The district unit of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) flayed the Agnipath scheme launched by the Ministry of Defence and staged a protest against it outside the Deputy Commissioner’s office in Kalaburagi on Friday.
CPI(M) leaders K. Neela and M.B. Sajjan said the Agnipath scheme might have adverse implications on national security. Ms Neela said the Indian armed forces was one of the best in the world due to its robust recruitment and professional training system.
She urged the Centre to scrap the scheme and recruit the youths permanently in the Army. “In many countries, such policy has failed to bring fruitful results. It is unfortunate that the government wants to save the pension and gratuity to be paid for soldiers who are always ready to lay down their lives for the nation. The government could have resorted to other means of saving the money to pay for the expenditure on troops without changing the policy for recruiting in the Army,” she said.
The CPI(M) activists also condemned the detention of human rights activists Teesta Setalvad and the former IPS officer R.B. Sreekumar, saying that their detention was a “pre-planned conspiracy” and an attempt to “silence” the critical democratic voice.
Activists said that Ms. Setalvad and Mr. Sreekumar were being targeted for standing up against communal politics and they were at the forefront of the struggle for justice for the victim-survivors of the 2002 Gujarat riots. They were being hounded by the police and subject to harassment under false and fabricated charges, they said and demanded that cases against both of them should be immediately withdrawn.
