COVER STORY

Pulwama and after

VENKITESH RAMAKRI SHNAN

Print edition : March 15, 2019T+ T-

Terror attacks after 2014

“If we are to defeat terrorism, it is our duty, and indeed our interest, to try to understand
this deadly phenomenon, and carefully to examine what works, and what does not, in
fighting it,” said Kofi Annan, Nobel Peace laureate and Secretary General at the time
of the United Nations, at “Fighting Terrorism for Humanity: A Conference on the Roots
of Evil” on September 22, 2003.

Kofi Annan, who served as U.N. Secretary General between 1997 and 2006, had, as
a senior international diplomat, engaged with India and its political leadership for
decades (he passed away in 2018). Several aspects of his 2003 speech have been
debated repeatedly in many international forums as pertinent pointers in the fight
against terrorism. “If we are to fight terrorism effectively, and avoid mistakes in doing
so, we need more debate, not less, regarding possible policy responses,” he said.

He added: “While terrorism is an evil with which there can be no compromise, we must
use our heads, not our hearts, in deciding our response. The rage we feel at terrorist
attacks must not remove our ability to reason…. There is no trade-off to be made
between human rights and terrorism. Upholding human rights is not at odds with
battling terrorism: on the contrary, the moral vision of human rights—the deep respect
for the dignity of each person—is among our most powerful weapons against it. To
compromise on the protection of human rights would hand terrorists a victory they
cannot achieve on their own. The promotion and protection of human rights, as well
as the strict observance of international humanitarian law should, therefore, be at the
centre of anti-terrorism strategies.”

On several occasions in the past one and a half decades, many security affairs
specialists, sociologists and diplomats in India have referred to these observations,
especially in times of major terrorist attacks. There have been instances when Annan’s
pointers were used as broad parameters to analyse the security establishment’s
responses to major terrorist attacks. These analyses have periodically flagged the
strengths, inadequacies and failures of successive Indian governments and the
security establishments under their control in tackling terrorism.

Going by Annan’s parameters, the terrorist attack of February 14 at Pulwama in

Jammu and Kashmir and the atmosphere in the country in its aftermath must mark an
abysmal low in the handling of terror. Forty jawans of the Central Reserve Police Force
(CRPF) were killed when a suicide bomber rammed an explosives-laden vehicle into
a convoy of the paramilitary force. Pakistan’s Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) claimed
responsibility for the attack, the deadliest faced by security personnel in Kashmir since
1989.

The immediate factors that facilitated it, and the broader ones that built up the
atmosphere in which it happened, expose the repeated failures of the security
establishment and the political leadership. Questions have been raised about the
intelligence lapse that allowed the perpetrators to smuggle in huge quantities of RDX
explosives. The wisdom of having such a huge CRPF convoy (2,500 personnel) travel
by road through areas without foolproof security cover has been questioned.
(Paramilitary forces such as the Border Security Force had, in the past, sought airlifting
of soldiers from Jammu to Srinagar but the requests were not granted.)

The personal and family background of the suicide bomber—19-year-old home-grown

jehadist Adil Ahmad Dar from Gundibagh village—points to the colossal bankruptcies
that have hollowed out the political and administrative structure in Jammu and
Kashmir. Dar’s case is symbolic of how the disastrous political machinations in the
State have given a fillip to home-grown jehadi terrorism. In effect, it debunks the
government’s claims of a sustained and systematic reduction of jehadi terrorism in the
State over the past few years (See “Living tragedies”, page 12, “Militant surge”, page
21). The ground situation in Jammu and Kashmir, never quite easy for security forces,
has been marked by heightened animosities in the last four years, especially after the
advent of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in New Delhi and following the
installation of the BJP-Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) coalition government in
Srinagar (that government fell in June 2018).

Security personnel posted in Srinagar told Frontline that the jehadi mentality brazenly
on display among the youths now was a recent development. “Earlier it used to be
mainly the Pakistani terrorist. There was very little local support, if any. But the
phenomenon of local Kashmiri youths picking up the stone or taking up a gun to attack
security forces has spread like wild fire,” said a CRPF commandant posted in the
Valley.

The Pulwama attack is a composite symbol of the security mismanagement and

political adventurism pursued by the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government
led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the Centre and its associates in Jammu and
Kashmir over the last four and a half years.

Belligerent rhetoric
There was a conspicuous absence of objectivity and sagacity in the administrative and
political responses that the governments at the Centre and in the State of Jammu and
Kashmir (presently under Governor’s rule) to the social and political situations that
evolved after the attack. Instead, members of the government, including Modi, used
emotional rhetoric aimed at inflaming the passions of the public.

Matters were not helped by the blatant communal and political exploitation of the
attack by the ruling dispensation and its cohorts in outfits such as the Vishwa Hindu
Parishad (VHP) and the Bajrang Dal, which started within hours of the attack and were
orchestrated across the country, especially in the north. Sangh Parivar activists
converted candle-light marches honouring the slain CRPF men into venomous public
gatherings replete with communal and divisive sloganeering against Muslims in
general and Kashmiris in particular. In the National Capital Region (NCR) comprising
Delhi and suburbs such as NOIDA and Ghaziabad in Uttar Pradesh and Gurugram in
Haryana, Sangh Parivar activists organised hundreds of such candle-light marches
supposedly under the umbrella of neutral resident welfare societies.

