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| Friday, 5 September 2003 |
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India to set up elite counter-terror units NEW DELHI, Thursday (AFP) India will spend more than three billion rupees (65 million dollars) to set up "lethal units" in its infantry battalions to counter terrorism, Defence Secretary Ajay Prasad announced. Prasad said the decision was made by the security cabinet presided over by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee. "The security cabinet has also decided to authorise the modernisation of battalions with enhanced firepower, state-of-art communication equipment and night-vision capability through hand-held thermal imagers," Prasad said. He said the platoons would be carved from the existing batallions of India's million-plus army and armed with lethal weaponry, part of which will be imported from the international arms bazaar. "The lethal units will be ready by 2007," Prasad told a crowded press conference after the security cabinet meeting. The Indian army is spread thin on the country's borders, having to assign massive chunks of its combat formations on "internal security" duties, a euphemism for counter-insurgency tasks. Islamic militancy is steadily bleeding the 1.3-million army in the Indian zone of troubled Kashmir, where 38,000 people including hundreds of soldiers have died in separatist violence since 1989. Tribal and ethnic insurgencies in six of India's seven northeastern states too have taken a deadly toll and a general distaste for "internal security" has led to a staggering shortage of 15,000 officers in the military. Defence secretary Prasad said the army will also spend an additional 2.9 billion rupees (62 million dollars) over the next two years to create special units to deal with landmines and other ambushes involving explosives. "Keeping in view rampant terrorism it has been decided to create special units to neutralise improvised explosive devices used by terrorists," he said, adding a "sizeable number" of such units will be drawn from the army's engineering, infantry and other formations. "These units in the army will be able to handle challenges," said Prasad in an oblique reference to India's mounting military casualties in landmine ambushes in disputed Kashmir. |
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