No nation can progress unless small traders are protected: Arvind Kejriwal
Chandigarh (PTI): No nation can progress unless small shopkeepers and traders are protected and given ease of doing business, Aam Aadmi Party national convener Arvind Kejriwal said on Thursday.
Kejriwal made the remarks while addressing the maiden meeting of the Punjab State Traders Commission in Mohali, where he was accompanied by Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann.
The former Delhi chief minister said that through the commission, local markets will be upgraded, and long-pending small issues of shopkeepers will be resolved.
He said the purpose of the commission is to make the tax system simpler, more transparent, and trader-friendly.
"Till now, in our country, traders and businessmen have been viewed with a very negative mindset. No matter which government or which party ruled, everyone treated traders as thieves," Kejriwal said.
"I pray that one day our government is formed at the Centre and we free you from GST. There is a kind of tax terrorism going on," he said.
Kejriwal termed the traders also a victim of politicians, who, he said, only remember them during elections and then, once in power, to extort money till the next election.
"I come from a trading family. I understand the pain and suffering of a trader. You may remember how, as children, we used to go to the village during summer holidays. My uncle there had a grocery shop at the bus stand. During summer vacations, many times I would manage the entire shop alone for days. I understand the pain of a shopkeeper," he said.
The AAP leader said the governments always talk about big investments everywhere. "But no one ever paid attention to the small shopkeeper running a grocery store, a clothing shop, a bread shop, a tile shop, or shops in small markets."
Attacking the rival parties in Punjab, he said that after their run was over, neither the Akali Dal nor the Congress would have dared to go among the public and seek honest feedback.
"After four years, they would face such abuse that I do not think the Congress government would have had the courage to pass around a microphone in a public gathering and say, speak whatever you want … If it had happened during the Akali Dal government, the microphone would not have returned," he said.
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Op Sindoor demonstrated India's progression towards 'domain jointness,' says Army Chief
Bengaluru (PTI): Army Chief General Upendra Dwivedi on Thursday said Operation Sindoor demonstrated India's progression towards "domain jointness" and called the military offensive carried out inside Pakistani territory a "defining case study" of operational significance of integration.
In May last year, India had launched a military response targeting terror launchpads in Pakistan post the April 22 Pahalgam terror attack that killed 26 Indian tourists.
"Operation Sindoor was India's most powerful tool of progression towards domain jointness. But we need to achieve domain integration and fusion," General Dwivedi said.
He was addressing the "Ran Samvad" forum on "Land Forces visualisation of Multi Domain Operation (MDO)," here.
The army chief also highlighted the creation of an information warfare organisation and a psychological defence division following Operation Sindoor.
He said, "15 per cent of our effort was on managing the disinformation campaign."
He cautioned, however, that key challenges remain, particularly in synchronising operations across strategic, operational and tactical levels and addressing the growing prevalence of hybrid or grey-zone warfare.
"These are typically below the conventional military threshold, with the goal to exploit adversary vulnerability," he said, adding that non-kinetic operations are increasingly taking precedence.
"Operation Sindoor was India's most powerful tool of progression towards domain jointness. But we need to achieve domain integration and fusion," he said.
The Chief of Army Staff said his visualisation of MDO is not of six domains operating in parallel but all of them "in constant dynamic interaction where the weight shifts and the lead changes".
The Army chief stressed that modern warfare is no longer confined to geographical boundaries or single-service dominance, but is instead defined by continuous interaction across domains, stakeholders and levels of conflict.
"We are living through a dispersed, undeclared, multi-theatre, multi-domain war of our times. The question is not whether domains interact, it is how the interface is orchestrated across the battle space," he said.
General Dwivedi drew a distinction between land domain and land forces, explaining that while the former refers to the operational space, the latter represents the actors, comprising all six domains—land, air, maritime, cyber, space and cognitive—operating in a shared environment.
He underlined that these domains are no longer siloed but function through dynamic synergy.
Elaborating on the evolving battlefield, General Dwivedi noted that MDO has transformed warfighting into a layered, three-dimensional construct.
"In MDO, the battlefield is no longer a line on a map. It's a 3D -- cyber effects shaping the cognitive space, space assets cueing targets, and electronic warfare contesting every frequency simultaneously," he said.
He emphasised that commanders must develop cross-domain situational awareness from the tactical to strategic level.
Highlighting the operational significance of integration, General Dwivedi referred to Operation Sindoor as a "defining case study".
"It was a ground intelligence network coupled with cyber and EW (electronic warfare) inputs that gave the joint army-air force targeting, while the navy's repositioning shaped the strategic calculus simultaneously. No single domain decided the operation," General Dwivedi added.
He described such mutually enabling actions as the essence of MDO.
The Army Chief observed that while domains like cyber, space and cognitive operations benefit from centralised control, land warfare continues to rely on decentralised execution, creating a complex and adaptive system that must be aligned through central intent and technological integration.
On capability development, he said the Indian Army is transitioning steadily from concept to execution under a structured transformation roadmap.
He pointed to dedicated MDO war-gaming exercises since 2024 and the joint doctrine issued in August 2025 as milestones that have provided a unified operational framework across the three services for the first time.
General Dwivedi detailed several structural reforms underway, including the operationalisation of integrated battle groups, Rudra brigades, drone units, electronic warfare formations and cyber operations nodes.
He further underscored the importance of the "three Is" —integration, informatisation and intelligentisation—driven by technology but anchored in human decision-making.
"The human must remain in the loop exercising the judgment," he asserted.
The Army Chief emphasised the need for leadership transformation in the digital age.
"Commanders must evolve into techno-commanders, to build a force that does not know where one domain ends and another begins," he said.
Outlining the future roadmap, he identified "six Ds" shaping the MDO environment—dispersion, democratisation and diffusion among them—leading to imperatives such as diversification of assets, delegation of command and distributed response.
He called for a shift from "domain silos to domain fusion", describing a six-stage progression from domain purity to complete integration.