Targeting of Kashmiris
Soon, the sloganeering degenerated into targeted campaigning against Kashmiris,
most conspicuously in Dehradun in Uttarakhand. First, the campaign demanded that
Uttarakhand colleges stop admitting Kashmiri students, but within no time it turned into
a demand for the ouster of all Kashmiris in the colleges of Dehradun. Alpine College
of Management and Technology, which had around 340 Kashmiri students and a 27-
year-old Kashmiri, Abid Kuchay, as the dean, was one of the main targets. A mob of
about 500 people stormed the college, demanding the ouster of the dean and Kashmiri
students. The management of the college succumbed to the pressure and suspended
Abid Kuchay. There were ousters of students in other colleges in Dehradun.

The pattern was picked up in different parts of the north—in Gurugram, Bareilly,
Panipat, Roorkee and Meerut. Among the students forcibly removed were merit-based
beneficiaries of the Prime Minister’s Special Scholarship Scheme (PMSSS), a
programme that offers admission to students of Jammu and Kashmir in colleges,
institutes and universities across the country and provides financial aid for their tuition
and board.

Speaking to Frontline over the phone, a Kashmiri student studying in Dehradun said
that he and other fellow Kashmiri students started receiving threats immediately after
the Pulwama attack was reported. He identified the people threatening him as known
activists of the VHP and the Bajrang Dal and said they were asking Kashmiri students
to get out of Uttarakhand in 24 hours or get killed. He said that there were some
thousand Kashmiri students studying in Uttarakhand colleges.

VHP-Bajrang Dal activists also made the owners of several educational institutions
undertake that they would not admit any student from Kashmir in the new academic
session. However, the authorities in two Dehradun colleges—Alpine College of
Management and Technology and Baba Farid Institute of Technology—later clarified
that they had announced the decision under pressure and that there was no policy
decision to deny admission to Kashmiri students.

The campaign was not limited to frenzied mobs. Meghalaya Governor Tathagata Roy
called for a financial boycott of Kashmir and Kashmiris. Almost on cue, attacks on
Kashmiris were reported from Patna in Bihar, Raipur in Chhattisgarh and several parts
of Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra. In some places,
shops owned by Kashmiris were burnt. According to estimates of security agencies,
10 States reported attacks of varying intensity.

For some 48 hours, neither any leader of the Union government nor the BJP
condemned Governor Roy’s call. Opposition politicians ranging from the National
Conference’s Omar Abdullah to Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader Sitaram
Yechury questioned his stance and criticised the Union government’s silence on it.
Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad then came up with a terse statement that the BJP
did not agree with Roy on the issue.

By this time, however, the campaign against Kashmiris and Muslims had risen to such
levels that the Supreme Court was impelled to take note. On February 22, a bench
comprising Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi and Justice Sanjiv Khanna, responding to a
petition filed by advocate Tariq Adeeb, directed the Chief Secretaries and police chiefs
of all States and Union Territories to take “prompt action” to prevent incidents of
“assault, threat, social boycott and such other egregious acts” against Kashmiris,
including students, and other minorities. The bench issued notices to the Centre and
the States of Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Haryana, Jammu and Kashmir, Meghalaya, Uttar
Pradesh, Uttarakhand, West Bengal, Punjab and Maharashtra and sought their reply.
The court order was followed by a Union Home Ministry notification directing State
governments to ensure that there were no attacks on Kashmiris and minorities.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke up on the attacks on Kashmiris only on February
23; he said that the country’s fight was for Kashmir and not against the State or
Kashmiris. “What happened to Kashmiri youths in the last few days…It does not matter
whether the incident was small or big, such things should not happen. Kashmiri youths
are victims of terror. Every child of Kashmir is with India in our fight against terror,” he
said at a public meeting at Tonk in Rajasthan.

Alongside the strong rhetoric against terrorists and Pakistan, the government also
initiated diplomatic moves, which resulted in widespread support from the international
community. The United Nations Security Council condemned the attack. The UNSC
statement forced Pakistan, which has been claiming that it had nothing to do with the
attack and threatened to hit back if India took any action, to move against the JeM.
(See “Terror next door”, page 18.) But the centre piece of the post-Pulwama situation
was undoubtedly the social and political conflagrations in its aftermath.

Propaganda war
Notwithstanding the rather late move by the Union Home Ministry, the communal and
political orchestration following the Pulwama attack has not ceased. Sangh Parivar
outfits, from the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh to the VHP, the Bajrang Dal and the
BJP, along with many other smaller units, are still actively pursuing it. In view of the
forthcoming Lok Sabha elections, this is hardly surprising.

