New Delhi: Accepting that the two terror attacks in the last two months were a "blot" on government's record, Home Minister P Chidambaram, Thursday, said many homegrown modules are active across the country and several of them have acquired the capacity to make bombs.
Addressing the annual DGPs and IGPs conference organised by the Intelligence Bureau, Chidambaram accepted that the challenge of terrorism was a “formidable challenge” and that the country was facing multiple-threats from various fronts. However, “No country is immune to terror,” he said.
While accepting that “home-grown terror modules are attracted to radical ideology”, Chidambaram said that many of these modules had acquired the “means to make bombs.”
The Home Minister said some of these modules are loosely knit under an organisation called Indian Mujahideen (IM) and many old cadres of the banned Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) have transformed themselves into IM cadres.
The Home Minister pointed out that no country in the world, including the United States, appears to be entirely immune to the threat of terror. The worst-affected were Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, he said.
"The epicentre of terror is Afghanistan-Pakistan (region). Four out of five major terrorist groups are based in Pakistan and three of them LeT, JeM and HM continue to target India," Chidambaram said.
Stressing on the challenges that lay ahead for the security forces, he enumerated that capacity building required time, money and harnessing the capacity of security apparatus in the country.
Extending “fullest co-operation” to the security forces, he goaded them to take ownership of the counter-terrorism and counter insurgency measures.
With the government and the security forces coming under fire for a spate of terror attacks in the country, the recent being the Delhi High Court blast, the Home Minister humbly accepted that the criticisms were “legitimate”. But he said that since the Mumbai attacks of 2008 more than 50 terror modules had been neutralised including a SIMI plot in Madhya Pradesh in June 2011, to kill the three judges who had delivered the Ayodhya verdict.
On a poetic note he added, “We have a long-distance to travel and years of hard work.” Chidambaram also said that the Centre and the states “must provide more money to the security forces.”
On the issue of left-wing terrorism, Chidambaram maintained something which he has outlined before, that it was the “most-violent” form of aggression, whose goal was, “seizure of power with armed rebellion.”
“CPM (Maoists) is the most violent organisation in the country,” he added. He reiterated that though it was a responsibility of both the Centre and the states to deal with counter-insurgency, the states had to be more vigilant. He lamented that there was no significant decline of violence in states like Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa and Maharashtra.
P Chidambaram also dwelt on other challenges that the country was facing like communal violence and civil protests. Agreeing that the right to protest was a legitimate right, the Home Minister said, “Sometimes they can get violent”.
He cited the examples of stone-pelting in Kashmir and road blockades in North-East. Nonetheless, he emphasised, “the use of non-lethal methods to control civilian violence must become the new operating procedure.”
Source http://zeenews.india.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment