In the aftermath of the Pulwama terror attack, while the nation came together in support of Indian security forces and the family of those martyred, there has been a concerted attempt to politicize the entire matter by certain sections of the Indian polity and the liberal elite.
While some have insinuated that the Indian government conspired to murder our own soldiers to derive political benefit, others have called for a plebiscite in Kashmir.
Now, an image is being circulated by a Pro-AAP page on social media which is quoting false data to paint the NDA government in poor light.
The image claims that during the second term of the UPA era, there were 109 terror attacks, 139 Jawans were martyred, 12 civilians were killed and there were 563 ceasefire violations while the same numbers for the NDA government are 626, 483, 210 and 5596. As per the image, the data comes from the South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP).
However, if we are to look at the data on the SATP website, in Jammu and Kashmir alone, there were 146 civilian casualties during the second term of the UPA. While under the NDA, there have been 205 civilian casualties till now. The casualties among security forces was 242 during UPA-II while the same has been 346 for the NDA government. It’s true that more Jawans have been martyred during the NDA regime than the previous government, however, more terrorists have been eliminated as well. The number was 752 for UPA-II while for the NDA, it stands at 859 thus far. The data is till February 3rd, 2019, therefore, does not include the casualties of the Pulwama Terror Attack and the anti-terror operations since. The data also does not include the casualties inflicted during the Surgical Strikes.
As for ceasefire violations, there were 335 violations between 2009-2014 at the LOC. And 576 between 2015-2018. Although from the given data, it’s clear that there have been more ceasefire violations during the Narendra Modi government, the numbers are nowhere near to those mentioned in the image. The disparity is not that vast as well.
It’s unclear where the number of terror attacks was derived from as we could not find any such thing on the SATP website. However, given the nature of the other data in the image, it appears quite obvious that they are just random digits thrown together without any basis in fact.
The conclusion is quite clear, the NDA’s record when it comes to eliminating terrorists has been better than the second term of the UPA. While more security personnel have been martyred, it can be attributed to more number of anti-terrorism operations carried out by the Indian Army. Pakistan’s desire to destabilize India during the tenure of a government that has a single party majority in the Parliament which provides our country with greater stability also certainly contributed to the fact.
More importantly, the data being circulated in the image does not bother at all with the stellar work conducted by the central government in combating Left-wing extremism. Due to the Narendra Modi government’s harsh crackdown on Naxal terrorists, it has become much easier to imagine the end of Maoist violence in the country in the near future.