| 40,000 stone-pelters in Kashmir | | | Early Times Report
Jammu, Mar 10: Major-General GD Bakshi (Retd), who served Jammu & Kashmir for years, has a made a startling revelation about the rise of stone-pelters in Kashmir and accused Pakistan of using them to hamper anti-insurgency operations in the Valley. General Bakshi has said: "In between the year 2000 and 2005, there were over 4,000 armed terrorists in Jammu & Kashmir. Today, this number has been brought down to 250 by the Army. During those times, Pakistan used to send more terrorists against the number of deaths. In 2005, we started building fence and it was completed in 2005 itself. Infiltration decreased by 70% to 80% as a result of the security measures".
"By 2008, the Pakistanis realized that they had lost the armed phase of terror. So they switched to the intifada phase on the Palestine model. Today, the main foot soldiers are not so much armed terrorists but stone pelters," he said, adding that there are around "40,000 stone-pelters in Kashmir mostly paid by the Pakistani spy agency, Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI)".
General Bakshi has said, and rightly, that these stone-pelters "mount lethal attacks with stones and then pose as victims before the world press". "Peaceful protest is fine but stone-pelting is not a peaceful protest. It is lethal attack and demands a firm response," he has suggested. |
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