The Hindu : Gandhi's monkeys

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Monday, Jul 07, 2003

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Gandhi's monkeys

By Praveen Swami

Operation Sarp Vinash illustrates the failure of the defence establishment to comprehend and engage with the challenges of counter-terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir.

THE GATES of the Ministry of Defence in New Delhi are guarded by three stone-faced monkeys, ferocious mutant versions of the porcelain paperweight Mahatma Gandhi kept by his beside. They let neither unhappy word nor evil sight enter in or wander out. Every so often, the real world tries to storm its way past the monkeys. Then, the massive gates of the building slam shut, and once the din dies down the monkeys signal the all-clear for slumber to resume.

Fiction? Yes, but not quite. It has been four weeks now since an investigation in The Hindu's sister publication, Frontline, blew the lid off one of the most flagrant hoaxes in the history of the Indian Army. Operation Sarp Vinash, a massive military exercise to clear terrorists from the Hil Kaka area of Poonch, had been claimed to be among the Army's most significant successes in recent years. It has now been demonstrated to have been spectacularly unsuccessful. Operation Sarp Vinash illustrates the failure of the defence establishment to comprehend and engage with the challenges of counter-terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir — and its retreat into an imaginary world where all is well.

Officials have claimed that up to 180 terrorists were killed in the course of Operation Sarp Vinash, which employed air power and artillery for the first time in the 15-year sub-conventional war in Jammu and Kashmir. The Army claimed to have found and destroyed almost a hundred fortified bunkers, and to have discovered war-like stores. Most important, they said training camps for terrorists had been operational in Hil Kaka — ironically bolstering Pakistan's position that terrorists are trained within Jammu and Kashmir.

The Army's own documents, however, make clear that just 27 terrorists had actually been killed in the Hil Kaka operations — a considerably lower figure than the Army had succeeded in eliminating in the same area in 2001 and 2002. The truth is recorded in seven documents filed with the Surankote Police Station by Army units participating in Sarp Vinash. In the course of the seven engagements, the 9 Para Regiment, the 15 Garhwal Regiment, the 4 Gorkha Rifles and the 20 Rashtriya Rifles also collectively claimed the recovery of four machine guns, nine assault rifles, a sniper rifle and a single 60-millimetre mortar. Non-military stores recovered included 355 kilograms of grain, against the 7000-odd tonnes claimed before the media, 30 cooking utensils and 27 blankets. None of this can, by any stretch of imagination, be claimed to be evidence of a `war-like' arsenal.

Contrast these meagre achievements with what the Army has, itself, secured in the past. No fewer than 103 terrorists were killed on Hil Kaka in 2001. Another 47 were eliminated in 2002, even though counter-terrorist formations had been thinned out that year and sent to the Line of Control for participation in India's war-that-eventually-wasn't with Pakistan. Indeed, it is possible that a good many terrorists escaped Hil Kaka this year because they were alerted by the theatrical artillery barrage that preceded the first Army ground operations. Last year, 151 terrorists were shot dead in Poonch between January and May, despite the stripping of the Army counter-terrorist assets. This year, with troop strength back to par, the corresponding figure is down to 124. Worst of all, terrorist groups have simply moved from Hil Kaka to areas such as Thana Mandi and Rajouri's Kandi belt, where killings of civilians have shown a marked upward trend.

These figures need to be read against the backdrop of the very serious challenges the Army faces in Jammu and Kashmir — the challenges operations like Sarp Vinash are intended to address. In May 1998, even as increasingly well-trained and heavily armed Pakistani jehadis began to be pumped across the Line of Control to bolster the flagging insurgency in Jammu and Kashmir, the Union Government announced the initiation of a `pro-active' response. Operations like Sarp Vinash are advertisements for this muscular-response policy, which is claimed to have had considerable success.

