Greater discussion on setting up VDGs needed

ON the night of April 17, 1998, militants slaughtered 28 villagers in the Prankote area of Reasi district of Jammu and Kashmir. Prankote, an administrative unit comprising several villages, could be reached after an eight-hour trek over a mountainous stretch.

The militants had hacked the villagers with cleavers. There were some lucky survivors. For instance, Krishan Kumar lost his parents, two sisters and a younger brother. Incidents like this marked the bloodstained period from the mid-1990s to 2007 in the inhabited hills in and around the Pir Panjal from Poonch to Doda district.

With a spate of intermittent attacks on civilians in the J&K hills, including the killings in Rajouri, there is now a strong emphasis on the Village Defence Committees (VDCs) and developments around them are getting a lot of attention. Beyond the news cycle, the experience of the VDC, described as a self-protection mechanism, and its future scope require to be studied from the broader three-decade institutional knowledge of the counter-terrorism domain.

In actual practice, the 1995 conceptual framework for the establishment of VDCs, now called Village Defence Guards (VDGs), is the same as the new order issued in 2022 with a few changes in the modalities. Earlier, the special police officers (SPOs) within the VDC were paid a remuneration that reportedly became Rs 18,000 per month. In the new order issued by the Ministry of Home Affairs, apart from changing the nomenclature, all VDG members will be paid, thus ending the distinction between SPOs and VDC members. Instead, there will be two categories, namely V1, areas which are more vulnerable, and V2 with each drawing a salary of Rs 4,500 and Rs 4,000, respectively. Both will be headed by a former Army, police or central paramilitary force officer. The SPOs have moved the court as they consider the order a demotion as they will be paid the same salary as the rest of the VDGs.

In the mid-1990s, the Centre reluctantly conceded the establishment of the VDCs. It was feared that in the context of mixed demographic areas like Doda, where the militants were trying to polarise the communities on religious lines, arming one community may exacerbate the situation. Second, the right to bear arms for self-defence is not a constitutional right in India and the responsibility to protect citizens lies with the state. This is unlike the US where the Second Amendment provides the right to keep and bear arms as a fundamental right. Even within the US, there are differing interpretations of this provision.

After conceding the demand of the VDCs, the political elite, both in New Delhi and J&K, was careful in describing their scope and concept. For instance, one of the frequent questions was about the remuneration of the VDCs and the default reply of the ruling political elite was that since the establishment of the VDCs was a voluntary concept for self-protection, they cannot be paid. The term ‘voluntary’ was emphasised and it was done to ward off any potential criticism on its constitutionality.

In 2011, the Election Commission had to clarify that the SPOs who draw remuneration from the state cannot contest elections, whereas the others, who are volunteers, can do so after the deposition of arms to the authorities concerned. In this context, the 2022 order provides a greater clarity about the overall structure, including its relationship with the police, bureaucratic and village institutions, as compared to the ambiguities of the 1995 order. However, providing for the remuneration to the VDCs may invite a greater constitutional scrutiny in the future. In addition, the actual execution of the concept in a varied landscape calls for shunning the one-size-fits-all counter-terrorism approach.

The VDC was established in the mid-1990s and its demand grew from the erstwhile Doda district, which included Kishtwar and Bhaderwah, after a series of militant attacks on religious minorities. In 1993, Santosh Thakur, BJP’s district president, was killed and the BJP national leadership, including Kedar Nath Sahni, was consistently vocal about the need to establish VDCs. The VDCs were established across the hill areas to the south of the Pir Panjal in J&K and in the infiltration-prone areas near the India-Pakistan international border in the plains.

It is not that the attacks ceased with the establishment of the VDCs. From January 1996 to August 8, 2001, when Doda, along with some other districts, was declared a disturbed area and brought under the Armed Forces Act, a series of massacres had already taken place in the remote hills. In fact, apart from the brutal massacres by militants, some VDCs, armed with vintage .303 rifles, were specifically attacked. The first major attack on a VDC occurred when militants mowed down 15 members of three families at Layata on the Doda-Kishtwar highway on July 19, 1999. More people would have been killed had it not been for the bravery shown by six residents, including three children. The six took guns in their hands and kept the militants engaged the whole night till the security forces arrived on the scene. In another incident on February 10, 2001, as many as 15 persons of three families of VDC members, including three women and seven children of the Gujjar Muslim ethnic stock, were burnt alive when militants, after locking them inside their homes, set them ablaze in Morasalahi village of Kot Charwal, 40 km from the Budhal area of Rajouri district.

In a Global South context, the practical realities of inadequate state capacity in protecting human lives in arduous terrain may necessitate the formation of VDCs or VDGs. At the same time, a more calibrated response and structure are required that factors in demography, history and geography of each segment, as this author learnt while researching for the book, Militancy in Jammu and Kashmir: The Uncovered Face, which covered the 1990-2007 period. Shubh Sharma, one of the lucky survivors of the Champnari (Doda) massacre, in which 25 members of his family were killed on June 19, 1998, had told this author that his kin were attacked after the killing of four Muslims. Following the killings, militants had warned the villagers against celebrating any wedding in the village. The militants attacked a bridal party of Shubh’s family which turned out to be from a different village. In this context, one of the notable civil society interventions was of Gandhian Nirmala Deshpande and her peace activists drawn from across the country, who camped in Doda district for a month. It momentarily contributed to bringing the two communities together.

Fast-forward to 2023. Some of the basic parameters of a sound counter-terrorism strategy, as learnt in the last three decades, are no different from the past, which is to marry the sound approach of a security framework with a more grounded push for social cohesion.