The feckless claims ostensibly made by Coast Guard DIG BK Loshali on Feb 17th at Surat that he was the officer who had ordered that the Pakistani boat under the surveillance of the Indian security establishment in end December 2014, be destroyed, has resulted in a very awkward and avoidable controversy.
The video that has been circulated of the officer speaking at a public event records this pithy turn of phrase: “I hope you remember 31st December night…I was there at Gandhinagar and I told at night (sic), blow the boat off. We don’t want to serve them biryani…”
This assertion is at total variance with the stand taken by the Indian government when the event was first reported. At the time, suggestions made in a cross-section of the media that the Indian Coast Guard (ICG) which had intercepted the boat in the Arabian Sea had used disproportionate force were stoutly refuted by the Defense Ministry and the Raksha Mantri.
Mr. Manohar Parrikar went on record to state that the Pakistani boat had tried to evade inspection and sought to escape and when pursued by a Coast Guard vessel - the crew on the Pakistani boat had set the vessel on fire resulting in an explosion and the boat sinking.
The claims attributed to DIG Loshali have resulted in the Indian Coast Guard, an armed force of the country having egg on its face even as denials have been issued. The officer claims he was misquoted and an investigation is currently under way. Concurrently Minister Parrikar at a press conference in Bengaluru on Feb 18th rubbished reports in a section of the media and firmly stood by the stand taken by the Indian government in early January. He also assured the media that his Ministry would share the evidence of the incident in the course of the next week.
The implications of this intriguing development are multi-faceted and the issue needs to be both clarified and quarantined at the earliest. Casting aspersions on the integrity of an armed force of the nation is rife with many disturbing interpretations.
At the time when the incident came into the public domain, the opposition parties – in my view – imprudently sought to politicize the matter and raised doubts which seemed to indicate that this action by the ICG was shaped by political compulsions. Predictably the Indian media gave the issue considerable prominence and the memory of the Mumbai terror attacks of November 2008 only heightened the emotive contour of the public debate.
In relation to the strained India-Pakistan bilateral ties, the report in the Indian Express on Feb 18th is the equivalent of a self-goal by India and the diplomatic and domestic mileage that Pakistan will derive from this assertion (the denials will be ignored) needs little reiteration.
While the BJP led NDA government will be kept pre-occupied with this development for a while - some lessons may be gleaned from this development. On matters pertaining to national security, the need for political consensus among political parties is paramount.
Dissent and debate while being part of the democratic dispensation must be appropriate to the forum. And as regards the media, governments seek to restrict the flow of information citing confidentiality and the sanctity of national security – and the intrepid journalist will seek the converse – to report the facts.
This is a healthy imperative for a robust democracy and imputing less honorable motives is most undesirable. The use of military force must be within the ambit of law and rectitude and the onus is on the Defense Ministry and the ICG to clarify the whole episode.
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