But the Government's own figures, recently published in the Ministry of Home Affairs' Annual Report for 2002-2003, show that there is no reason to rejoice — Operation Sarp Vinash is simply a symptom of a wider malaise. In 1994, with a supposedly weak and dithering government in place, the number of terrorists killed for each Indian security force member lost in combat stood at 7.98. This ratio, a key index of the success of counter-terrorist operations, stood at 5.57:1 in 1997, the year before the `pro-active policy' was put in place. Since then, it has declined with almost unfailing regularity. From 4.23:1 in 1998, the figure went down to 3.05:1 the next year, it rose slightly to 3.83:1 in 2000, and settled at 3.77:1 in 2001 and 2002.

What the figures show is that the hype notwithstanding, the defence establishment simply has not been able to come up with technological or tactical measures to deal with a well-armed and innovative enemy. As a direct result of this failure, violence levels in Jammu and Kashmir have been rising steadily. In 1998, 889 civilians were killed in 2,932 terrorism-related incidents of violence. In 2002, 1,008 civilians died in 4,038 incidents of violence, a stark index of the reality. In 1998, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh's journal, Organiser, claimed that the "pro-active Kashmir policy [had] effectively checked [the] trans-border influx of trouble-makers." In fact, the figures show quite the opposite has happened. Unsurprisingly, Pakistan reads the military situation as a sign that it can extract greater territorial concessions from India than it might otherwise be able to secure.

It does not take too much to see just why the Indian Army is finding success hard to come by in Jammu and Kashmir. For all the noise about being a soldier-friendly army, Indian troops are still poorly equipped for the sub-conventional war being waged in the State. Despite claims of new acquisitions of ground sensors and thermal imaging devices, no less than the Nineteenth Report of the Standing Committee on Defence informs us that our soldiers are short of almost a quarter of a million bullet-proof jackets. Soldiers do not have elementary mountain gear that any trekker or terrorist carries into the hills, like windproof over-clothes, waterproof lightweight sleeping bags, or even comfortable hiking boots.

Elsewhere in the security establishment, things are just as bad. Ten years into counter-terrorist operations, the Jammu and Kashmir Police still have not worked out a system for giving personnel on gruelling night-and-day operations a hot meal. Doda's Special Police Officers, locally recruited militia members who are at the cutting-edge of anti-terrorism operations because of their knowledge of mountain terrain, recently abandoned their posts en masse because they had not been paid their pathetic Rs. 1,500 salary for several months. The Intelligence Bureau's Multi Agency Centre, India's first online data collation and retrieval centre for counter-terrorism, is still not up and running two years after it was cleared by a succession of high-level committees — all because the Finance Ministry will not clear the hiring of the skilled personnel required to run it.

As things stand, the main consequence of Operation Sarp Vinash will be the commitment of troops to a gruelling but pointless deployment on the Pir Panjal mountains. Having supposedly cleared Hil Kaka of terrorist encampments, the Army now has to position troops there permanently to make sure they do not return. Past experience, in areas like the Wadwan region of Doda, shows that these small posts have little utility. Troops there are too bogged down maintaining their presence to operate aggressively in the mountains. Terrorists, for their part, shift base to other areas where the military presence is thinner.

All of this, of course, begs the question: just why did the Army put together the Sarp Vinash illusion in the first place? Confronted with public outrage over the apparently unending crisis in Jammu and Kashmir — the sorry tale of events from Kargil to Kandahar and on to Kalu Chak is too well known to need recounting here — the defence establishment has invented a peculiar default mode of operation. Instead of undertaking the hard work needed to restore and revitalise counter-terrorist operations, it invents great victories. Every year, the military top brass routinely announce that terrorists are on the run, only to retreat into their shells after the next big suicide squad attack or bombing. It is perhaps not coincidental that Operation Sarp Vinash was conceived in the context of widespread disquiet over the collapse of Operation Parakram, and the subsequent realisation that India just did not have the military might to impose its will on Pakistan.

The Ministry of Defence has had the good sense this time not to issue the kind of reflexive denials of hard evidence it resorted to during the Kargil war, but silence on the Sarp Vinash affair is simply not adequate. The monkeys at the gates of the Ministry of Defence need to open their eyes and ears, and learn to speak the unhappy truth to their bosses — before the pillars of the building come crashing down.

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