Caught off guard

A Latin phrase comes to mind, given the sudden mushrooming of chowkidars across the land: ‘Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?’ Its closest English translation is, ‘Who will guard the guards?’ To put it in our context: Who will keep watch on our self-declared political chowkidars?

The phrase, attributed to Roman poet Juvenal, has come to be used in the context of policing a tyrannical government or demanding accountability of those in power.

PM Modi, who is very good in capturing narratives, has given his chowkidari a neat twist: Instead of accountability for the acts and omissions of his own government, he says his chowkidari is directed at the malfeasance of governments  past.

Accounting for the performance of the old watchmen is important, but surely, it is more important to know how the current lot is performing. There are charges that they allowed high-profile corporate crooks like Vijay Mallya, Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi to escape. Indeed, our political chowkidars pushed out the real ones, RBI Governors Raghuram Rajan and Urijit Patel, who had presented a list of high-profile fraud cases and non-performing assets to the supreme chowkidar, Narendra Modi’s office.

Then, there is the Rafale deal. Even now it is not clear as to the circumstances in which the old deal for 126 aircraft was scrapped and one for the off-the-shelf purchase of 36 came about. Junior chowkidars like the CAG have not covered themselves with glory by accepting the dubious accounting through which the deal is being made to look cheaper. 

All democratic polities have watchmen—the police, Parliament, civil society groups, RBI, CAG, Central Information Commission (CIC), National Women’s Commission (NWC), National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), the media, and so on.

 In the watch of our self-appointed political chowkidars, police malfeasance has reached new heights. The CBI Director and Special Director slugged it out for months before the chowkidars woke up. The charges that have been flung against the top-most officers of the CBI and the CVC will put ordinary criminals to shame. 

We have seen how the RBI has been undermined, the CIC, too, has been rendered toothless; CAG has bent with the wind; and the National Statistical Commission (NSC) defenestrated. Key appointments have not been made to the NWC and NHRC.   

But thievery is not just about money and valuables, it is also about depriving the people of good governance, justice and national security. Here, our self-declared political chowkidars have been found wanting. Their wanton decision to demonetise the currency brought untold hardship to the entire nation, especially the poor.

Political chowkidars have always been quick to claim credit and wrap the tricolour around themselves on national security matters. But a closer accounting shows their conduct has been less than satisfactory. On their watch, J&K has seen a sharp rise in violence leading to an increase in the deaths of security personnel. Worse, indiscriminate and disproportionate violence has led to the rise of local recruitment. Alarmingly, the Pulwama bomber was a local.  

Pakistani raids across the border in J&K and Punjab continued unabated despite the so-called surgical strikes of 2016. But we cannot forget the grossly incompetent handling of the Pathankot attack earlier. Despite prior information, the response was so messed up because the chowkidars in New Delhi insisted on handling them by remote control. It took four days to put down the attack by some four attackers with the loss of seven security personnel. And despite the strikes, attacks from across the border continued—Nagrota 2016, Pulwama 2017, Sunjuwan 2018, and then earlier this year again in Pulwama.

The recent events relating to Balakot and the aerial clash, too, does not quite jell with the excessive self-praise that the chowkidars have heaped on themselves. While the Air Force strike was well conceived and executed, the aerial encounter was hardly an Indian victory as is being made out. We lost one MiG-21 and an officer prisoner to the Pakistanis, and another Mi-17 helicopter and six personnel aboard to what was probably friendly fire.

 Now in the fog of war this happens, but not the fact that the Indian fighters lacked the equipment or weapons to deal effectively with the Pakistani challenge. Who can we blame for this, if not the chowkidars who said they would be guarding the national turf better than the team before them?

Perhaps the most pernicious action of these watchmen has been the manner in which they have systematically undermined the status of the real chowkidars—Parliament, police, civil society, autonomous institutions like CAG, NHRC and CIC.

Civil society groups have been systematically targeted and neutered because of their critique of government policies in the name of curbing foreign funding influencing policy, yet the chowkidars had no hesitation in allowing anonymous foreign funding for political parties to come in.      

The respected chairman of the Parliament’s Standing Committee on Defence, Maj Gen BC Khanduri (retd) was replaced in 2018 because of the devastating report on the sorry state of our defence system. Murli Manohar Joshi has been denied a ticket for the Lok Sabha elections because the Estimates Committee chaired by him had questioned the government’s performance on job creation.

So, what have political chowkidars achieved in the past five years? Seeking accountability from the earlier chowkidars is needed, but it is not as important as getting an accounting of the performance of our current ones.

Tribune April 2, 2019

India Learned Valuable Lessons from 26/11. But So Have Terrorists Across the Border.

They say that human memory tends to shut out trauma. But the pain caused by the 26/11 attack on Mumbai will always be difficult to forget. What happened on November 26, 2008 was an act of pure terrorism: Defenceless civilians sought out and gunned down over three days in the glare of national television.

For this reason, the incident has been a watershed in India’s attitudes towards terrorism. It hardened the country’s attitude towards terrorists and militants of all stripes. Further, it has made any kind of a dialogue process with Islamabad difficult, given how the authorities there have dragged their feet in providing justice to the 157 killed and the 600 injured on those terrible days.

The fact that the attack was planned and executed by a Pakistan-based terrorist group is accepted even by the authorities in that country. The official narrative in Pakistan is that these were ‘non-state actors’. But given the wealth of evidence about the meticulous planning of 26/11, it is difficult to believe the attack did not have some kind of official sanction.

Also read: 26/11 and the Media: Where Were the Protocols?

Ten years on, India has learned some valuable lessons from 26/11, yet it is hard to be sanguine about the country’s ability to deal with future threats. For one, the terrorist groups operating on the other side of the border have also internalised 26/11 –and changed their modus operandi. Worse, the ruling ‘parivar’ is increasing the country’s vulnerability by attacking its social fabric.

A series of firm steps

Following Mumbai, the government of India came up with a slew of measures to deal with the new threat. The National Investigation Agency was created to investigate terrorism issues, four National Security Guard (NSG) hubs were set up for a rapid response to attacks. An amended Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act was created to provide for the arrest and interrogation of terrorism suspects.

One of the first outcomes of 26/11 was to get the Multi Agency Centre (MAC), an intelligence agency clearinghouse, in motion. Subsidiary MACS at the state level came up next.

Counter-terrorism efforts ran up against India’s federal system on two important instances. In the first, opposition from the states prevented the emergence of a powerful new outfit called the National Counter-Terrorism Centre (NCTC). The second instance concerned a nationwide information-sharing system, the NATGRID.

The NCTC, which would have subsumed the MACs, was aimed at pre-empting, responding to and containing terrorist attacks. But several states blocked it, saying that it was improper and possibly illegal to give the Intelligence Bureau the charge of a body with investigation and arrest powers.

One of the major decisions of the government was to place the Indian Coast Guard under the Indian Navy, and make the latter the overall in-charge of maritime security, in coordination with the state government agencies and the marine police. A number of radars and automatic identification systems were later set up along the coast, as well as a command, control and coordination centre in New Delhi to monitor the operations.

But gaps galore

But this system is full of holes. Many of the coastal police stations have yet to become functional. Besides the infrastructure of jetties, police stations and vessels, there is a problem of imbuing the personnel with a maritime culture. Getting the largely land-oriented policing system to think in a maritime fashion has not been easy.

One of the major gaps in security relates to ports, especially the smaller ports and harbours of the country, most of which lack any kind of security cover. Even in the larger ports, little is being done to check the containers that pass through, as that requires specialised equipment.

