LG Manoj Sinha to chair high-level security meet in Srinagar today

Srinagar : Jammu and Kashmir Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha will chair the unified command security meeting on Wednesday in Srinagar city.

The meeting comes a day after Union Home Minister Amit Shah chaired a security meeting on J&K, which was attended by senior officers of the CRPF, BSF and others in Delhi.

The unified command is the name given to the top security grid in J&K that comprises the Army, CAPFs, J&K Police, Central and state intelligence agencies and senior bureaucrats of the UT administration.

Officials said the meeting is aimed to focus on key security concerns, including counter-terror operations, infiltration attempts and the increasing challenges of drug abuse in the union territory.

In J&K, law and order, security and central services like the IAS/IPS are under the direct control of the Lt Governor.

Manoj Sinha is the first L-G of J&K, who always speaks of dismantling the terror ecosystem. He believes that unless the over-ground workers (OGWs) and sympathisers of terrorists are tackled, focusing on the numbers of terrorists killed in anti-terrorist operations would not end the scourge of terrorists in the UT.

The lieutenant governor has been the strongest protagonist in a holistic approach to ending terrorism. He has been saying that the roots of terrorism exist in drug smuggling, hawala rackets, religious indoctrination, the allurement of unemployed youth through anti-national propaganda and the patronage of those known to operate in the ‘grey area’.

Intelligence agencies describe those white-collared so-called civilians as existing in the ‘grey area’, who are apparently unconnected with terrorism but serve as ideologues and champions of separatism and secessionism. “Those existing in the ‘grey area’ are the most powerful pillar of terrorism and as long as such forces are allowed to operate under the very eyes of the security set-up, numbers of terrorists killed would only be of arithmetical significance”, said a top-level central intelligence officer.