Repeating Pulwama’s Mistakes

S.K. Sood

Two more tragic incidents of ambush by militants have taken place after the interview by Satyapal Malik, who was the Jammu and Kashmir Governor when the Pulwama bombing took place on 14 February 2019. In the interview, Malik mentioned the grave mistake of Ministry of Home Affairs in not acceding to the request of CRPF authorities for airlifting the troops stranded at transit camps in Jammu due to the closure of the road for over a week. Malik also pointed out failures at operational levels by the troops, who failed to sanitise the area for safe movement of the convoy on the highway located in a militancy-prone area.

Questions about incompetence at various levels of the security establishment and the political leadership were raised even at the time of the incident by several analysts and thinkers but remain unanswered till now.

Glaring mistakes committed by functionaries at various levels in the Pulwama incident is apparent even to a layman. However, what is troubling is the fact that we refuse to learn from those mistakes and continue to repeat them. The ambush on the Rashtriya Rifles convoy near Bhimber Gali on April 20 in which five soldiers lost their lives and the ambush at Dantewada, Chhattisgarh, on April 26 point towards institutional failures and callousness leading to precious loss of lives of trained soldiers.

The ambush of the RR convoy at Bhimber Gali in particular has eerie similarities with the Pulwama bombing. The absence or lack of response by the Road Opening Party (ROP), if it was deployed, and the absence of reaction by the troops in the accompanying vehicles in both the incidents point towards lack of training and inability of junior commanders to take the initiative. The absence of specific actionable intelligence was another deficiency common to both the Pulwama and Bhimber Gali incidents.

[caption id="attachment_27259" align="alignnone" width="800"] IED blast in Pulwama 2019[/caption]

The deficiency in the Dantewada incident is a repeat of the failures that took place in the 3 April 2021 operation in Chhattisgarh, where troops withdrawing after an operation in the jungles of Bijapur, were trapped in an ambush by militants leading to 22 causalities of state District Reserve Guard (DRG), state Special Task force (STF) and CRPF personnel. Both the incidents could have been averted had the supervisory leadership ensured securing the line of communication and a route of withdrawal for the large number of troops inducted for the operations. In the April 2021 incident, the militants had laid an ambush on the only available route of withdrawal in the jungle because it was not secured. The only difference in the latest incident in Dantewada is that the troops were moving in a vehicle and one of the vehicles was blown away by an IED, which perhaps was planted on the metaled road long time ago, either before the road was made or by tunnelling below the road.

The militants, who must have been closely observing the movement of the DRG and police personnel, were apparently getting real time information of their return movement from the same route and activated the IED killing one civilian and 11 DRG personnel. While the surprise element in the outward moves may thwart militants from initiating any action, re