Also read: Ten Years After 26/11, Coastal Police Stations Remain a Weak Link

Another major gap is in not being able to provide Automatic Identification Systems for all the fishing vessels in Indian waters. The scheme is being introduced for vessels 20 metres in length, but the bulk of the fishing fleet around India’s coasts consists of vessels smaller than that.

Policing as Achilles’ heel

Perhaps the biggest problem in counter-terrorism (CT) has been the country’s generally third-rate police system. The civil police are the first line of defence against terrorism, and often the first responder. But state police forces are grossly under-resourced and lack the organisation, leadership and culture to play an effective CT role. The MACs and AIS systems may be computerized, but the average police stations often lacks even the most basic of infrastructure. Instead of NSG hubs, the country would have been better off upgrading state police forces and creating SWAT teams to deal with Mumbai-like strikes.

Many of the failures of the CT system became apparent in the fiasco surrounding the Pathankot attack of January 2016. Despite advance knowledge of a possible terrorist strike, the response was, as in Mumbai, chaotic. First, reports of terrorists breaching the border and hijacking vehicles were ignored by the Punjab Police. Then, despite that information, the gunmen were able to penetrate the perimeter of the Pathankot Air Force Base. Instead of getting locally available army units to deal with them, the government insisted on flying in the NSG from New Delhi. Once again, it took three days to finally terminate the attack.

Coordination remains a problem

The Pathankot attack brought out another lesson not learnt from the Mumbai incidents. It had become clear in those excruciating days in November 2008 that no one was in charge of the counter-terrorist operation. At various times, various actors – the Mumbai Police, the Marine Commandos, the NSG – claimed to be coordinating the response. Because it was clear that in reality no one was.

Also read: Read: What the Maharashtra Government Promised to Do Based on 26/11 Inquiry

Something similar happened in Pathankot when NSA Ajit Doval took charge of the response from Delhi, while a variety of players – Air Commodore Dhamoon, the base commander at Pathankot, Maj Gen Dushyant Singh of the NSG, Home Secretary Rajiv Mehrishi, Air Marshal Anil Khosla, or the Air Officer Commanding in Chief of the Western Air Command S B Deo – seemed to be in charge.

A new MO from the Pakistani side

There was another angle to the Pathankot attack that the Indian side had not fully considered given the national preoccupation with the danger of more 26/11-type incidents.

Following the international outcry against the Mumbai strike and the wealth of evidence that became available on Pakistan’s official complicity in the attack, terrorist groups in Pakistan had, with the backing of their patrons in the military establishment there, turned towards a new strategy towards India. Instead of indiscriminate attacks on civilians and non-combatants, strikes in the years after 26/11 began to focus on military and police targets between Jammu and Kathua along the National Highway.

Between September 2013 and July 2015, there were five attacks of a similar pattern. A small group of militants dressed in army fatigues crosses the international border which runs parallel to the National Highway, they hijack a bus or a car and head to a target, usually an army camp or police post. Many of these attacks were carefully timed to disrupt important meetings between Indian and Pakistani leaders.

The Pathankot attack came in the wake of Prime Minister Modi’s sudden visit to Lahore to wish his Pakistani counterpart Nawaz Sharif for his birthday. The Mumbai attack of 2008 came following efforts by India and Pakistan to push their dialogue to the level of military officers from both sides.

Engineering social strife only helps terrorists

There is, unfortunately, another lesson that is being steadily unlearnt since those terrible days of 2008.

From the 1980s onwards, terrorist attacks in India have been a largely Pakistani affair. They have been organized and aided by the Pakistani intelligence organisations and executed through proxies. The Pakistani effort has been as much to seek the breakup of India as to foster tension and divisions between Muslims and other communities in the country, presumably in order to incentivize the radicalization of young Muslims. These efforts have so far been a signal failure.

All told, in three decades, there cannot be more than 300 Indian Muslims who have been accused of being hard-core jihadists; the number convicted is much smaller than that. This, in a population of some 170 million Muslims, and in a period when the high tide of Islamist radicalism swept the world, is statistically negligible.

Despite terrible bomb blasts, orchestrated communal riots and mayhem, the social fabric of the country has held firm. In the past four years, however, Hindutva activists have unleashed verbal and physical attacks on the Muslim community using cow protection, Pakistan, or so-called ‘love jihad’ as proxies. Muslims in India have not responded the way the Sangh wants, so the Hindutva fanatics are redoubling their efforts. Their end goal is to push Indian Muslims to the wall so that a section becomes militant.

The Wire November 26, 2018

Modi Will Not Get Very Far in Kashmir By Pretending the Problem Doesn’t Exist

The Modi government’s strategy for what are, with some understatement, called “law and order” issues, work on three tracks. The first is of  delivering homilies,the second of being relentlessly tough in all circumstances, sometimes more in words than in deeds. Union home minister Rajnath Singh’s statement blaming Pakistan for the Jammu and Kashmir disturbances appears to have created a third track, where the government holds Islamabad responsible for the ongoing crisis.
So, the prime minister’s response to the “gau rakshak” rampage was the homily on the necessity of differentiating between  fake gau rakshaks and, presumably, the good ones. And in his over-the-top style, Modi made a grandiloquent declaration that “if you have to shoot, shoot me, but not my Dalit brothers.” No one is about to take up Modi at his word, but he knows that. It is another addition to the list of his famous jumlas, or false promises. On Kashmir, he carefully spoke about the national love for Kashmir – not for Kashmiris though – and somewhat unconvincingly repeated the Vajpayee formula for dealing with the issues through “insaniyat, jamurihat and Kashmiriyat.”
The government’s tough track has been visible in dealing with Pakistan, the Patidar agitation in Gujarat and the Maoists of Chattisgarh. And now it is showing up in the handling of Jammu & Kashmir, where over 55 persons have been killed and 1,000 injured and there has been a continuous curfew in many parts of the state for over a month in the face of what are essentially violent civil protests. The only answer the government seems to have is more of the same, and now there is talk of handing over parts of the state to the Army.

 

The third track was on display on Wednesday when the government got the National Investigation Agency to put out the confession of a captured Lashkar-e-Tayyeba terrorist, Bahadur Ali, in order to suggest that the whole agitation in the Valley is being run out of Pakistan  and that LeT cadres have been asked to throw grenades at security forces while mingling among civil protestors. Actually, till now there has been no recorded instance of a police officer being killed through firing from the mob or grenade attacks. Confessions are not even considered evidence in Indian courts, so the whole purpose of the NIA’s exercise was part of a political theatre to back up the home minister’s performance on Kashmir during the debate in the Lok Sabha.

