Prime Minister Narendra Modi is holding a key meeting with Union Home Minister Amit Shah, National Security Advisor Ajit Doval, and Defence Minister Rajnath Singh today. Sources told CNN-News18 that ‘security and policy-related discussions are on the table’ and that the main agenda of the meeting was to expedite the process of formulating a drone policy for India.
India will have a drone policy very soon, top sources told CNN-News18.
The meeting comes in the backdrop of Sunday’s drone attack on the Jammu airbase and the events that followed. The meeting started at 4 pm, sources said.
Ahead of the meeting with PM Modi, Singh also met with the top brass of the Air Force. Officials said the agenda of this meeting was also drones and formulating a policy on them.
This meeting in South Block, also attended by the Air Chief seemed to be a preparatory meeting ahead of Singh’s meeting with PM later in the evening.
“The agenda of the meeting was to expedite the process of formulating a drone policy for India,” officials said. They claimed both these meetings were incidentally planned days before the Jammu Airbase drone strike.
Meanwhile, the investigation into the attack on the Jammu air force station has been handed over to the NIA. In what was the first instance of Pakistan-based terrorists deploying drones to strike vital installations, two bombs were dropped at the IAF station in Jammu in the early hours of Sunday, causing minor injuries to two airmen.
The explosions took place around 1.40 am within six minutes of each other. The first blast ripped off the roof of a single-story building at the technical area of the airport manned by the IAF in the Satwari area on the outskirts of the city. The second one was on the ground. The officials said the explosive material dropped by the drones might have been manufactured using a cocktail consisting of RDX, but a final confirmation was still awaited.
Investigators were yet to determine the flight path of the drones that dropped the bombs as they scanned the CCTV footage, including from cameras installed on the boundary walls of the airport. However, all the CCTV cameras focused on the roadside, the officials said. The drones that dropped the explosives were either flown back across the border or to some other destination during the night, they suspect.
The aerial distance from the Jammu airport to the international border is 14 km. A day after the attack, the IAF station located at the Jammu airport on Monday continued to remain out of bounds for all but the probe teams including one from the NIA, which picked up every bit of evidence available on the ground.
(With PTI inputs)
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