Omar Abdullah has once again ascended the hot seat as the head of J&K government through a transparent, free and credible electoral process. Many have commented to say it was immaterial who came to power in J&K. That such an electoral process could be carried out in a proxy war zone without an incident of violence or repoll is itself a certification of what the nation has achieved. There are times when we need to sit back and observe what we did right without too much critiquing and negativising, notwithstanding the attack at Z-Morh which is an after event.
Most striking is the fact that whenever the international community intercedes in conflicts around the world, it aims at a drawdown among the contestants, then an election, to get a people’s elected government in the seat of power. It’s not often this happens successfully and if it does, it rarely lasts. Cambodia and Mozambique were two good examples of UN interventions and both had an Indian peacekeeping presence.
The recent parliamentary and assembly elections in J&K need to be examined from the angle of the success of the Indian model of conflict management, which betters almost all other models. We rarely give ourselves credit for this, but it’s not any one agency or domain that has succeeded in achieving what may have at one time appeared as an impossible task; it’s the Indian system and its conciliatory approach that many are critical of.
Consider the environment we faced in 1989-90. A cascading insurgency sponsored from across the borders that moved into the realm of terror, a virtual genocidal eviction of a minority with a helpless administration looking on, atrocities aflush, mountain infiltration routes converted to highways, and the populace in the streets baying for the blood of soldiers and policemen. A gleeful adversary watching its handiwork succeed beyond expectations, with half its army sitting in deployment areas in a massive exercise called Zarb-e-Momin. This was January-February 1990.
We inducted untrained troops and used brute power, all necessary if the fires had to be doused. The Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA-1990) was legislated to give additional powers to central forces. It remains in place as a contentious instrument used by anti-national forces as a propaganda tool. We resisted that right through and maintained the empowerment of the Army, without which the task would have been well nigh impossible.
We defeated the early phases of the local uprising but, could do little against the rising alienation. The adversary inducted foreign terrorists in hundreds along the infiltration highways. We then raised a counter-insurgency (CI) and counter-terrorism (CT) force drawn from the Army itself and called it the Rashtriya Rifles (RR), one of our boldest military experiments. It succeeded due to the permanence it brought to the CI and CT grid, where earlier units were turning over even before they settled in.
This domain of military and quasi-military operations needed permanence for stabilisation. The Jammu & Kashmir Police gained more experience by the day and proved as effective and loyal as any other. It raised the Special Operations Group, which worked closely with the RR, giving it the local advantage and hence force-multiplying intelligence.
Later, the Army went and raised the Territorial Army (Home & Hearth) units, with the sons of the soil concept that helped in direct outreach to villages and small towns as our influence operations. The local Army regiment, the J&K Light Infantry provided liaison and outreach facilitation through local soldiers, many of whom also suffered the consequences.
Quite early, the senior hierarchy realised that the proxy war could not be controlled without considering the local population as the centre of gravity. The years 1996-97 were crucial . We fought back against international efforts to label us undemocratic and violators of human rights. The 1996 elections and the government that came to office was an appropriate message to the world on India’s narrative on how such situations would be handled.
In 1997, the Supreme Court handed to the Army a set of dos and don’ts in the conduct of operations under AFSPA. Simultaneously, we launched Operation Sadbhavana, a military civic action programme to assist the local administration in development work and outreach to people where the writ of terrorism prevailed. Under this, 43 goodwill schools and hundreds of joint Army-civil medical camps, cataract camps, aspirational tours to the rest of India, youth empowerment, sports schemes and so much more were organised. This led to the humanisation of conflict conditions. It all militated against the allegations of human rights violations. This was an approach rarely followed in hybrid war conditions anywhere else in the world except perhaps the British model in handling the Malayan Emergency.
Surges in terrorism and the adoption of new models such as ‘agitational terror’ were controlled with minimum force. The Army was hardly ever employed except in search operations. With the realisation that the terror ecosystem that sustained the proxy war needed doses of neutralisation, Indian agencies went after terror financing networks and many other such systems related to media, drugs, radicalisation, overground workers, recruitment and separatist ideologues, which broke the back of terrorism, especially after 2017. The transformation from the concept of counting terrorists to counting the number of systems and networks neutralised gave a telling blow to the sponsors of proxy war.
Five years after using the legislative and constitutional route to bring J&K into the Indian mainstream, the nation risked everything by holding elections. Even as the forces of revival were raising their head and Pakistan’s relevance is being re-sought through the Jammu route and now by attack on infrastructure, the Indian government decided to repeat 1996 and announced to the world that J&K would have the democratic choice to elect its own government.
The new government may feel peeved at its relative disempowerment. In due course, powers will return, as will statehood, but much will depend on the ability to sustain the success we have progressively made. While the world agonises over the wars in Ukraine, Gaza and Lebanon, India’s example is one of a shining beacon in the murky world of conflict management where its interests will need to be permanently secured.
Lt Gen Syed Ata Hasnain (Retd)
Former Commander, Srinagar-based 15 Corps.
Now Chancellor, Central University of Kashmir
(Views are personal)
(atahasnain@gmail.com)