What’s missing is statecraft
Anyone familiar with Kashmir knows that there are at least 150 hard-core militants – about half the number being Pakistanis, probably belonging to the LeT – in the Valley at any given time. Also, that July, August and September are months of high infiltration when Pakistan sends its replenishments in terms of men and material into Kashmir. A Bahadur Ali by himself means little; there have been scores, if not hundreds before him. We have killed many, caught a few and in that scale he is not particularly significant. Pakistanis do use sleeper assets, but at a time of their own choosing and there are no indications – except claims by the authorities – that the disturbances are being masterminded by Islamabad.
All this is surprising, considering that the government Modi heads traces its DNA to the sages of ancient India, none of whom is more revered than Chanakya,  whose niti (policy), they believe is the cure all for India’s sorry modern-day plight.  Both India’s adversaries and its votaries attribute to the legendary Mauryan adviser, the strategy of handling politically difficult issues by an amalgam of  saam (persuasion), daam (purchase), dand (punishment), bhed (division).
Even a cursory survey of the past 69 years of the history of the republic, most of them under the rule of the Congress party, will show that these have, indeed, been the principal means through which this famously diverse nation has been kept as one.
It was persuasion that ended the separatist threat in Tamil Nadu whose residue is still visible in the state’s opposition to the GST. In the North-east, military means have been combined with generous largesse to the elite and in a region replete with tribal identities, sowing division, based on these identities has not been difficult. New Delhi’s response to the Mizo rebellion was harsh, but it quickly changed tracks and resorted to a successful strategy of purchase and suasion, in an operation that gave current NSA Ajit Doval his reputation.
Separatism in Punjab was scary, if only because it was so close to the heartland. But fortunately it did not have much political support because of its use of terrorist tactics and so a policy of relentless punishment finished off the Khalistani movement.
J&K, being a big headache, has seen all four strategies being liberally employed at all times. The huge dand (punishment) component does not require much elucidation;  suffice to say it numbers hundreds of thousands of soldiers and policemen and it has, in the past, seen the extensive use of torture and extra-judicial executions. The bhed part has been manifested in the successful, if dangerous, strategies of raising counter-militant forces in the mid-1990s to take on the militancy.
Suasion has been forgotten in the mists of time when Pandit Nehru and Sheikh Abdullah signed the Delhi Agreement in 1952, or when Mirza Afzal Beg and G. Parthasarthy worked out an accord in 1974 under the auspices of Indira Gandhi and the Sheikh. Note, both the agreements were not between individuals, but between the Union of India and the putative representatives of the state of Jammu & Kashmir.
Daam has wide currency across the state and was actually confirmed by no less than the minister of state for external affairs,  General V.K. Singh who acknowledged, after an initial “misunderstood” statement, that money was paid to some politicians “to win hearts and minds of people.”  Subsequently, A.S. Dulat, who headed both the R&AW and the Intelligence Bureau,  bluntly disclosed that no one was immune to bribes in J&K, not the militants, not politicians and not the separatists. “Over the years, they have all been paid by intelligence agencies.”
The strategies employed by the first NDA government headed by Atal Bihari Vajpayee, are both instructive and illuminating. Even while seeking to engage with Pakistan, despite obstacles like the Kargil back-stab, Vajpayee remained focused on the need to fix the Kashmir problem. The most dramatic manifestation of this was the 2000 ceasefire negotiated with the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, which could have led to an end of Kashmir’s armed militancy. Unfortunately, here too, there was an element of back-stabbing from within the system and without, and the initiative failed.  Yet, Vajpayee captured hearts and minds in J&K so effectively that today, a decade and a half later, people, including Modi, still swear by his policies – located as they were, within the bounds of insaniyat (humanity).

Terrorists and militants are not the same
What is striking is that the Modi government’s only response  has been “dand”. True, ministers have decried the havoc caused by shot-guns, but police-bureaucrats have opined that there is no alternative to these weapons. More forces have been rushed and there is talk of giving the Army a larger role in policing the Valley. And now we have the NIA suggesting that the whole thing is actually being run by Islamabad. No doubt Pakistan is fishing in troubled waters, but it doesn’t have to do much; the shoddy handling of the issue by New Delhi is doing the needful.
The main way of doing this is to refuse to acknowledge that the issue has local roots. Another is the insistence that Burhan Wani was a “terrorist” and not a “militant”. Clearly,  the government does not want to give any quarter to the sentiment that has caused the state to be in a state of turmoil for the last 30 years. The problem with using emotive  rather than analytical categories is that you usually end up with the wrong answers.
Like it or not, there is a difference between a “terrorist” and a “militant”. The latter fights against the state and its symbols – the police, army etc – while the former targets innocents. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the Mumbai attacks of 2008 where men, women and children were targeted was an act of pure terrorism. Whereas the Pathankot attack, which targeted a military facility comes under the category of militancy. There is no evidence that Wani targeted, or intended to target, non-combatants. Terror is not an “ism” as such but a method – where the perpetrator, by attacking unarmed and helpless people, aims to overawe them, and thus the state.
Both the terrorist and the militant live by the sword, and they must be defeated by the sword, just as Wani was. There is, however,  a difference: You cannot negotiate with a terrorist, but you can with a militant, just as Vajpayee sought to do in 2000.
Indeed, Chankaya niti suggests that the sword alone cannot be the instrumentality. A wise state uses a mix of strategies depending on the situation and common sense suggests that the most drastic is adopted only when there is no option. Unfortunately, in the current situation, daam is not working. You can buy off politicians and militants, but you cannot buy off a mob. Neither will bhed work with the centrists and mainstream politicians scared to speak given the current public mood.
The problem of persuasion, or saam, is more complex. The fact that the BJP as a party believes in closer integration of J&K with the Indian Union makes the use of saam even more complicated. Indeed, a key ideological shibboleth is its belief in the need to delete Article 370 from the constitution – the one that gives J&K a unique relationship with the Indian Union. So there can be no question of addressing the sentiment of the separatists and their supporters that they lack something by way of self-governance. This despite the fact that the same government is willing to address the sentiment of an equally important group – the separatist Nagas led by the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (Isak-Muivah).
So this leaves dand, then, as the only way out. Home minister Rajnath Singh is in any case always inclined to give a “muh torh jawaab” (‘jaw breaking’ response)  to adversaries. Brilliant tacticians like Doval have no strategy except to declare that India would exercise utmost restraint with  “our own citizens”, even while coming down hard on “terrorists” –  a distinction that does little or no justice to the situation obtaining in Jammu and Kashmir. So we seem destined to live with the self-defeating, self-destructive option of dand, and more dand.
The Wire August 11, 2016

Lesson From Kashmir: The Art of Policing Lies in Tiring Out a Mob and Not Firing Upon It

The way sensible riot control is done is to deploy sizeable numbers before rioters every day and to use attrition as their principal weapon.

Youths throwing stones at security forces during a clash in Srinagar on Thursday. Credit: PTI/S. Irfan

Within five days of the shooting of Hizbul Mujahideen militant Burhan Wani, 36 young Kashmiris had died and 1500 or so injured in the ensuing protests.  Earlier uprisings in 2008 and 2010 had also seen more than 200 people killed in protests. Today, the death toll stands at 45.
Even though many more civilians were killed in the state every year in the past – in 2001, for example, SATP figures show, civilian casualties were as high 1067 – what makes the present figure so unacceptable is that the most violent phase of the Kashmir insurgency is long behind us. Clearly, the security forces are ill-equipped to deal with the rise of protest movements involving civilians. The first wave of mass protests was against the lease of land to the Amarnath Yatra board in 2008. In 2010, it was the shocking Machhil fake encounter that brought young men and boys onto the streets.  This time around, it is the death of Wani.
A common thread in all these protests is that they brought ordinary folk, mostly the young, out onto the streets. While many of them may have sympathised with the demand for independence, they were themselves neither militants nor active political workers. In other words, they were civil protestors who often expressed their anger in the somewhat uncivil way of throwing stones at the security personnel – something protestors in Haryana, Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh have done in the recent past, to mention just a few regions of India.
Given the overwhelming dominance of the army and paramilitaries for over a decade, militants today can only operate in the Valley in very small groups of three or four and it is not easy for them to move around with their weapons. There are some forest and mountainous areas where they can gather in larger numbers, but in populated areas, they are very cautious because the police and IB’s information network is dense and often the militants get cornered in their hideouts. The rules of engagement say that the security forces should try and arrest them, failing which shooting is the only other option.
The problem arises with civil protestors who gather in crowds that can vary from 30 to 100, often emerging from narrow alleyways in urban areas.
There has often been talk of militants operating with the crowds and using weapons. Though there have been reports of shrapnel injuries caused by the odd grenade, till now there is no record of any police officer being shot while confronting a crowd. The problem really is in the inability of the police to manage the crowds – which often assume the form of a riot, with protestors throwing stones at the police personnel.
In a riot-like situation where the police and security forces find themselves at the receiving end, standard operating protocols demand that they be prepared to open fire – especially when there is danger of the force being overwhelmed and losing its weapons. However, the large number of non-combatants who have been killed in recent days indicates the police has also been trigger-happy – or is simply not trained to deal with civil protest and riot-like situations.

