New Delhi [India], November 28 : Retired Army officer, Colonel Hunny Bakshi said on Friday said that Indians seem to have a problem of not calling out any "enemies from within." He claimed that the Central government took a "nice approach" towards terrorists by calling them "militants" before.
Colonel Hunny Bakshi (retd) is an intelligence specialist who led the Army's covert intelligence unit Technical Support Division (TSD). While speaking about alleged domestic terrorists in the context of the November 10 car explosion near Red Fort in the national capital, he said that the problem of alleged terrorists residing within India is decades old.
"Problem with us we are not ready to call out. We are aware there are enemies. It is not about 1990, it started sometime in 1985-86 where the first lot of people went for training. In 1991 we caught a group exfiltrating, those were the days where a lot of exfiltration was taking place. Normally jisko pakadte the woh jawab deta tha ki (whoever we caught used to reply) his father is put under threat, give one child from house, they had their own stories," the retired officer said while addressing second session of ANI's National Security Summit on the topic 'The Enemy within'.
Recalling his time in the Armed Forces, Colonel Bakshi (retd) said that he has met people who are "convinced" of their goal and path, and as such the Central government was "going through niceties" in calling out terrorism properly before.
"I met a guy, he was an engineer and he said that I am very convinced on what I am doing. So if you think this kind of thing is happening now, it is always there. We need to understand, and I will be very brutal here. We have been going through niceties, we have been calling them militants, which by the way is a very honourable word," he said.
"Then the government wanted to be subtle and started calling them anti-national elements. They still didn't want to call them terrorists. Till date we are not ready to say it is Islamic radicalisation," Colonel Bakshi said.
The former army officer's comments were made in connection with the explosion which killed atleast 15 and injured multiple others near Red Fort earlier this month. The National Investigation Agency (NIA) is probing possible terror links after finding a "terror module" with multiple doctors and professionals allegedly part of it.
Meanwhile, the NIA has stepped up its investigation into the deadly suicide car bomb attack near Delhi's Red Fort, taking one of the arrested accused, Doctor Shaheen Saeed of Uttar Pradesh' Lucknow to Haryana's Faridabad for on-site questioning, according to sources.