NEW DELHI, Oct 4: India’s senior security officials met here on Wednesday to consider a range of urgent issues including a nagging fear of losing Delhi’s traditional military edge over Pakistan, sources said.
The discussions came on the day new Foreign Secretary Shiv Shankar Menon met the Home Secretary, Duggal, to consider the Mumbai police claim that Pakistan’s spy agency was behind the 7/11 train blasts in the city.
The Times of India said on Wednesday that the high-level security meeting was called barely three days after Washington and Islamabad resolved their differences over the proposed F-16 fighter package.
It was to discuss “enhancement of Pakistan’s war capability” and the threat it poses to India, the paper said. “Faced with a declining combat ratio with Pakistan, the armed forces have called for urgent steps to ensure that their long-standing conventional military superiority is not eroded any further,” The Times said.
Along with Pakistan’s acquisition of a worrying nuclear arsenal, India’s defence establishment is also worried about the conventional edge. “Unless immediate steps are taken to arrest the reduction in IAF’s force levels, the nation will for the first time in its history lose the conventional military edge over Pakistan,” Air Chief Marshal S. P. Tyagi cautioned in a recent letter to Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee, the newspaper said.
Similarly, army estimates show India enjoys only a slight edge over Pakistan now, it said. “Consider this: The combat ratio during the 1971 war was 1.75:1 in India’s favour. But it declined to 1.56:1 by 1990, and now stands at only 1.22:1.”
The meeting was called by Cabinet Secretary B.K. Chaturvedi and included Home Secretary V.K. Duggal, Defence Secretary Shekhar Dutta, army chief, Gen. J.J. Singh, air force chief, Air Chief Marshal S.P. Tyagi, and navy vice chief, Vice Admiral Venkat Bharathan.