Over the last two years, the BJP and the larger Sangh Parivar have been building up
a campaign on the “nationalism versus sedition” theme, investing it with communal
and divisive propaganda. After the fall of the BJP-PDP government in Jammu and
Kashmir in June 2018, Sangh Parivar insiders across northern India were discussing
a potential new angle to this propaganda. It revolves around the projection of a new
polarising narrative pitting “Hindu India driven by the forces of Hindutva against Muslim
Kashmir, which is in collusion with the enemy country Pakistan”. According to this
narrative, the “only possible denouement of this situation would be in establishing the
absolute supremacy of Hindutva forces over the political establishment of India,
consequently resulting in the total subjugation of Muslim and Pakistan-aided Kashmir”.
The Pulwama attack seemed to catapult this campaign, until then conducted over
social media, into the the real world.

Speaking to Frontline, Omar Abdullah of the N.C. and Mohammad Yousuf Tarigami,
State secretary of the CPI(M) and a four-time MLA representing Kulgam in the State
Assembly, said this vile campaign was bound to push not just Jammu and Kashmir
but the whole country into a state of volatile sectarianism. Tarigami was of the view
that the post-Pulwama Hindutva politicking was in line with the general political
adventurism of the BJP and the Sangh Parivar that had pushed the strife-torn State
into greater unrest and chaos.

Omar Abdullah questioned the priorities of the BJP leadership. He said: “Modi wants
detractors of the Vande Bharat train to be punished but says nothing about people
targeting innocent Kashmiris. I have no firm evidence to suggest that the BJP is behind
the attacks on Kashmiris, but they [BJP leaders] are silent about what is happening,
and that silence is clearly helping those who are fanning the attacks and the communal
campaign. There is only one electoral beneficiary from such anti-Muslim communal
posturing.”

In private, Sangh Parivar insiders, including many leaders of the BJP, admit that the
post-Pulwama scenario has helped the party and the Modi government stave off the
growing political challenges ensuing from the debate on the Rafale deal. A group of
Sangh Parivar activists gathered at the Delhi residence of a former BJP MP a week
after the Pulwama attack expressed satisfaction that the minute examination of the
Rafale details by the public had now been replaced by patriotic fervour and an anti-
Pakistan sentiment.

Critical voices persist

Yet, critical voices persist within the security establishment, some of them belonging
to senior officers of the Army and the paramilitary forces, questioning the government’s
response to the Pulwama attack. Retired Colonel Subash Chandra Deswal has some
questions: “The Prime Minister has said after the Pulwama attacks that the Army has
been given full freedom to retaliate as and when it decided to do so. But what is the
meaning of this full freedom? It has been known for decades that Pakistan is promoting
jehadi terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir. Putting an end to it once and for all was the
major plank on which the BJP fought the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. Evidently, the
Prime Minister has not been able to give full freedom to the Army to eradicate jehadi
terrorism in the last four and a half years. So what new freedom is going to come to
the Army now? The fact of the matter is that the Modi government has turned out to
be like earlier governments in its failure to tackle terrorism. Coffins continue to come
back to remote villages and towns with the dead bodies of jawans. And politicking
continues as usual.”

This sentiment was echoed in the views of V.P.S. Panwar, retired Inspector General
of the CRPF. He also expressed concern about the inadequacies in infrastructure and
about welfare issues. Pay scales and and poor perquisites added to the sense of
hopelessness in the security machinery, he said. “We are supposed to be in a battle-
like situation 24x7, but our benefits are similar to civilian staff posted in urban or semi-
urban areas. By virtue of being posted in battle-like conditions, we are not able to avail
ourselves of many of these perks meant for civilian staff, and on top of that we are
denied any other risk or hardship allowance because our service rules consider us on
a par with babus,” he said. Panwar is chairman of the National Coordination
Committee of Central Armed Police Forces Organisations, the umbrella body of all
central police organisations—the Indo Tibetan Border Police, the Central Industrial
Security Force, the CRPF, the BSF, the Sashastra Seema Bal and the National
Disaster Response Force.
According to him, the service rules for these forces do not even consider them an
“organised service”, which deprives them of routine service benefits such as pension,
house rent allowance, and so on. This provision was challenged in court, and the
Supreme Court recently directed the Centre to accord them the status of an organised
service. Officers say the order is yet to be implemented. Besides, though the personnel
of these forces are shifted continuously from one corner of the country to another,
there is no provision for them to be airlifted. It is this lacuna that made the Pulwama
attack possible. Also, there is no provision for these personnel to be rotated between
disturbed area posting and peace posting. They end up spending 14-15 years of their
initial career in field duties, away from their families. Unfortunately, there is no
provision of accommodation for their families, no educational facilities exclusively for
their children, and no exclusive medical facilities. Jawans are permanently housed in
tents, and officers’ accommodations, too, are dreary.

The most unfortunate part, say several officers, is that the men leading these forces
are completely cut off from the ground realities because they are not cadre officers
and are drawn from the Indian Police Service. “This results in a situation where there
is nobody to speak for us. We are nobody’s children. Our issues get discussed only
when something as horrific as this happens,” says Panwar. It is a situation that leads
to suicides and fratricides. According to government figures, 123 personnel from these
organisations committed suicide during 2016-18, a number that exceeds that of men
killed in field operations. Evidently, none of these issues has been addressed by the
Modi government at the Centre and by the Jammu and Kashmir government over the
last four and a half years.