Attack Of The Drones

These silent killers are hard to detect and neutralise in time, and can be used to wage war with plausible deniability

- Sandeep Unnithan

It was late August and India’s security establishment suddenly sat up after an incident in Punjab. An anonymous caller tipped off the Amritsar (rural) police of a ‘fan-like gadget’ lying in a paddy field in Muhawa village of the district. With the recovery of a second drone a month later in Tarn Taran district, the Punjab police pieced together an audacious plan by the Pakistan-based Khalistan Zindabad Force to infiltrate weapons from across the international border. Four hexacopter drones—each around two-feet-wide and capable of carrying a 4 kg payload—had flown multiple sorties to fly in nearly 80 kg of arms and ammunition, including AK-rifles, pistols and fake currency. It was, as Punjab chief minister Capt. Amarinder Singh said in a tweet, ‘a new and serious dimension on Pakistan’s sinister designs in the aftermath of the abrogation of Article 370’.

The incident sparked off concern among the police, paramilitary and the army alike. All at once, it looked like the Union home ministry’s snazzy smart-fence project—in the works for a decade and costing thousands of crores—could prove potentially powerless for it has been designed only to stop intruders from physically crossing the international boundary. Aerial incursions were a different ballgame. The question everyone is asking in North and South Block, which house the ministries of home and defense, is: how exactly do you counter rogue drones?

What would it take to stop an explosive-laden drone from flying into the path of a passenger aircraft when it is at its most vulnerable—landing or taking off. How to stop ‘kamikaze’ drones from crashing into crowds at a Kumbh Mela or flying directly into a VVIP enclosure at an important public event?