Cong Ignites A Credit War Over Brahmos; Men In Uniform Praise Govt For Support

With BrahMos making the news, trust some Congress leaders like Jairam Ramesh to ignite a credit war over the missile that is associated with former President Dr APJ Abdul Kalam. Jairam surely doesn’t have the breadth and vision of a Shashi Tharoor to go with the flow and articulate mood of the nation. Instead as AICC media head he ferrets out info that he imagines will best please the Gandhis even in these strained times. On X, he went on to trace the origins of Brahmos — how it was named after the Brahmaputra and Moskva rivers and how it was an outstanding example of Indo-Russian collaboration. The whole point of tracing Brahmos history — which began as an inter-government project in February 1998 when IK Gujaral was PM and the first contract was signed on July 9, 1999, when Atal Bihari Vajpayee was PM — was continued by successful governments. The first successful launch took place on June 12, 2001. While all this happened when NDA was in power, Jairam mentions that the missile was inducted into the Indian Navy in 2005 and Indian Army in 2007 under the UPA regime. The air-launched variant of BrahMos appeared in 2012 when Dr Manmohan Singh was PM. Significantly, at the DGMOs briefing on May 12, the men in uniform gave a different picture. In a statement it was acknowledged that “our battle proven systems stood the test of time” said Air Marshal AK Bharti who quoted Ramcharitmanas said a highlight has been the stellar performance of the indigenous air defence system — the Akash system. “Putting together and operationalising the potent Air Defence environment has been possible only because of budgetary and policy support from the government of India in the last decade.”