NEW DELHI: The principal opposition party Congress today hit out at the central government after four army personnel, including a Major-rank officer, were killed in an encounter in the Doda district of Jammu and Kashmir last night on Monday, 15 July.

Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge and Congress leader and Leader of the Opposition (LoP) in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi both asserted that the government should take full responsibility for the repeated security lapses and take strict action against the culprits and slammed the BJP government over the spate of terror attacks in the Union territory.

While he paid tributes to the martyrs and expressed his deepest condolences to the bereaved families, Rahul Gandhi wrote in Hindi on X, "Such horrific incidents happening one after the other is extremely sad and worrying. These continuous terrorist attacks are revealing the poor condition of Jammu and Kashmir. Our soldiers and their families are bearing the brunt of the Bharatiya Janata Party's wrong policies. It is the demand of every patriotic Indian that the government should take full responsibility for the repeated security lapses and take strict action against the culprits who harm the country and the soldiers." He ended his post by posting, "In this hour of grief, the entire country stands united against terrorism."

Mallikarjun Kharge also expressed his condolences on platform X. “"The Modi government is acting as if everything is ‘business as usual’ and nothing has changed,” wrote Kharge. “They must know that increasingly the Jammu region is bearing the brunt of these attacks,” Kharge said as he urged the Centre to not endanger national security.

Among other Congress leaders, including general secretaries Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, expressed her condolences and wishes to the bereaved families, and Jairam Ramesh also attacked Prime Minister Modi saying, “While we must demonstrate an effective collective response cutting across political parties, the question must also be asked: what happened to all those grand claims made by the self-anointed non-biological PM and the self-styled Chanakya?”

The Doda encounter occurred one week after a similar terrorist ambush in the isolated Machedi forest belt of the Kathua area which left five soldiers dead and numerous others injured. The police and security services have launched large joint combing and search operations in response to a recent spike in terror attack events in the Jammu division.