Defence: India may attend anti-terror exercise in Pakistan next week!
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: India is likely to participate in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation’s (SCO) anti-terror exercise to be held in Pakistan next week, media reported on Thursday.
New Delhi may send a three-member team to participate in the exercise to be held
at Pabbi in Pakistan’s Nowshera district from October 3 under the auspices of the SCO Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure (RATS), constituted to promote counter-terrorism cooperation between SCO member-states.
India is the last country to confirm its participation and is expected to send a team from the National Security Council Secretariat, according to the reports.
The SCO is an economic and security bloc in which India and Pakistan were inducted as full members in 2017. Its founding members included China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.
Headquartered in Tashkent, RATS is a permanent body of the SCO with the objective to promote cooperation among member-states against separatism, extremism, and terrorism.
Despite its participation in the SCO exercise, India will not dilute its position on Pakistan’s role in fanning cross-border terrorism, the reports said.
Recently, Chief of Defence Staff General Bipin Rawat had visited Russia to witness a multi-nation counter-terror exercise in the Orenburg region.
India had sent a team of nearly 200 personnel for the two-week-long “Exercise Peaceful Mission” that began on September 13.
Recently, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in a virtual address to the SCO Summit, had called for a shared template to fight against radicalization and extremism. At the plenary session of the 21st SCO meeting in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, he said radicalization and trust deficit was the biggest challenges to peace in Central Asia, and the recent developments in Afghanistan had made it clearer.
He said the change of power in Afghanistan was not inclusive and it happened without negotiation. These developments can lead to a spurt in the trafficking of illegal arms, drugs, and humans.
The decision to hold the joint exercise “Pabbi-Antiterror-2021” was announced in March 2021 during the 36th meeting of the Council of the RATS held in Tashkent.
The exercise aims at identifying and suppressing channels of terror financing and does not involve the participation of troops.
