Daily Times

A day after Pakistan performed the groundbreaking ceremony of Kartarpur corridor and offered an olive branch to New Delhi, Indian Army chief General Bipin Rawat claimed that his force was ready to use strike drones in Jammu and Kashmir.

“If the nation will spare us, for the kind of mistakes that may get committed using such kinds of weapons, then I think we [Indian Army] will take a call,” he said at a lecture at the Institute of Defence Studies and Analysis, a Delhi-based think tank.

The Army chief was responding to a question if India will follow the footsteps of the United States in using the strike drones to terminate the ‘hostile targets’. To another question on the possibility of the Indian army using strike drones ‘across the border’, Gen Rawat said there can be mistakes across the Line of Control (LoC) as well. “Either way, whether in your territory or the territory across, there will be mistakes…if you are willing to accept the mistakes…there is a way for it…it’s not that we can’t use it.”

Rawat claimed that Pakistan has altered the demography of Azad Kashmir and that the identity of Kashmir is has been systematically eroded. “Pakistan has very cleverly changed the demography of Azad Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan. So, one is not very sure who is an actual Kashmiri. Is he is a Kashmiri or a Punjabi who has come in there and occupied that area. People from Gilgit-Baltistan are also now being taken over gradually. So, if there is an identity between our side of Kashmiri and the other side, then the identity thing has gradually been eroded. That is an issue we have to look at,” he said. He disapproved of suggestions about sending back security forces to barracks whenever there is a little bit of peace in Kashmir, saying it will give ‘terrorists’ time to revamp their networks and asserted that there was a need to maintain sustained pressure ‘to control the situation’.

Published in Daily Times, November 30^th 2018.