Guwahati: At a conference attended by the country’s top cops, Prime Minister Narendra Modi laid out his plan for SMART policing: he urged the police force to be strict and sensitive, moral and mobile, alert and accountable, reliable and responsive, techno savvy and trained.
The PM was addressing a conference on internal security in Guwahati, where senior-most officials of India’s intelligence and security agencies were also in attendance. Modi congratulated the officers who were being honoured at the meet and said that a tradition has been broken by holding the conference in Guwahati instead of Delhi. “The security meet in Guwahati is a morale booster for the northeast,” Modi said.
The Prime Minister also extolled the role played by India’s policemen, saying, “Since independence, 33000 police men have died in the line of duty”.
He suggested that all state governments should have a set of protocols to honour policemen who have died while on duty, including publishing e-books and souvenirs with the details of such policemen.
The PM also stressed on the importance of good intelligence, claiming it held the key to national security.
“Good intelligence negates the need for weapons or conflict,” said the Prime Minister. He also stated that more than the power of weapons, what mattered was who was in charge of those weapons, observing, “It is important that the right weapons be in the hands of the right people”.
Addressing the police welfare issue, Modi said that an officer may be good but a comprehensive plan is needed to ensure the welfare of their families.
The director of Intelligence Bureau in Guwahati, Asif Ibrahim, who addressed the meet earlier, said that terror outfits like ISIS and al-Qaida are a serious challenge for India. The meet comes two days after the arrest of an ISIS recruit from Kalyan who returned to India.