Assam Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal on Saturday chaired the inaugural session of the strategy group meeting of Unified Command structure at Assam Administrative Staff College in Guwahati.
During the meeting, the CM underlined the importance of the Unified Command mechanism in bringing peace to the state while maintaining the law and order situation.
Sonowal said the Indian military and paramilitary forces in close coordination with the state agencies, under the Unified Command structure, have been playing a crucial role in maintaining peace in Assam.
The CM hoped with its vast experience of handling insurgency, the Command would continue to devise pragmatic and citizen-centric strategies to completely eradicate violence from the society in the near future.
He also stressed the need to ensure that no innocent person is harassed in the name of insurgency operations while imploring the military, paramilitary and police forces to conform to its own code of conduct.
Sonowal congratulated the Unified Command for its recent achievements when a large number of insurgents surrendered arms and came back to the mainstream.
Sonowal asserted that these achievements added more responsibility to the law enforcing agencies to ensure assimilation of the misguided youths in the society while taking a sympathetic view towards the minor misdeeds of the misguided youths to persuade them to shun the path of destruction and contribute to the nation-building process.
He appreciated the sacrifices made by the armed forces personnel in the line of duty for keeping the country and its people safe.
Sonowal said under the dynamic leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India has attained the reputation of a strong country capable of safeguarding its interest at any cost and the armed forces have also been provided the required support to foil evil designs of the country’s enemies.
Admitting that there were still challenges of drugs, insurgency in the region, the CM exuded confidence that Unified Command would be able to overcome all such hurdles as peace was a pre-requisite to realise the vision of the PM for Northeast being the Astalaxmi.
The CM also stressed on the need for the army to inspire the youth of the state to join the armed forces to serve the country.
Chief secretary Kumar Sanjay Krishna; GOC of 3 Corps, Lt Gen Rana Pratap Kalita; GOC of 4 Corps, Lt Gen Shantanu Dayal along with several top police and intelligence officials were present in the meeting.