were fooling common people that it was a $10-12 billion contract !!!! Moreover, three years earlier the fighter was offered at prices of below $100 million so in three years the price escalated to 2.5 times !!!!

    Wow ! What a deal !!!

    http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/defence/rafale-deal-pricing-issues-indias-insistence-on-50-local-spending-lead-to-missing-of-july-target/articleshow/48288656.cms

    Reply
  6. shishir mohan says:
    August 2, 2015 at 12:14 pm

    Dear Mr Karnad after all these years of terrorism,do we still have to prove the obvious….the paki hand….at this stage and so many years down the line if we still try to get hold of proof of paki involvment,then i think we are brain dead bozos or whatever that means…..
    regards
    oh by the way luv ur blogs!

    Reply
    • Bharat Karnad says:
      August 2, 2015 at 2:57 pm

      Knowing the obvious, and proving it, are two very different things and it is a distinction the Indian State has difficulty understanding whence police/SF/intel SOPs not emphasizing taking cornered terrorists, to the extent possible, alive. And the Gurdaspur thugs couldn’t have been more cornered, and more at the surrounding Indians’ mercy.

      Reply

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