Still Shooting Blanks

Ten years and counting. The Indian army’s baffling inability to induct a basic assault rifle points at a deeper procurement malaise.

- Sandeep Unnithan

On July 15, troopers of the Jammu & Kashmir police, the CRPF and the army’s Rashtriya Rifles closed in on three Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorists hiding in a cave in the Satoora forest, in Tral, south Kashmir. All three terrorists were killed after a fierce fire fight lasting over 11 hours. After the fight, AK-47-toting security personnel entered the cave to recover the terrorist’s weapons—three AK-47s and 14 field magazines—bringing to a close yet another encounter. If few noticed the intriguing fact of both sides using the same assault rifle, it was because this has ceased to astonish. The AK-47 is a legendary weapon among soldier and guerrilla alike because of its rugged simplicity and effectiveness—it has just nine moving parts. Its continuing use by security forces is also an indictment of the army’s failure to equip soldiers with a modern assault rifle kitted with force multipliers like day and night sights (which can be used irrespective of light conditions), ‘red dot’ sights to pinpoint targets and under barrel grenade launchers, which can toss explosives twice as far as hand-thrown grenades. (The majority of in-service INSAS and AK-47 rifles lack these.) Army officials also bristle at the glitch-prone INSAS’s production quality, the break ability of its plastic magazines and its poor metallurgy.