Poor training, high stress
Since 1990, the security forces have operated in the Valley in response to an insurgency-like situation to combat armed militants. But, those days are over and have been over for the better part of a decade.
However, the police force which was trained to deal with militant with guns, remains untrained in handling riots where the main weapons are stones. There was talk of retraining forces and some were, indeed, trained to deal with crowds. That is the point in time when the police acquired rubber pellet guns. Now the term ‘rubber pellet’ is a misnomer. These are actually shots of steel covered with rubber and therefore can be pretty dangerous, especially when the police are too close to the crowd. Actually, researchers have questioned their use either way.
Well before India turned to ‘rubber pellets’, a study in 2001 conducted in a Jerusalem hospital after the Palestinian uprising and published in Eye, the journal of the Royal College of Opthalmologists, found a high instance of eye injuries among those hit. It concluded that “the term ‘rubber bullet’ is misleading. ‘Rubber bullets’ cause a wide variety of ocular and periocular injuries. Orbital fractures are common. The tissues of the orbit are easily penetrated. If the globe is hit, it is rarely salvageable.”
Its not clear whether the police is using Israeli ammunition, or that made by the Ordnance Factory Board. Pictures and x-rays of those shot indicate that these are metallic balls. Either way, these have to be used under strict rules of engagement, which means shooting low and at distances beyond 50 metres,. But in riot-like situations, it is difficult to meet the SOPs, a problem made more difficult  by ricochets in urban locations in Kashmir.
The ironic difference is that the Israelis are using these bullets against people they do not consider a part of their country. This is something that Modi-bhakt hawks do not understand when they hold up Israel as a paragon of counter terrorism. India’s goal is to try and ensure that Jammu and Kashmir remains part of this country. Surely, it calls for tactics and procedures which are designed to achieve that end.
The police and security forces cannot be blamed for this development. The blame rests squarely with the politicians and their mandarins, whether they sit in the secretariat in Srinagar or North Block in New Delhi. Time and again they have messed up the politics of running the country and then ruthlessly used the police to fight the fires that they have been responsible for lighting. Their assumption is that just because they pay the salaries of the police force, they can do what they like with them.

Repeating old mistakes
In 1990, the Border Security Force, which had never been involved in internal policing for more than a couple of days, was press-ganged into the Valley and ordered to re-establish the state’s control in the urban areas of the Valley. To do this, they set up pickets in militant dominated areas where night after night their bunkers came under fire. The stress of living there and for others, running the gauntlet to supply them, inevitably created a kind of mentality which was responsible for great excesses by the force.
The story of the CRPF is no different. In the 2002 elections, and here I am writing from memory, I reported about a CRPF unit deployed in Kashmir. It had, in the previous six months, never spent more than 10 days in one location because they were asked to douse fires all over. Fourteen years later, nothing has changed. So yesterday you could have been in Chattisgarh fighting Maoists, today, there is a riot in Gujarat demanding reservations for Patels, tomorrow the Jats revolt in Haryana, and now you are fighting separatists in Kashmir. There is black humour in the joke that CRPF stands for Chalte Raho Pyare Force (Keep on moving force.) Stressed out constables, usually deployed in penny-packets and commanded by non-commissioned officers, they are liable to excesses in the cauldron into which they are thrown. It is not as though there are no drills and courses for the jawans. The problem is that too much is expected from them – from counter-insurgency to riot control and guarding VIPs.
The experience in anti-Maoist operations has revealed in stark detail the disaster that happens when a force which is trained for static policing is ordered to counter well-prepared guerrillas after some rudimentary jungle warfare training. And that disaster is compounded when this same force is asked to counter civil protest and riots, with little or no retraining. Is it any wonder that when dealing with a riot, they confuse the adversary for the “enemy” to be overwhelmed, failing which their own lives are at stake.
The training of police to deal with civil protests which degenerate into riots is a highly specialised job and requires substantial investment in personnel, equipment and training. It is not that the government does not understand this. We have the experience before us of how – after repeated riots often made worse by police excesses in the 1980s – the Rapid Action Force was created asa unit within the CRPF. Currently it has 10 battalions – that’s roughly 10,000 men and women – spread across the country. Which means they can at best deal with one-and-a-half major riots.
But given the situation in J&K, you would need a force of that size to be stationed permanently in the Valley itself.
 The way sensible riot control is done is to deploy sizeable numbers before rioters every day and to use attrition as their principal weapon. They need to be specially equipped and provided with protection against stones and they need to be specially trained for  crowd control.  Being policemen, they need to be told that time is not the issue, but the need to wear down the rioters is. So they should be prepared to go on – day-in, day out – confronting the rioters in the largely passive mode of blocking their movement, even while using tear gas and an occasional lathi charge when things threaten to get out of hand.
Other countries have done this and succeeded. The best example is that of South Korea which had a major problem with its police forces prior to the 1988 Olympics. Clashes between the police and students had led to scores of deaths. However, in the run up to the Olympics, South Korea decided to retrain its force on methods of crowd and riot control.
Since then, these have been held up as models around the world. South Korean rioters can be more than a handful. On one occasion, they even came equipped with flame-throwers and other incendiaries to attack the police, but to little avail.
The troubles in Kashmir are not about to get over soon. In any case, in a large and chaotic country like India, there is always going to be need for trained riot police. The time has come to give up ad hoc solutions and think about the police and policing in a much more systematic and rational manner.

The Wire July 22, 2016

Delhi must act to address J&K's turmoil

The world is changing. Power is shifting eastwards towards China and India, and is being diffused downwards to non-state actors - including NGOs and terrorists.But what we are witnessing these days is something far more dramatic, and frightening.

The events in Turkey, the massacre in Nice, Brexit, and the verdict against China in the UNCLOS tribunal, are just the latest evidence that the world is not just changing, but being turned upside down.

This could well be the first sign of a different, more difficult world, with jobless growth, a broken global trading system, and Islamism going rogue across the world.

Even worse, it’s also about being blindsided, as people certainly were with Brexit and the rise of the Islamic State.

However, India - even with its usual chaos - is an oasis of calm where economic growth still means growth above 6 per cent. Where it is politics as usual, though with a dangerous edge of majoritarian grievance.

Alarm bells are certainly ringing across the country, but none so loudly as the ones in Jammu & Kashmir.

Glance

A superficial glance would suggest that the events rocking the state have become routine. After a bout of curfew and repression, things will settle down to the kind of uneasy peace that has prevailed through the past decade and a half.

But the eruption that took place after the killing of Burhan Wani needs to be analysed in careful detail. 

The significant pockets of separatist activity across the Valley are well known.

They have manifested their presence in the markedly lower voter turnout of constituencies in and around Srinagar, Sopur, Baramulla or Anantnag, and separatist leaders can bring the Valley to a halt through strike action.

Men carrying guns are still a regular sight in the Valley, despite a reduction recently.

Besides the neo-Hizbul Mujahideen, with its penchant for self-publicity, there are small groups of Pakistanis who are remote-controlled by the ISI.

