New Delhi: Chief of Defence Staff, General Bipin Rawat, on Sunday said the territorial ambitions of China and Pakistan require the Indian armed forces to remain alert and deployed along the disputed borders and coastal areas round the year.
Asserting history is witness to the fact that whenever a nation neglects its armed forces, the external powers are quick to exploit it, General Rawat said India overlooked this important lesson of history in the 1950s and allowed the security apparatus to drift and the Chinese shook the nation up in 1962.
“We had to relearn this lesson through an ignominious experience,” General Rawat said.
“Post-1962, we have had several skirmishes against the Chinese at Nathu La in Sikkim in 1967, at Wangdung in 1986, at Doklam in 2017 and the recent skirmishes in the eastern Ladakh,” he added while delivering the Sardar Patel Memorial Lecture at All India Radio, PTI reported.
Underlining the outcomes have made it clear that the Indian armed forces are alert and determined to defend national territory, General Rawat said this has helped the Chinese and our leaders to pursue agreements for maintaining peace and tranquility along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) and several other confidence-building measures to improve ties.
The Chief of Defence Staff recalled the Indian armed forces’ role in controlling the post-partition violence in the country.
“No one had fathomed that the scale of mayhem due to the communal frenzy that was unleashed due to the partition of our nation,” General Rawat said.
“Large scale violence between people who once lived as one community resulted in the loss of thousands of innocent lives in 1947,” he added.
Stating the police force, not fully trained or equipped, was limited in numbers and was suffering from the trauma of communal fighting, General Rawat said: “The communal frenzy of that time was beyond the control of the police. The armed forces were then called in to control the furious rioting and enforce civil order.”
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General Rawat also lauded India’s first home minister Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel.
“The quintessential visionary that Sardar Patel was, he had assertively voiced the need of an independent Tibet as a buffer state between India and China, as can be found in his correspondence with the then Prime Minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru,” he said.