A battle to win hearts and minds in J&K

NEW DELHI deserves credit for acting with despatch in handling the recent incidents in the Poonch-Rajouri area. Four jawans were killed in an ambush on December 21; a day later, three civilians, picked up for interrogation along with others, died in custody, allegedly after being tortured.

Three of the four jawans killed had been apparently decapitated. This was almost certainly aimed at instigating the kind of reaction that unfortunately did take place.

The Army Chief, Gen Manoj Pande, and Union Defence Minister Rajnath Singh visited the area within days of the civilian deaths. Neither of them addressed the brutality directly, but both sent a clear message to the Army against the recurrence of such incidents.

No doubt, the situation was an extremely difficult one for the Army. Three of the four jawans killed had been apparently decapitated. This was almost certainly aimed at instigating the kind of reaction that unfortunately did take place. The long-drawn insurgency is testing the nerves of the Army.

News reports suggest that it was New Delhi’s intervention that led to the J&K police filing a case on the basis of a 29-second video clip shot in an Army camp, purportedly showing the torture. The media’s role here was not particularly glorious. Most news reports spoke of three civilians being “found dead” in Bafliaz village of Poonch. Some even spoke of a ‘mystery’ surrounding the deaths. Since the three had been picked up by the Army a day earlier, it would not have taken a genius to realise that these were custodial deaths.

What was striking was the political reaction. On December 27, the Defence Minister landed in Rajouri and exhorted the forces to “not only safeguard national interests but also win the hearts of the people.” He said there should be “zero tolerance for violations of the well-established standard operating procedures.”

The minister met the families of the dead civilians and assured them of an “expeditious investigation into the incident, culminating in the delivery of justice.”

Two days later, BJP leaders, including state party president Ravinder Raina and local MP Gulam Ali Khatana, who is a Gujjar, also visited the families. They sought strict punishment for the guilty, whom they said had committed “a major crime.”

Those killed were from the Gujjar and Bakarwal communities, which have largely worked with government agencies in the counter-insurgency (CI) campaign. Their support is an important element of the BJP’s electoral plans in Jammu & Kashmir.

The government has been suggesting that militancy in the state-turned-UT is almost over. This is not true. Given the level of security in the Kashmir valley, militancy has shifted its weight to the Pir Panjal region adjacent to Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK). Thirty-six soldiers and seven civilians have been killed in the region since October 2021.

Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld has said that there are two ways to fight an insurgency. First, a sledgehammer approach, such as the one adopted by Hafiz al-Assad when he crushed the Muslim Brotherhood uprising in the city of Hama in Syria in 1982. Assad simply levelled the city with artillery and tanks, killing tens of thousands of people.

The second method is the one in which the British dealt with the Irish Republican Army (IRA) insurgency beginning in the late 1960s. There were regular shootings and killings and the IRA bombing campaign even expanded to the UK. They assassinated Lord Mountbatten and blew up the hotel where then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was to speak; they even attacked 10, Downing Street.

According to van Creveld, the British exercised “extreme self-control”. They avoided firing at crowds and desisted from collective punishment such as blowing up houses. The army stayed within the boundaries of the law and refrained from arbitrary torture and killings. There were violations of this code of conduct, but they were kept to a minimum. The result has been a lasting victory for the British.

Actually, van Creveld’s typology could well be applied to the Israeli Defence Forces, which is adopting the Assad style in Gaza by using some of the heaviest weapons in its arsenal. Remember that the Assad strategy, applied to the civil unrest that broke out in 2011, led to the whole of Syria coming apart.

One reason for this was the ‘othering’ of the opponent. Assad belongs to the Alawite minority, with little sympathy for the Muslim Brotherhood. The Israelis, too, do not see the Palestinians as equals. Indeed, the Israeli defence minister suggested that they were ‘human animals’.

But living in a culture where diversity is celebrated, our Army cannot afford to ‘other’ its opponents. The goal of CI, especially within the country’s borders, is to win back the allegiance of the disaffected through police action and also political outreach. This is what brought us success in Nagaland, Mizoram and Punjab.

Though much larger in scale and intensity, the Indian CI campaign in J&K has also exercised self-control, but it has had its bad moments. The Poonch incident is one of them. But within the Army, there has been a clear understanding that counter-insurgency is also a battle to win the hearts and minds of the people. There was a deviation in 2017-18, when the Army launched Operation All-Out to crush militancy. Later, the Union government revoked Article 370, arrested several politicians and demoted the state to a union territory. Now, having dealt with Article 370 for good, New Delhi is hopefully moving to restore the political component, which is critical for ending any insurgency.