Events in 2008 - the protest against the land transfer to the Amarnath yatra shrine board, and in 2010 - the Machhil fake killing of three innocents by army personnel - led to a popular upsurge where protesters adopted the dangerous tactic of pelting security forces with stones. 

Eventually more than 150 people were killed in the police shootings that were used to control the protesters.

Protest

In both instances, there appeared to be reasonable grounds for civil protest, which was subsequently manipulated by militants like Masrat Alam to become violent.

In the latest instance, the death of a militant has triggered the clashes.

Wani lived by the sword, and perhaps unsurprisingly died by it. There are all kinds of dark hints to suggest that he was extra-judicially executed.

But Kashmir is a place where rumours flourish, often because of the ham-fisted way the government attempts to control the narrative.

The danger that we see is not so much from Wani and his associates, but the mood that has persuaded thousands of protesters to brave the security forces' bullets.

In an era where Islamist radicalism has mutated so sharply in states like Iraq and Syria, you cannot be too careful.

That is why New Delhi needs to pay more attention to J&K than it has previously.

There are three elements of the Kashmir problem: one is the need for a discussion with Pakistan to resolve the outstanding dispute, and a second is the vital need for New Delhi to address the sense of grievance in the Valley.

In both areas, little or nothing is happening on the NDA-II watch.

Thirdly, the security forces have done all they can to bring armed militancy to heel in the state. 

Forces 

But despite the experience of 2008 and 2010, the governments in New Delhi and Srinagar have not been able to develop a professional police force equipped and trained to deal with crowds.

A CRPF constable trained to fight Maoists armed with AK-47s cannot switch personalities when dealing with a civil protester throwing stones at him in J&K.

Each of these elements is linked to the other.

Tough but non-lethal policing could enable an environment in which New Delhi can make a deal with Islamabad and Srinagar to return the state to normalcy.

The difficultly lies in synchronising the three.

We often find that the Pakistan part moves ahead, and Srinagar gets forgotten - or some event like Wani’s shooting triggers an uprising which undermines the first two elements.

A glance at those injured by pellets would show that most were born after 2000, with little or no memory of the dark days of the state in the 1990s. And like all teens, they seldom really think through consequences.

However, they do create them. And that’s why we need to move with some urgency in the state.

Mail Today July 17, 2016

What saves India from suicide attacks

Earlier this month, Radio Free Asia revealed that nearly 80 people were killed by Uighur separatists in a September attack in a coalmine in the Xinjiang province of China.Beijing has yet to officially acknowledge the attack, which was carried out by terrorists armed with knives. 

There have been similar attacks linked to Uighurs in recent years. On June 18, people had died in a similar attack with knives and bombs at a traffic checkpoint in the city of Kashgar. In March 2014, an attack at the railway station of Kunming left 29 people and 4 attackers dead. 

Knife attacks 

In recent months, the trend has manifested itself in similar Palestinian attacks on Israelis. 

Given the strict policing, in China and Israel, the Uighurs and Palestinians have no access to either bomb-making material or guns, and so the use of primitive weapons like knives has become the weapon of choice. 

The knife may be primitive, but it is deadly. However, its use does require a certain nerve, physical strength and training on the part of the attacker. In comparison, a suicide bomber merely has to approach the target and pull a trigger to cause mayhem. 

There have been instances of suicide squads and attacks through history in almost all cultures in the military sphere. But something as primal as a knife has emerged as a new terrorist tactic which has rapidly spread in today’s wired world, just as suicide bombing did in the 1980s. 

It became a tactic of choice in Lebanon, compelling the US to pull out from Lebanon. In a parallel, the LTTE perfected the cult of suicide as it became prominent in the Sri Lankan civil war. Among the prominent targets of the LTTE were former prime minister of India Rajiv Gandhi and a slew of top Sri Lankan politicians, including president R Premadasa. 

The key role in suicide attacks is played by motivators - mainly seasoned political operatives and in the case of Muslims, mullahs who use precepts of Islam to persuade young and impressionable people to go through the horror of a suicide attack. They create an ethos where the attacker is hailed as a martyr and his/her family is raised in status among its peers. 

Acts of terror 

Attacks on non-combatants, regardless of motive, are acts of terrorism and deserve the highest condemnation. But attacks that target troops and police personnel of countries who are involved in military operations in the attackers’ country or region are different. 

There is a species of analysis which argues that there can be no ‘root cause’ of terrorism. Regardless of what a perpetrator does, retaliation using terrorist tactics is condemnable. 

This does not quite work in the real world, where unresolved grievances are often the template on which terrorist attacks are built. As a first step towards countering terrorism, an effort must be made to understand this and tackle grievances relating to political and human rights in places like Xinjiang, Palestine, Chechnya, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and Kashmir. 

In many cases, the issue is related to fears of a minority community that it will be swamped by the majority. Beliefs, often in economically-backward regions, that modernisation itself is an existential threat, cannot be tackled through military campaigns. 

What the knifing campaign brings out is that harsh counter-terrorist tactics and total and intrusive surveillance cannot by themselves put an end to terrorist attacks. 

Israel’s dilemma is the most manifest on this score. Relentless ferocity against Palestinian violence has not brought Israel the peace it has been looking for and is unlikely to do so. 

In contrast, look at India. Some Muslims have a sense of deep grievance against the state on account of communal violence, in Jammu & Kashmir, many are motivated by separatism. Yet, India has not seen the kind of suicide bombing and desperate knife attacks that have motivated Muslim radicals elsewhere. 

Terrorist violence that has rocked the country has often been motivated, directed and perpetrated by Pakistan. In any case, it peaked in 2008 and for the present it is at a low ebb, whether in Jammu & Kashmir, or elsewhere. 

Alienation 

The reason is that Indian Muslims have a strong sense of Indian identity. In both their grievances and aspirations they think like their fellow Indian citizens, rather through any religious or sectarian prism. 

That critical point of alienation which separates them from the mainstream and persuades them to wield a knife or a bomb has not been reached. At least, not as of now. 

Mail Today October 25, 2015

Three years ago, around this time of the year, I wrote a piece in these very columns listing six things that ought to be done in the coming year, but probably would not be.That was the year when the first flush of the United Progressive Alliance's stunning electoral performance of 2009 showed signs of wilting.
The year began with two senior army officers being indicted for the Sukhna land scam, and soon skeletons were tumbling out of the cupboard at an alarming rate.
Focus returned to the shenanigans of army officers, politicians and bureaucrats over the Adarsh housing cooperative building. There was a continuous cacophony accompanying the run-up to the Commonwealth Games, outdone only by the revelations from the Radia tapes, followed later in the year by the CAG report revealing the extent of the 2G scam.

My suggestions for what was doable in the year to follow, 2011, were not particularly utopian and tinged by the corruption scandals that had exploded through the year 2010: The establishment of an autonomous directorate of prosecutions, the abolition of the single-point directive which requiring government sanction to prosecute civil servants, creating the post of a Chief of Defence Staff to modernise and synergise India's higher defence management, deep reform of India's hopeless police system, dropping of a number of known corrupt ministers from the union council of ministers, and reforming agriculture and food logistics to rein in food inflation.

