Parliamentary panel blames security for Pathankot incident

The government came under a sharp attack from a parliamentary panel for lapses and failures in the Pathankot airbase security, and said “something was seriously wrong” with India’s counter-terror mechanism. A report by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on the Home Ministry has red-flagged India’s overall security apparatus to battle cross-border terrorism. It said the January 2 strike at Pathankot was preventable after “concrete and credible intelligence inputs” were received about a possible attack by terrorists from across the border with Pakistan.

The panel, headed by P. Bhattacharya of the Congress, lamented how Indian security agencies “were so ill-prepared to anticipate [terror] threats in time and counter them swiftly and decisively.… Something is seriously wrong with our counter-terror security establishment,” said the report.

In the Pathankot terror attack seven Indian security personnel were killed at the sprawling airbase complex which houses some of India’s high-value security assets, including fighter jets.

The Parliamentary Standing Committee questioned how the “Pakistani terrorists” managed to cross the border “despite fencing, floodlighting and patrolling by” Indian frontier guards. The panel “is unable to understand that in spite of terror alert sounded well in advance, how terrorists managed to breach the ‘high-security’ airbase”.