New Delhi, May 26
Even as Defence Secretaries of India and Pakistan started discussions on the complex Siachen issue, the Chief of Army Staff, Gen J.J. Singh, today said, “New Delhi wants the 110-km long Actual Ground Position Line (AGPL) on the Siachen glacier to be authenticated by Pakistan to safeguard the country’s interests when disengagement takes place”.
Talking to reporters on the sidelines of an Army-CII seminar on information warfare, General Singh said the Army had already given its plans and feedback to the government on the issue and that the Army was awaiting the outcome of talks.
He although refused to comment on the talks in Islamabad, but said that the country’s basic position was that the present AGPL between NJ9842 to Upper Saltoro Ridge should be authenticated as it will safeguard the country’s interests in the future.
Commenting on the Sino-Indian peace and tranquility agreement he asserted that the
agreement was holding all along the 4,000-km long border and that if the trend continues, more confidence-building measures, including troop reduction, could be considered.
Declaring that interaction between the two armed forces was growing, the Army Chief said the armies of the two nations might soon hold joint exercises in counter terrorism and prepare for UN peacekeeping operations.
While saying guns were silent across the Mcmohan line Himalayan frontier, he said there were few abberations for which mechanism had been institutionalised.
He said these minimal cases were due to difference in perception in the alignment of the Line of Actual Control (LAC) and “We hope that once detailed maps are exchanged in all three sectors — western, eastern and central, these issues would be resolved.”
Meanwhile,
inaugurating the two-day seminar on “Information assurance and risk management”, he said the Army had put in force the highest international grade systems to safeguard the country’s strategic weapons firing systems.
“We are aware of the threats posed by tech-savy hackers to these vital systems,” the Army Chief said while making it clear that the top most B-1 security system had been installed for operating these weapons.
He said a frequency-hopping network had recently been inducted into the armed forces making them secure from hacking and jamming both from air as well as from ground transmissions.
He said armed forces networks had not only been secured but made multi-layered at all levels for all situations, including strategic, tactical battle area, backbone communications and peace-time systems.
Asserting that efforts were constantly on to update information assurance and information denial systems, General Singh said a road map had been set to make Indian Army at par with leading tech-savy forces in the next decade.
Earlier, inaugurating the seminar in which 400 experts from the world over and major information warfare equipment makers are participating, Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee called for working out a national information assurance strategy which would ensure that risks to national information infrastructure was properly managed.
