Former Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Monday said "jawans cannot be fodder to be martyred at will” and claimed that the anti-naxal operations in Chhattisgarh were either poorly designed or incompetently executed.
Last Saturday, security forces, who were involved in anti-naxal combing operations in Chhattisgarh, came under heavy attack from the naxals that resulted in the death of 22 security personnel and injured, at least, another 30 of them.
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"No Indian jawan should face an enemy without body armour in the 21st century. It needs to be made available to every soldier,"Mr Gandhi he said in a tweet.
In another another tweet, he commented on a media report that quoted the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) chief General Kuldeep Singh as saying that there was no intelligence failure in the anti-naxal operations and an equal number of naxals were killed.
"If there was no intelligence failure then a 1:1 death ratio means it was a poorly designed and incompetently executed operation. Our jawans are not cannon fodder to be martyred at will,"Mr Gandhi said on Twitter.
The Congress also targeted Home Minister Amit Shah for "continuing to address election campaigns in Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Assam."
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“Please note the date and time of the attack; April 3 and the time is around 11:30am. For the next 24 hours, the country’s Home Minister didn’t respond. When armed forces and soldiers were becoming martyrs, the Home Minister was doing a roadshow with a former cine actress in Tamil Nadu. Thereafter, he addressed another meeting in Tirunelveli, then he went to Kerala and finally proceeded to Assam. He didn’t come to Delhi or go to Chhattisgarh. On April 4, he addressed another rally in Sorbhog in Assam,” Congress chief spokesperson Randeep Surjewala said, reading out the timeline from official Twitter handle, Office of Amit Shah.
Mr. Surjewala quoted Home Ministry data to claim that since 2015, there have been 5,213 naxal attacks so far and 1,416 people including security forces have been killed.
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“I want to ask you: can the country’s Home Minister be so careless about his responsibilities?”asked Mr Surjewala, adding,“Can the Home Minister be so insensitive that while the bodies of our jawans are lying, he is busy asking for votes? Can such a person have the moral authority to continue in position?”