Former Indian Chief General (Retired) Shankar Roychowdhury, said that the primary responsibility for the Pulwama terror attack rests “on the government headed by the Prime Minister, who is advised by the national security adviser”.
The 18th Chief of Indian Army Staff, while speaking to The Telegraph, reacted to former Jammu and Kashmir governor Satya Pal Malik’s revelations in an interview. Malik said that the 2019 Pulwama attack in which 40 jawans were killed after a car laden with explosives rammed into a CRPF convoy was the outcome of government incompetence and negligence.
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“The primary responsibility behind the loss of lives in Pulwama rests on the government headed by the Prime Minister, who is advised by the national security adviser [NSA}. This was a setback,” General Roychowdhury told The Telegraph. He said that NSA Ajit Doval should “also get his share of the blame” for the intelligence failure behind the ambush.
General Roychowdhury agreed that“A CRPF convoy moving along the interstate highway between Jammu and Srinagar was ambushed by a group of Mujahideen in Pulwama. If the troops had travelled by air, the loss of lives could have been avoided.”
General Roychowdhury also agreed with Malik’s statement that the terror attack was the result of an intelligence failure. Malik said that while the RDX, an explosive substance, which was used in the attack came from Pakistan, the fact that a car that was “roaming around” in Kashmir for days before the attack and could not be located was an intelligence and security system failure.
Governor IOJK Statement on Pulwama Attack
Earlier Satya Pal Malik former governor of Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJK) revealed that the Indian prime minister silenced him on the security lapses that led to the Pulwama attack in 2019 so that they could benefit from it by blaming it on Pakistan.
The former governor said Modi did it to so he could benefit from the move and blame the attack on Pakistan by concealing the India’s own mistakes on the attack.
Attributing the attack to the “incompetence and negligence of the Indian system” and CRPF, Malik said that the request for airlifting the soldiers had been refused by the home ministry, while the sanitisation before the transfer by road was inefficient.
“I had sensed that all of this onus will be diverted towards Pakistan so it’s better to keep quiet,” Malik said, confirming that the strategy was to derive electoral benefit for Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) from the incident.
Remember that on 14th February 2019, around 40 Indian soldiers of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) were killed and dozens injured at the Srinagar-Jammu Highway in the Awantipora area in the Pulwama district of the IIOJK, an attack which is dubbed as the deadliest in Indian forces in over a decade.
The soldiers were killed when an improvised explosive device (IED) went off as a convoy of military vehicles drove by, some 20 kilometres from the main city of Srinagar.
