Special Frontier Force: Vikas Battalion

History : 

In the early wake of the 1962 Sino-Indian War, SFF was founded on November 14th.

After the war of 1962, the CIA and Intelligence Bureau (IB) made the decision to train a 5,000-person Tibetan force for potential missions against China.

Since the 1950s, the CIA has been engaged in a clandestine effort to train Tibetan insurgents to combat Chinese forces in Tibet.

The Central Intelligence Agency is the federal government of the United States of America’s civilian international intelligence service.

The CIA and IB created Mustang Base in Nepal’s Mustang in the 1950s, where Tibetans were trained in guerilla warfare. During the Tibetan Uprising of 1959, the Mustang rebels transported the 14th Dalai Lama to India.

At first, only Tibetan refugees from the Khampa group were recruited (now it has a mixture of Tibetans and Gorkhas).

Because it was founded by Major General Sujan Singh Uban, an artillery officer who had previously led the 22 Mountain Regiment, it was once known as Establishment-22.

About:

SFF is governed by the Cabinet Secretariat, and its Inspector General, a Major General in the Army, is in charge of that organisation.

The Vikas battalions are the individual units that make up the SFF.

They are highly skilled members of the special forces who are capable of carrying out a number of activities that would typically be done by any special forces unit.

SFF units include female troops who carry out specialised duties.

With the Army:

Although the SFF units are not Army members, they operate under Army operational supervision.

The rank structures used by the units are equivalent to those used by the Army.

They have their own training facility where special forces training is provided to SFF recruits.

Major Operations: Operation Eagle (1971 conflict with Pakistan), Operation Bluestar (1984 conflict with Pakistan to clear the Golden Temple in Amritsar), Operation Meghdoot (1984 conflict with Pakistan to secure the Siachen glacier), Operation Vijay (1999 conflict with Pakistan at Kargil), and numerous counter-insurgency operations throughout the nation.

Eagle Operations:

In order to neutralise Pakistan Army strongholds and aid the Indian Army in moving forward, the SFF operated in the Chittagong hill regions in East Pakistan (later Bangladesh) in 1971.

Criticism:

In 1965, Special Frontier Force and the CIA worked together to plant a nuclear-powered equipment on Mount Nanda Devi (Uttarakhand) to keep an eye on China’s nuclear arsenal. Unfortunately, the mission had to be aborted, and the nuclear-powered equipment was lost on the mountain.

Indian media channels reported the loss of the nuclear-powered sensor in 1978, which prompted a comment from the then-prime minister over Indian participation in the mission.

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