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The Frontier Post, Updated on 11/19/2001 9:32:14 AM
India’s secret army in Kashmir
Mubarik Shah
The Indians do not talk of them.
The world largely doesn’t know of them.
The Kashmiris dread and hate them.
The Indian military lovingly calls them ‘Friendlies’.
The Kashmiris scornfully brand them variously as ‘The Third
Force’ or ‘Sarkari militants’ or ‘renegades’.
Respected watchdog Human Rights Watch (HRW) has, however,
christened them as India’s Secret Army in Kashmir and
profiled their wickedness and evil deeds in an exclusive 48-page
startling report.
They are former Kashmiri freedom fighters, coerced or seduced
away from the resistance movement by the Indian military to be
its hired guns and death squads to eliminate activists fighting
its occupation of Kashmir.
For a company, they have scores of proclaimed rogue criminals and
hardened jailbirds, released from captivity at the Indian
military’s instance, and recruited to this secret army.
India commenced raising this underground force of state
terrorists soon after it launched its ongoing massive, brutal
military action in 1992 to quell the popular uprising in occupied
Kashmir.
The international community was yet to be enamoured of India as
an emerging market and an investor’s place.
It reacted adversely to the Indian military campaign.
New Delhi started coming under world heat to rein in the military
and respect human rights of the Kashmiris.
In a bid to ward off this mounting pressure while continuing with
its brutal methods against the Kashmiris, the Indian military
launched into organising these death squads around 1993, “subcontracting”
to them, as the HRW report put it, some of its abusive tactics.
The report noted while they were set on the suspected freedom
fighters, whose elimination at their hands under the military’s
protective shield would routinely be attributed to “inter-group
rivalries”, their main victims were civilians, particularly
difficult journalists, human rights activists, medical workers
and families of suspected freedom fighters.
They were assigned “special operations in which the costs in
terms of human lives and the Army’s reputation were likely
to be too great”, observed Indian journalist Pankaj Mishra
in a report in daily Hindu that got him in trouble with his
fellow journalists for its outspokenness.
They were tasked to threaten and kill families of the freedom
fighters living in the Valley as well as the “journalists
and human rights activists who were seen as too eager to report
the excesses committed by the army”, he wrote.
“In retrun, the army and the administration looked the other
way when these renegades kidnapped and killed for money”.
Besides, said Mishra, between 1994 and 1996, they helped the army
track down and kill hundreds of hardcore freedom fighters.
Though not wearing the uniform and operating outside the army’s
command structure, their links with the Indian military became
quite known outside the barracks by early 1995.
Not only had it become a public knowledge that they had been
trained and armed and were being bankrolled by the Indian army
but they were often seen patrolling with the army squads and
living in military compounds.
They thus caught the eye of foreign human rights watchdogs that
started urging their governments to compel India to disband and
disarm this secret army in Kashmir and prosecute its members
responsible for murders, violent assaults and other human rights
abuses.
The human rights community started building up pressure on the
US, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and India’s other
trading partners to suspend all military sales and all
cooperation with New Delhi until it disbanded the underground
terrorist force.
In the face of this escalating demand, the army decided in 1996
to dismantle the militia and induct its elements in the Indian
paramilitary forces deployed in Kashmir.
Though themselves exceptionally notorious for brutality and gross
human rights abuses, even these paramilitaries were unwilling to
take them on their rolls.
They viewed them too thuggish for their “discipline”.
On army’s insistence, only the Border Security Force (BSF)
took a few.
For the rest, the army turned to the state police.
But Farooq Abdullah, who by then had been catapulted to the chief
minister’s saddle in a rigged poll, was averse to take them
in, not so much for their roguishness as for the threat he
perceived from them to his own personal security.
Finally, he had to give in to the arms-twisting of the
domineering Indian army in the state.
These hired guns and death squads now make up the dreaded Special
Operations Group of the state police, creating waves all over the
Valley with their wickedness, brutality and thuggery.
Quite interestingly, elements of them now also form the core of
Farooq Abdullah’s own personal security apparatus.
Some were still left out.
They were too wild to be acceptable even to the state police.
They are now freelancing, mostly for the army for “special
operations”.
According to Pankaj Mishra, there are “still 1,500 of them
on the government’s payroll”.
They are “the most dreaded people in the Valley”, even
“more than the Army and police officials in remote areas, or
the jumpy soldiers in their bunkers”, he says.
“A senior Government official spoke to me of them as
Frankenstein’s monsters; they were, he said, the most
visible and hated symbol of Indian rule over the Valley, and it
was not going to be easy to tame them”, Mishra reported
further.
The Kashmiris see the hand of these state terrorists in car
blasts, grenade explosions in markets and public places, killing
of civilians in their homes, murderous assaults on political
figures, and politically-motivated massacres of the Sikhs and
Hindus in the Valley.
Hurriyat leader Abdul Ghani Lone blames them for the failed
attempt on his life at his home on the November 1 night.
In a press statement on Tuesday, Hurriyat chief Abdul Ghani Bhat
came out strongly against the stepped-up reign of terror
unleashed by these state terrorists, in and out of uniform, on
the innocent Kashmiri civilians since September 11.
“Organised groups of people, organised at the state level,
indulge in rape, arson, killing in custody and perhaps all such
acts which are inhuman and barbaric”, he said.
“This is state terrorism.
And this state terrorism is unacceptable to us.
If the people who talk in terms of nonviolence and democracy,
culture and civilisation, if they are serious, let them bring
culprits to book and disband such elements as are involved in the
acts of terrorism”.
“If the state does not stop terrorism at their level, we may
be forced to call upon the people to come out and die with honour
and dignity”, he warned.
“Enough is enough”, he said.
It may be enough with Bhat.
But it can’t be with the Indians.
For keeping the world charmed into its unbroken silence over the
Kashmiris’ brutalisation by their military with their
lullaby of ‘cross-border terrorism’, they need acts of
terrorism in the Valley.
If their secret army of hired guns ad death squads is delivering
them well on that score, why would they disband it? Poor Bhat! He
is asking for the moon.