Monday, 17 August 2020
Why the déjà vu over the Shopian killings
http://www.kashmirtimes.com/newsdet.aspx?q=104450
Unedited version
Three men were killed in an
encounter in Shopian last month by the army and passed off as unidentified
terrorists. This version of events has been challenged by families in Rajauri
claiming that the three were possibly their relatives who had gone to Shopian
in search of work and went missing. The army has said that it will inquire into
the matter. The police will undertake DNA testing to verify the claims of the
families.
It is strange that the army
requires a furore for it to inquire into the matter. If it was sure of the
facts – and it must know more than it lets on – then it need not launch an
inquiry into the matter. Afterall, if there is an encounter in which people are
killed, it gets reported up the army’s channel. Therefore, it already has the
facts. If these facts were questionable, then it did not wait into the
following month to launch an inquiry. If it was sure of the facts, then there
is no necessity of an internal inquiry as it now promises, but only an openness
to outside investigation, in this case, to the one promised by the police.
Now, we have two investigations,
an internal army one and one by the police, or perhaps just one, the army one
being assisted through DNA testing by the police. If this be the case, the army
needs faulting for dispensing with due diligence in its monitoring and reporting
on the encounter. Surely, if the encounter was instead a ‘fake encounter’ then
it has no place in the army’s repertoire. The penalty should have been
instantaneously exacted last month. Since this has evidently not been done, the
army chain of command was either complicit in the killings by creating and
sustaining a command climate permissive of such killings, or, worse, ordering
the killings.
Let us take the second, seemingly
implausible, possibility first. This author as a company commander once was privy to a corps
commander dropping in at the battalion headquarters and – over lunch –
suggesting to the assembled orders group of the battalion, that included this
author as a young major, that the battalion needed something to ‘show’ for its
presence in that hostile infested area of the north east. The corps commander
explained that having been flown in for counter insurgency operations after the
area was declared disturbed, the army needed to project that it was effectively
tackling the insurgents. He thought it would be a good idea if the company
commanders would rely on a couple of tough lads and take out a couple of
civilians and depict them as militants. He said this would take the pressure of
him to show results. The ever polite battalion officers saw off the corps
commander that afternoon.
Since this episode was a quarter
century back, there was no action taken on his suggestion, though the times
were such – some seven years into the militancy in Kashmir where the corps
commander had gained his spurs in command of a division – that the suggestion was
made without flinching, even if received with some disbelief. With much water
having flown down the Jhelum since then, it can be hazarded that not only can
such demands be made, but there may well be enough volunteers in the ranks to
carry them out. The demands in themselves would no doubt be cloaked as an
operational necessity – such as unmistakable messaging to the militants to lay
off an area of responsibility since the troops would through such killings
demonstrate that they are alert. Such orders could well be obeyed since by now
Kashmiris – who also are to top it all Muslims – are fair game, if the national
– read majoritarian - interest is better served by some of them better dead.
Recall a young aspirant politician's rueful statement recently that the only
good Kashmiri politician is a dead one.
Ten years back in a similar
incident, three labourers were enticed to the line of control with the promise
of work and done to death. Their dead bodies were passed off as those of
infiltrators. The public tumult this occasioned did not allow the army to sweep
the incident under the carpet. Instead, there was an inquiry leading up to a
court martial which was endorsed by the then army commander, DS Hooda. Even so,
the armed forces tribunal, with no less than a former army vice chief on it,
let off the perpetrators. Sly potshots were taken by veterans, answering to the
label ‘nationalist’, on Hooda’s stand and on his subsequent arraigning of
trigger happy soldiers at a road barrier who shot up two Kashmiri teenagers in
a passing car, calling the latter decision ‘politically motivated’. What this
recount suggests is that within the military there is a counter culture – which
is now the dominant culture –at gross variance with the purported ethics of the
military.
Where the dominant institutional culture
is this counter culture (with values aligned with the what passes for
nationalism in politics today) a permissive attitude to killings such as this is
extant. Not only does such an attitude allow for such killings but valourises
perpetrators. Need one remind readers of Major Leetul Gogoi. When
accountability calls, the counter culture facilitates cover up – such as at the
infamous case of Pathribal when not only was no action taken against
perpetrators, but even when called for by no less than the Supreme Court, the
Court was fobbed off by the army’s inaction. It is easy to discern that the inaction
owed to the accountability for the decision to kill the five unfortunate
Kashmiris was at the highest door, with an operational rationale written all
over it. After all, the American president was then on a visit to India and the
Pakistanis needed to be painted in black. That the divisional commander was
rehabilitated in another command billet and, post retirement, in a governmental
sinecure, indicates illegal orders were passed on and obeyed. Therefore, the
perpetrators had to be left off, lest all up the food chain would have to buy
it too.
Now for the second possibility, that
the command culture is so vitiated that long discredited ‘kills’ continue to be
the yardstick of performance. This author had warned back when the army put out
its doctrine in the public domain of ‘iron fist in a velvet glove’ that it
would not last the test of the next uptick in insurgency. What needed to be
done was introspection over its record till then in Kashmir and an extensive
education imbuing it with a democratic ethic valuing human rights and a duty to
citizens caught up in such situations. The recurrence of incidents such as
Machil soon thereafter and this case now does not mean that the army has failed
as much as that it did not try, or, rather, did not want to try. The public doctrine was merely public
relations suited to the political circumstance of the time – of quietude in
Kashmir and a ceasefire along the line of control. The army has also since been
subject to the onslaught – through trojan horses within - of cultural
nationalism. It can be inferred from this incident that the Othering that
accompanies the Hindutva discourse has infected the army too; else how can one
account for the perverse killing of three young men, the coverup and now the
charade of an inquiry. The usual excuse that some army men were after awards is
for the gullible and hides a systemic malady.
Command responsibility in this
case must lie with the corps commander since the army commander is presumably distracted
by the Ladakh front. It behooves on the corps commander to set the moral
compass. If such incidents occur with accompanying inaction, whether Chinar
Corps has lost its ethical moorings is a valid question. That the commanding
general in Badami Bagh was last seen, with the divisional commander in tow,
accompanying a bureaucrat, if a lieutenant governor, to the opening prayers at
the Amarnath shrine bespeaks of priorities and levels of self-regard. If the
level the army has been reduced to is one in which there are no whistle blowers
and none preferring to resign rather than carry out illegal orders, then operational
level leadership must face the music.
It is important that the dust not
be allowed to settle on this case the way it has over other such instances. The
army has to be alerted to a grim future ahead if it succumbs to yet another
eyewash of an inquiry. There are far too many such episodes and corresponding
inquiries going back to Kunan Poshpora that do its record in Kashmir no credit.
It should not end up as yet another force indulging in fake encounters, little
different from its khaki clad counterparts. It must preserve its professional
backbone, lest it end up as yet another institution fallen by the wayside in
the majoritarian march through this land.
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