As India approaches the 13th anniversary of the terror attacks on Mumbai, excerpts from a book by a Congress MP are causing a stir.
Manish Tewari,who served as a minister in the second UPA government, on Tuesday tweeted excerpts from an upcoming book written by him. 10 Flash Points; 20 Years—National Security Situations that Impacted India is the fourth book written by Tewari.
Tewari tweeted the book “objectively delves into every salient National Security Challenge India has faced in the past two decades”.
Even though Tewari shared a mere three paragraphs from the book as excerpts, Twitter was ablaze thanks to one of them. The excerpts by Tewari referred to the recent Taliban victory in Afghanistan, the Narendra Modi government's decision to scrap plans for a mountain strike corps for the Indian Army and the absence of a military response to the Mumbai terror attacks. The last one was used by critics of the Congress on Twitter to paint the party as being “soft on terror”.
26/11
Referring to the Mumbai attacks, Tewari wrote in the book restraint is “perceived as a symbol of weakness. There comes a time when actions must speak louder than words. 26/11 was one such time when it just should have been done. It, therefore, is my considered opinion that India should have actioned a kinetic response in the days following India's 9/11”.
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Tewari had previously referred to the Mumbai attacks as India's 9/11 and wondered about the possibility of military action. On the anniversary of the attacks in 2019, Tewari tweeted, “What would happened to Pakistan if 26/11 would have unfortunately happened in the US & the smoking gun would have nailed Pakistan conclusively as it did in the case of the Mumbai outrage? - I often wonder.........”
Mohonto Panging, a retired Indian Air Force officer who was in active service at the time of the Mumbai attacks, had claimed the military was ready to conduct air strikes on PoK in retaliation. He told The Times of India in 2019 that the Indian Air Force had prepared Mirage 2000 and Su-30MKI aircraft for attacks on terror targets in Muzaffarabad, but did not get approval from the government.
Mountain strike corps
Interestingly, the criticism against the Modi government over the mountain strike corps is one the Congress has consistently levelled. Tewari wrote that Doklam situation in 2017 could have been averted if the Indian Army was allowed to raise and deploy the mountain strike corps. Tewari argued “Scrapping the mountain strike corps is perhaps the greatest disservice that this government did to India's national security”.