Fixes

Barring the idea of a separate directorate of prosecutions, nothing has really changed since. However, it is that time of the year when hope triumphs over experience and optimism rules. The recent elections suggest that the volcano of expectations that has built up in the country is ready to explode and sweep aside anything that stands in its way.
So here goes with my eight things to fix in the coming year:

• A foreign policy for the country which is anchored on national security. As a country with disputed borders and aggressive adversaries, it matters little if India can get a seat on the high table, but get pushed around in its own backyard like a banana republic. This is not just about military strength, but ways and means to enhance India's shrinking footprint in our neighbourhood and beyond.
• Overhaul our internal and external security system from bottom up. Which means getting down to the thana level policing on one hand, and restructuring higher management of national security on the other. This includes the appointment of a Chief of Defence Staff to synergise India's defence capabilities across the three Services, and unleashing private sector investment and energies to remove the public sector deadwood clogging our defence R&D and industry.
• Communal violence is a virus that has been allowed to persist for too long. It diminishes us as a nation and it is time we got serious about tackling it. Whether we need a legislation to do this, of course, is another matter.
• Reining in food inflation: Pass the Goods & Service Tax, repeal the Agriculture Produce Marketing Committee Acts and check runaway support prices for wheat and rice. The three measures will help bring huge revenues to the government even while driving down food prices.
• Initiate a new energy policy. Most of our power is generated from coal and despite huge reserves we face shortages. Remove Coal India's monopoly, reform the state electricity boards, and come up with a plan to reduce dependence on imported fossil fuels. Recall that China, the largest fossil fuel consumer of today has been hard at work to put in place an alternative energy programme since 2001.

Reforms

• Begin right sizing the government. The Fifth Pay Commission had called for a 30 per cent cut in the size of the central government. Our governments are much too big and consume a huge amount of our national resources. Ironically, if large parts of the government are bloated, there are other vital parts, like the Indian Foreign Services, the Intelligence Bureau and the Research & Analysis Wing which do not have adequate manpower.
• To merely say that we need desperately to reform our education system is stating the obvious. But there is need to make a beginning and now before we slip further down in global rankings. Across the country we are spending a great deal of money in universities which provide third rate education to hapless young people who are unaware that this education is unlikely to equip them to be either good citizens or employable young men and women.

Change

• The last two years have seen the passage of significant legislation based on pressure from below-laws on rape, sexual harassment, land acquisition and, yes, the lokpal. What 2014 needs is a beginning of their effective implementation as well as their refinement, considering that some of the laws were passed in a hurry or in moments of emotion and can become a liability just as the nuclear liability law of 2010 has become.

The agenda for change is a large one. This list or any other can be multiplied several times and still come up short. But the compulsions of reform are urgent. With a bulging profile of young people, India is said to be on the cusp of a demographic dividend. But that dividend could well become a nightmare unless we are able to fix our politics, our governance system, economy, national security machinery.
But for all these changes to take place we need one crucial fix-leadership. This is a commodity of which there is an acute shortage, at least at the central level.
There was a time you could get away by leading from behind. But today's wired world and a much more informed citizenry is demanding discerning and decisive leaders who will lead from the front and deliver.

Mail Today December 31, 2013

Agni V launch and other great expectations

The test launch of Agni V has been greeted by some breathless reporting, considering missile technology is old hat and the putative target, China, is way ahead of India in launch vehicle, as well as nuclear weapons technology.
Nevertheless, the successful test adds to the incremental steps that India has been taking to enhance its strategic deterrent capabilities. This has been marked earlier this year by the commencement of the sea trials of the Arihant, nuclear propelled ballistic missile firing submarine.
In a different category come the Indian successes against domestic terrorism in the form of the arrest, first, of Abdul Karim ‘Tunda’ an ace-bomber who operated in the late 1990s in the region around Delhi and second, of Yasin Bhatkal, a key Indian Mujahideen operative who has played a significant role in the bombing campaigns across India since the mid- 2000s.
Both the Agni and the terrorism successes hide more than they reveal. In the case of the terrorists, we have not heard too much about the role played by our external intelligence agency R&AW in ferreting out the terrorists and ensuring their arrest. Reports show that today’s terrorists are quite savvy and resort to all manner of techniques and methods to evade electronic snooping. The only way to get them is through the old-fashioned way — using human intelligence. This is also the toughest and most tedious method, but, as veteran intelligence officers will tell you, also the best.
Likewise, the Agni test does not reveal the sterling role played by the Indian Space Research Organisation in the success of the Agni programme. Key technologies that have gone into the Agni series of missiles were first mastered by ISRO, principal among these being the ability to make solid propellant engines and accompanying it, the flex-nozzle technology enabling the missile to pitch and yaw. If the ISRO designed SLV 3 formed the second stage of the very first Agni, it was an ISRO scientist who designed the second stage for the Agni II, which is the key missile in the Indian arsenal.

As for Agni V, it needs to be noted that its diameter is the same as that of the segment developed for the ISRO’s Polar Space Launch Vehicle (PSLV), the workhorse of our space programme.
What the two developments do indicate is that the country does have deep resources in the area of defence and security. The issue is to harness them effectively. The big problem that we often face is that of the silo mentality. Our government departments and organisations insist on working in silos and would prefer to reinvent the wheel, rather than accept that another department may be able to provide the solution to their problem.
Contemporary security challenges require institutions and organisations to work together, just as modern science often depends on teamwork instead of the outpouring of individual geniuses. But getting people to work together in India is a major challenge. Perhaps the greatest challenge comes with regard to our national security. A broad definition of national security will involve almost every aspect of our lives — trade, commerce, natural resources, policing, governance, military matters, foreign affairs and so on. Though it is rare for countries to coordinate all of them, some like China do manage it and have benefited enormously from it. In India, we have been importing large numbers of passenger jets, but have never managed to leverage our purchases to establish a domestic civil aviation industry. The Chinese, on the other hand, invited foreign railways technology to set up projects in their country and within a decade they had imbibed the technology and emerged as a major player in developing fast railway networks.
They are now doing the same in other areas that interest them — civil aviation, renewable energy, military aviation and so on. Most of the Chinese advances in science and technology owe themselves to Project 863, named after the year (1986) and the month March (3) in which top Chinese scientists wrote a letter to supreme leader Deng Xiaoping, calling for major investments in a range of areas from biotechnology to robotics — to ensure that China would emerge as a major force in research and development. Through the programme, the government has pumped billions of dollars into labs and universities and enterprises, on projects ranging from cloning to renewable energy. It is through this programme that China has become the world leader in manufacturing solar panels as well as wind turbines.
The Chinese apply this principle of command-driven management to national security as well. At the top of the decision-making pyramid in everything related to national security sits the Standing Committee of the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party, and associated with it, the Central Military Commission. What these bodies decide is final and the task of pushing the decisions on the rank and file rests on the shoulders of the ubiquitous Communist Party members.
Of course, a country like India cannot replicate this structure. But surely, our Union Cabinet, or our state Cabinets and governments can do a better job of managing things than they have done. Disunity and incoherence at the top inevitably trickles down to the system below and that is what has made the national security system of the country largely dysfunctional, despite episodic achievements like the launch of the Agni V or the arrests of top terrorists. Mid Day September 17, 2013

Time to hit reboot button on Pakistan

The old policies are broken, we need new ones. But first we must get our strategic approach right. Should India follow a policy of 'selective engagement' or 'flexible containment ' with regard to Pakistan ?


