Modi got India its first independent security policy: Shah

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, July 17

Union Home Minister Amit Shah today said it was Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, which for the first time delinked India’s security architecture for the country with that of foreign policy and brought about a new independent strategy to deal with the issue.

Shah, while delivering the “Rustamji memorial lecture”, which was organised by the Border Security Force (BSF), said India’s security policy was for long remained “either influenced or was overlapping” with the foreign policy.

The memorial lecture and investiture ceremony is an annual affair to remember the contribution of BSF’s first Director General (DG) KF Rustamji, who was an officer of the 1938 batch of the British-time Imperial Police. Rustamji headed the BSF for nine years and died in 2003.

Before the lecture, the Union Home Minister also gave way gallantry medals to serving personnel and to those who were killed in the line of duty from the country’s largest border guarding force.

“I used to think if there is a security policy of this country or not? Till Narendra Modi became the Prime Minister, we did not have any independent security policy,” Shah said. He added that after Modi government came to power, the country got an independent security policy.

“Our idea is to have peaceful relations with all, but if someone disturbs our borders, if someone challenges our sovereignty, the priority of our security policy is that such an attempt will be replied in the same language,” Shah said, asserting that the changed security policy is a “big achievement”.

He said he had a firm belief that for the country’s democracy and economic progress, an independent security policy was a must.

Shah also declared that the government was working to ensure that there “will be no gap in the fencing” along India’s borders by next year. He said about three per cent of the country’s border was unfenced at present and this has left a “big space” for infiltration of terrorists and other border crimes like smuggling of arms, ammunition and narcotics. He asserted that the country would soon develop an indigenous counter-drone technology.

His comments came in the backdrop of the drone attack on the IAF station in Jammu last month where two unmanned aerial vehicles dropped bombs injuring two airmen and damaging a portion of a building.

Quote: Want peaceful relations with all

Our idea is to have peaceful relations with all, but if someone disturbs our borders, if someone challenges our sovereignty, the priority of our security policy is that such an attempt will be replied in the same language – Amit Shah, union home minister