India-Pak NSAs to strive to institutionalise DGMOs talks

The forthcoming meeting of the National Security Advisers (NSA) of India and Pakistan will strive to “institutionalise” Director General Military Operations (DGMO)-level talks between the two countries entailing face-to-face interactions, unlike the existing mechanism wherein the two DGMOs communicate over hotline every Tuesday. The periodicity of the interaction (annual or half-yearly) will be decided in the NSAs’ meeting, scheduled for August 23-24.

The two DGMOs have had face-to-face meetings only twice in more than 20 years — once during the Kargil war in 1999 and two years back when Pakistan escalated tension on the line of Control (loC) and International Border (IB) in Jammu & Kashmir with relentless firing.  The two NSAs will also try to arrive at a mutually-agreed schedule for talks between chiefs of the Border Security Force (BSF) and the Pakistan Rangers against the backdrop of Pakistan firing on the IB in Jammu sector.

With unabated firing from across the border on forward posts along loC and IB in J&K in the last fortnight, the two NSAs will try to fix the first meeting between the two DGMOs at the earliest, may be at the end of this month or early September, sources said on Saturday.Explaining the significance of “institutionalising” the DGMO-level talks, they said the all-powerful Pakistan Army actively aids and abets infiltration and terrorism in Jammu & Kashmir along with the ISI and face-to-face talks will enable India to put across its protest in a forceful manner.

So far, the Pakistan Army has denied escalating tension on the loC and International Border as it did last year. An institutional mechanism will help India to give proof of Pakistan’s involvement with facts, they said. Moreover, such interactions will force Pakistan to respond in a more responsible manner given the international ramifications of not honouring the ethics of institutional talks, officials said.

The decision to hold NSA-level talks was taken following a meeting between Prime Ministers Narendra Modi and Nawaz Sharif in Ufa, Russia on July 10. The two sides also decided to hold parleys between the DGMOs and chiefs of BSF and Pakistan Rangers. While the Army guards the 750-km long loC, the BSF is responsible for the International Border which is about 190 km in Jammu & Kashmir.

Pointing out that NSA Ajit Doval will focus on terrorism emanating from Pakistani soil, sources said he is also likely to give a fact sheet to his Pak counterpart Sartaj Aziz about ISI-backed militants now trying to sneak in through new ingress routes from across the loC.In the last three months about two dozen infiltration bids were reported along the loC and International border in Jammu region. The Army and the BSF maintained that not a single infiltration bid was successful and all of them were foiled by the robust anti-infiltration grid. However, in some of the cases, these infiltrators have managed to sneak throwing a new challenge to the security forces, officials admitted.

According to field reports handful of new “terror factories” have reportedly come up across the loC and International Border with India where ISI is imparting arms and explosive training to fresh batches of militants before pushing them inside the Indian territory to spread its “arc of terror.”