Former army chief Shankar Roychowdhury on Wednesday questioned the role of military intelligence and said India must strike back in the aftermath of the Pahalgam attack because the wrong must be righted.
At least 26 people, most of them tourists, were killed and many were injured when militants dressed in army fatigues opened fire on them in a meadow above Pahalgam in Kashmir.
Speaking to The Telegraph on Wednesday, General Roychowdhury, the country’s 18th Chief of Army Staff, spoke about how India should reply:
The Pahalgam massacre raises questions about our military intelligence. There was probably an intelligence failure, or how could those terrorists come up to Pahalgam and launch an attack? There is human intelligence and technical intelligence. Actionable intelligence is always sought after. That is why we have an intelligence bureau (IB). We have collected intelligence before... I don’t know about this time.
We need to know where our sources were, and what kind of sources were cultivated. The DGMI (Director General of Military Intelligence) will have to answer. Most probably, there was a human intelligence failure. There is nothing high-tech about this. Possibly, there was some flaw in the process of collecting human intelligence.
India needs to strike because the wrong must be righted. But does that mean another Indo-Pak war? No.
We have already fought three wars. We recalibrate our understanding that our neighbour is bad and that the enemy will not change. We have to go back to our own spiritual belief of not being a soft state and transform into a hard secular state, which Chanakya spoke about.
India should retaliate. But there are rules of international diplomacy that have to be maintained. An air strike would be the cheapest way, and we now have missiles.
The country has all the wherewithal. But it’s not just about tanks and artillery. We have to go back to the war room and understand the enemy’s thought process. We need to
be clear about the enemy’s doctrine.
These are very complex times, and thank God I’m not the army chief now.
India just can’t answer by taking conventional measures. The enemy’s philosophy must be understood to chalk out the operational strategy. It can’t be just more tanks, aircraft and drones because we have all of these. It is not even about the absorption of technology. It is about the absorption of the enemy’s doctrine that matters.
Those who were gunned down were tourists. Why were they killed? We have to understand the philosophy and realise we are faced with a mortal enemy.
We must strike back, and the striking back should happen the way it happens. We have plenty of personnel and material.