New Delhi’s policy towards Pakistan is once again at a cross-roads. The momentum of the Musharraf years is broken. It has been replaced by the same truculent demanding, and even threatening, tone that preceded the 2004-2007 period. In the eight months that the government has been in the election mode, a great deal has changed. Pakistan has a new civilian government, its internal security has deteriorated, its military has for all public purposes withdrawn into a shell.
What will the second coming of the United Progressive Alliance government mean in terms of policy towards Pakistan? Should it be ‘selective engagement’— or its darker flipside, ‘flexible containment’?
The rise of the Taliban in Pakistan has altered the terms of the world’s approach to Islamabad. Suddenly there is a feeling that we could well be on the threshold of something even more serious than we witnessed in the dark days after Nine-Eleven. From being a somewhat indulgent partner, the US has become a demanding patron. The Americans are being driven by the increased danger to their position in Afghanistan, a threat made possible by the consolidation of the Taliban and its allies in the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan. To counter this, the US has formulated a complex war plan that demands that Pakistan do more — far more — than they have been doing till now.




This demand has been heaven sent for a country which is expert at playing the US for a sucker. In the past eight years, Pakistan received $10 billion from the US, at least $6 billion as reimbursement for operations in the NWFP. But there is little to show for it. Former President Musharraf insists that Pakistan need provide no accounting for how this money has been spent.
But that is no secret. Some of it has been skimmed off for personal gain, but a large proportion has been spent to strengthen the Pakistan military against an adversary which has shown little inclination to act against them even when Pakistan-backed terrorists have inflicted great pain on it.

Engagement

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has reiterated, almost pro forma, the Indian demand that Pakistan dismantle the infrastructure supporting terrorism and act against the perpetrators of the Mumbai carnage. A number of voices in Pakistan, and this country, suggest that India must help out Islamabad by resuming the composite dialogue. They argue that such an action will help shore up the credentials of the civilian government in Islamabad at a time when it is being buffeted by the Taliban insurgency, as well as the rising tide of religious extremism and violence in other parts of the country.
Other voices, too, suggest that unless there is some reconciliation between India and Pakistan on Kashmir, Islamabad will not assist any move to stabilise Afghanistan. There are even darker suggestions, repeated most recently by the President of Pakistan himself, that unless the world supported the civilian government, there was every chance that Pakistani nuclear weapons could fall into the hands of the Taliban.
The UPA-II sees itself as a new government with new policies. Perhaps the time has come for it to rethink its Pakistan policy anew. Since 1990, governments have sought to deal with Pakistan in a defensive mode of ‘selective engagement’. They have talked to Islamabad on all outstanding issues — Siachen, Wullar barrage, Indus waters, nuclear and conventional military confidence building and, of course, Jammu & Kashmir, even while Pakistan carried on a massive covert war against us.

Power

The high-points, of what one official calls the “magnificent doggedness” of Indian policy, were the military confidence building measures of the early 1990s, the November 2003 ceasefire on the Line of Control and Siachen, the January 6, 2004 agreement to push the composite dialogue, the agreement to create a South Asian Free Trade Area on the same day. The low points have been the Bombay blasts of 1993, the IC 814 hijack, the Parliament attack of 2001, the Mumbai carnage of 2008 and the numerous bomb attacks whose footprints lead to Islamabad. In such a matrix it is difficult to see what, if anything, India has gained.
Since 2007, the beginning of the decline of Pervez Musharraf — simultaneously our great tormentor and good interlocutor — India has been left with the uncomfortable feeling that we are alone on the dialogue table. Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani and President Asif Zardari are all sound and fury signifying nothing. They cannot provide depth to the conversation that came from having a President who was also commander-in-chief, and thus carried the authority of the men who really wield power in Pakistan — the Pakistan Army’s Corps Commanders’ conference.
For the better or the worse, General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani has chosen to keep off politics in the formal sense. There is no doubt that he continues to wield the traditional authority that the army chief does in Pakistan. But he has chosen not to get directly involved in dealing with India or the US.
Everything that is wrong with India’s Pakistan policy is best summed up by the way in which Islamabad has dealt with the Mumbai carnage. From the outset Pakistan has been in denial over the role of the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba in the attack. It has acted against some of those involved, but this action has been fitful. Given the general reluctance to act on the issue, it is too much to expect that the Pakistani prosecutors will come up with an iron-clad case to convict a Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi or Zarrar Shah, let alone Hafiz Saeed. To expect cooperation on a case involving the LeT is to go against everything we, and indeed anti-terrorist officials anywhere, know about the relationship between the Pakistani intelligence services and the outfit.
There will be suggestions that it is to India’s advantage to deal with a civilian government, and that only through helping shore up this government and civil society can there be real reconciliation between the two countries. Perhaps it is true. But in the short-term in which policy outcomes are sought, this places an impossible burden on New Delhi to not only negotiate with Pakistan, but also work overtime to ensure that our counterpart remains a viable interlocutor. India is a large and resilient country, but its stamina is finite.

Containment

In these circumstances, New Delhi can go through the formalities of a dialogue. But it will be shadow dialogue with interlocutors who cannot deliver. On the other hand, India has to deal with the real possibility that those who carried out the Mumbai attack are planning something even more horrific to achieve what they failed to the last time. As it is there are disturbing signs of heightened activities of terror groups against India in J&K and elsewhere. New Delhi had been lax in policing its frontiers and coastline. But Mumbai has at last persuaded the government to urgently institute defensive measures to prevent another attack.
Second, we need to sharply enhance our capabilities to deter the Pakistan armed forces from their cost-free policy of using terrorist proxies against India. Despite public commitments, the Indian military has not yet been able to seal that space between all-out nuclear conflict and a conventional war that the Pakistan Army has used to bleed India. The way out is not more of the same and acquiring bigger and better weapons, but transforming the way our military works.
In other words, by comprehensively out-thinking and outflanking our adversary through a new policy of ‘flexible containment’.
This article appeared in Mail Today June 10, 2009

The worm is turning

To go by what the media says, the nuclear deal is still showing some signs of life. This is what The Hindu reported on a press conference held during German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s visit to New Delhi:

Maintaining that the government remained committed to the civil nuclear deal with the United States, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Tuesday said, “We have not reached the end of the road” even if there was some delay in operationalising it.

I am not surprised. I never believed it was dead. It did suffer a terrible blow when the Left suddenly pulled the rug under it in August, and a worse one when party members and UPA allies stabbed Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in the back.The reason why I remain optimistic is not some special information, but my analysis of what underpins its robustness.

In my view, the Indo-US nuclear deal, occasioned perhaps, by US worries about China, is actually a a larger geopolitical shift that is taking place as a result of the end of the Cold War. This is about the new world order that Bush 41 spoke of in 1990. India's nuclear status has been a pill stuck in the collective throats of the international community for quite a while. Bush 41 tried first to handle this by pinning down India and Pakistan in a regional arrangement, but this did not work. After India’s nuclear tests, and especially after 9-11 the situation was such that the idea of equating India and Pakistan became laughable. Pakistan was on the verge of economic collapse, the A Q Khan network had been exposed, and was now seen as a “rogue” state that had to be controlled. So, the US emphasis shifted to co-opting India.

The nuclear deal is a means of doing that, and there is nothing dishonourable about this. India is getting an opportunity to join the world community, whose leading lights also constitute the Nuclear Suppliers Group. There is an unwritten consensus among them that the US will work out the terms of engagement, and the Indo-American 123 Agreement is precisely that.

American benevolence has nothing to do with a sudden love for India and Indians, it is again, systemic. Indian economic weight is growing in handsome measure, its military power, though dissipated in internal policing, is not insubstantial. India is one of the most open societies in the world, fiercely democratic, naturally capitalistic, indeed a natural ally of the US, once the latter gets off its high horse and begins to understand the consequences of its misadventure in Iraq.

