Headlines
'Nothing big in Myanmar operation'
Panaji, June 12
"There is nothing big" about
the retaliatory surgical strike by elite military commandos on Myanmar
soil earlier this week, Congress Working Committee member Luizinho
Faleiro said here on Friday.
He added that such operations were routine and the BJP was making a "mountain out of a molehill".
Faleiro,
who was the All India Congress Committee (AICC) general secretary
in-charge of the north-eastern states for six years until last year, was
speaking to reporters at the state party headquarters.
"But our
soldiers (are) killing them...because those borders are totally porous.
They are doing it everyday. This was only a bravado. Such actions are
normal," Faleiro said, referring to the strike earlier this week by
Indian army's 21 Para Special Forces on militants of a terror group, who
on June 4 had killed 18 soldiers in an ambush in Manipur's Chandel
district.
While the National Democratic Alliance government first
said that the "surgical strikes" were conducted on Myanmar soil, in
subsequent statements, ministers of the central government exercised
caution by saying that the retaliatory attack was carried out along the
India-Myanmar border.
Faleiro, now the state Congress president,
said that the only novel element about the retaliatory attack by the
Indian military this time round was that it was "a little more
organised".
"The way they went and acted this time, may be a
little more organised, but our military (is) going and is doing it very
regularly. There is nothing big about it," Faleiro said.
The former Goa chief minister also accused the BJP of making much about the killer strike.
"That
is typically BJP's agenda to go to the press to make an issue, make a
mountain of a molehill. But I don't want to make comments to bring the
morale of the armed forces down, because I know they are doing a
wonderful job of it out there," Faleiro said.