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The 17 Mountain Strike Corps, raised in 2014 and headquartered at Panagarh in West Bengal has recently been allocated to the Indian Army’s Eastern Command instead of the dual role it was envisaged for initially.
Revealing that it is now fully operational with all its combat and combat support units are fully integrated, Eastern Army Commander Lt Gen Manoj Pande told Editor-in-Chief Nitin A. Gokhale that the strike corps provides both deterrence as well as an offensive capability to the Eastern Command against China.
Lt gen Pande spoke at length about many other changes and improvements that are currently underway along the LAC to provide a power-packed punch in the East.
Author, thought leader and one of South Asia's leading strategic analysts, Nitin A. Gokhale has forty years of rich and varied experience behind him as a conflict reporter, Editor, author and now a media entrepreneur who owns and curates two important digital platforms, BharatShakti.in and StratNewsGlobal.com focusing on national security, strategic affairs and foreign policy matters.
At the beginning of his long and distinguished career, Gokhale has lived and reported from India’s North-east for 23 years, writing and analysing various insurgencies in the region, been on the ground at Kargil in the summer of 1999 during the India-Pakistan war, and also brought live reports from Sri Lanka’s Eelam War IV between 2006-2009.
Author of over a dozen books on wars, insurgencies and conflicts, Gokhale relocated to Delhi in 2006, was Security and Strategic Affairs Editor at NDTV, a leading Indian broadcaster for nine years, before launching in 2015 his own digital properties.
An alumni of the Asia-Pacific Centre for Security Studies in Hawaii, Gokhale now writes, lectures and analyses security and strategic matters in Indo-Pacific and travels regularly to US, Europe, South and South-East Asia to speak at various international seminars and conferences.
Gokhale also teaches at India’s Defence Services Staff College (DSSC), the three war colleges, India's National Defence College, College of Defence Management and the intelligence schools of both the R&AW and Intelligence Bureau.
He tweets at @nitingokhale