As for the nuclear deal politics, what we are seeing currently is intense effort to knock sense into the BJP’s head. Everyone, but everyone knows that the party is taking a completely opportunistic position on the deal—in other words, opposing it for the sake of doing so, rather than any principle. Brajesh Mishra’s comment is kind of non sequitur:

“If I were to get credible guarantees from the government about the integrity of what we (the NDA) had left behind three and a half years ago, what has been done in these three and a half years for them to prove that there are also enthusiastic about the nuclear weapons programme, then I would say, personally, to go forward with the deal because I am not so critical of the US for following this particular policy. I am critical of the government bending to the wishes of the US.”

The real pressure is coming from the BJP’s “natural allies”—its supporters and well-wishers in the corporate and business world who are unable to comprehend the party’s stand. No one knows what has driven that stand which reflects the views of the xenophobic right of the Swadeshi Jagran Manch. Apparently Mr. Arun Shourie is its key mentor within the party’s core committee that decides policy. Why he, or for that matter Mr. Yashwant Sinha are there is a bit of a mystery since neither have any political base.

The BJP now has the option of simply backtracking and supporting the deal “in the national interest” or negotiating an arrangement with the Congress that could see the Parliament pass a “sense of Parliament” resolution underlining India’s belief in an “independent” foreign policy. The problem, however, is that the Congress and BJP are not on talking terms—the PM literally does not talk to the leader of the opposition. It is in such circumstances, of course, that the extremes of the Left flourish.

Confronted with the possibility that it may be left holding the can, the Left has changed tune. CPI(M) Party chief Prakash Karat who virtually accused Manmohan Singh of being an American stooge says in The Telegraph that he respects his integrity.

New Delhi, Oct. 30: In his first public overture to Manmohan Singh since the bitter stand-off began in early August over the Indo-US nuclear deal, CPM general secretary Prakash Karat today underlined the Left’s “respect” for the Prime Minister and appreciated his “unquestioned integrity”.

Is that a climb-down? Or an effort to get on to the "statesmanship" horse, after unhorsing the PM? You decide.

Cop Out

India's primitive policing methods and modern democracy can't co-exist. This article appeared first in Hindustan Times June 13, 2007

Last week for a few days, this wannabe superpower looked more like a punch-drunk giant. Violence brought on by the Gujjar community’s demand for an ‘upgradation’ to Scheduled Tribe status brought large parts of north-western India, including for a while, the capital New Delhi, to a standstill. For a while the spectre of anarchy hung over the region as mobs of rival communities took to the streets, blocked roads and rail transport and threatened mayhem against each other. The police reportedly fired in a number of places, killing several protestors. In turn, the rioters lynched a couple of policemen armed with nothing more than lathis. The army sent 4,000 personnel to stage flag-marches. But, in the end, it was neither the police nor the army, but probably fear of what a caste war in every village, kasba and town would mean for their own comm

unity, that persuaded the warring parties to pull back from the brink.

The state police and the top brass were taken unawares. There were not enough policemen to check the protestors; tactics of crowd and riot control were non-existent. The ever-astute politicians kept quiet, the country’s embarrassment was summed up by the Supreme Court, which termed the events a ‘national shame’.

In our recent history, there have, of course, been even greater moments of national disgrace — the Sikh massacres in Delhi in October-November 1984, the Hashimpura massacres in 1987, Bhagalpur in 1989, the Muslim killings in Mumbai in January 1993, the Gujarat massacres of 2002. What was shameful about them was not only that they took place, but that, in each case, the police and the administration failed to intervene effectively, if at all.

There is no doubt that there have been several instances where well-led police organisations have played a crucial role in preventing riots and checking uncontrollable law and order situations in India. Unfortunately, police failure has also led to terrible breakdowns.

Yet, besides establishing the Rapid Action Force to tackle communal violence, the state and central authorities have done little to re-orient their forces to meet the demands of the times. Political pressures, frequent transfers and the like are only one aspect of the situation. Another is that better intelligence, administrative action and aggressive intervention by trained police forces are rarely used to pre-empt and, if necessary, to effectively break up a violent riot or demonstration

One problem seems to be numbers. India has one policeman for 694 people (as of January 1, 2006); Britain has 1:290 and the US 1:334. Earlier this month, at the G8 summit, the German government took extensive precautions to prevent an estimated 30,000 demonstrators. The number of police deployed totalled 18,000 — a little more than an army division. They had 43 helicopters to assist them, and Heiligendamm, a village of 300 souls was fenced in with a 2.5-metre barricade costing 12 million euros.

While no estimates of the Rajasthan Police deployed is known, the army did send in some 37 columns. Rajasthan itself has a grand total of 70,000 police personnel in an area of 342,239 sq kms, an area nearly as large as Germany. There were no fresh recruitments in 2001-04 indicating that the state thinks it has enough forces. In contrast, Delhi had a deployable force of some 5,000 to tackle disturbances in a vast arc spread from Shahdara to the Loni border. While there was some physical damage, the greater hurt was to the national psyche that its capital could be brought to a grinding halt in the manner it was.

There is a need for reforming the Indian police to overcome the colonial mindset and organisational pattern that it follows even to this day. The Indian Police Service functions like a central military organisation rather than a civil police force. The Supreme Court has been pushing the states to reform their police services but to little avail. Politicians who run the states do not appear willing to provide police personnel the kind of autonomy needed to do their job without fear of consequences.

A lot has been written about police commission reports, the grievances of police officers over frequent transfers and so on. However, the real challenge seems to be the very concept of policing and its very important element of crowd and riot control.

All statistics show that besides the vicious communal conflicts, the overwhelming agitations are those relating to grievances of labour, government employees and students. These are the ones that can be handled through proper crowd control measures. The usual riot-control tactic is to warn the protestors, then shoot tear gas and finally lathi-charge rioters. But the recent violence showed that some of the rioters were armed with swords and other dangerous implements and the only way the police could have handled them would have been by firing at them, an action that would have been tantamount to the use of disproportionate force.

Today, modern crowd and riot control tactics are quite sophisticated. Police personnel are provided a considerable measure of self-protection against stones and other missiles. They are organised in well-drilled units led by professionals who also ensure that they do not inflict needless injuries on the rioters. After all, many a protest has become a riot following death or injury of an agitator. But the lack of training and equipment, and in many key instances, numbers, is almost tailor-made to turn many Indian situations into a Police vs Rioters one. The Indian Police needs to adopt the attitude of a fair umpire who will not hesitate to show a yellow card, but also have the mental and physical wherewithal to overawe a recalcitrant player. But the goal of the police forces must always be to protect lives, even those of protestors. To this end, there are a range of technologies that can be used from tear gas, water cannons, 40 mm blunt-force injury guns with a variety of ammunition such as rubber bullets, pepper spray bullets and gas grenades and dyes to mark rioters.

While it is fair for the police forces to demand security of tenure and insulation from the near-criminal interference by our political class, they must also reflect on their own responsibilities. More than technology, what is needed is a policing philosophy based on the need to protect the rights of all citizens. This must be a zero-tolerance process with no favours for Hindus, Muslims, rich or downtrodden. Unfortunately, this is not the message that many Indians have got. Governments and police officials have, at times, been criminally negligent in intervening on the specious plea that action would compound the problem. The result is that the police neither have a clear message about what could be the consequences of their inaction nor is the mob made clearly aware that their acts will bring them condign legal retribution. It is in such circumstances that the many shameful incidents that are a blot on the country’s history have taken place.

In a democracy, the right to protest is paramount. In a country like India that won its independence through a strategy of civil protest, there seems to be a special sanction for protestors. But somewhere down the line, this has led to a dangerous concession to violence and anarchy. While it is easy to pass the blame around for this, all Indians need to reflect where this attitude could lead them.