A shade more than a week after the terrorist killings of seven Hindus in Dhangri village in the Rajouri district of Jammu, the Union Ministry of Home Affairs ordered the revivification of Village Defence Groups (VDGs) in all ten districts of Jammu. In their earlier avatar, which lasted 26 years, VDGs were known as Village Defence Committees (VDCs).
They comprised a ragtag, semi-trained civilian armed militia, maintained by government fiat, that formed the fourth layer of antiterrorist defence after the Indian Army, the paramilitary, and the Jammu & Kashmir Police. For a quarter-century now, roughly 5,000 VDCs have had a floating membership of 26,500–28,000 members, many of them deactivated over the past decade by both government whimsy and unpaid remuneration. Now, they are being regalvanised with more fearsome (and free) weaponry, more monies in hand, and official status as junior police functionaries.
For all their fame (and infamy), VDCs were armed with the blunderbusses of this golden age of armamentation: obsolete World War II-vintage, single-shot, bolt-action Lee Enfield .303s. The newfangled VDGs are being armed with Ishapore SLRs (self-loading rifles).
While VDCs have been credited with helping the security forces nab or neutralise terrorists, the proof of such force multiplying is nearly entirely anecdotal. No data exists on how many encounters they have engaged in or how many terrorists they have killed or helped neutralise. It is difficult to imagine how, armed with heavy, high-recoil, low rate-of-fire bacamartes, they might have taken on terrorists—experts at riflery—with modern-day weapons.
On the other hand, what is not abstract is the involvement of members of the VDCs in criminality. In 2016, the Jammu and Kashmir government informed the state legislative assembly that 221 criminal cases had been filed against village defenders in Jammu, including 23 cases of murder and seven cases of rape, 15 cases of rioting, three anti-drug cases and 169 other cases, out of which charges have been filed in 205 cases. However, the conviction rate in the cases against VDCs is abysmal, with only six cases ending in a conviction.
These are not small numbers and are likely just the tip of the iceberg since armed village defence members are not exactly uninfluential.
At the same time, it is doubtful that arming VDGs with SLRs—and 100 bullets per unit—will contain terrorists. First, terrorists have months—if not years—of training behind them; the VDGs will have cursory training in operating semiautomatic rifles. Second, the terrorists almost always have strategies and tactics; the VDGs will have to confront them head-on in the service of hyperlocal protection. Third, there are fewer terrorists today in Jammu and Kashmir from across the border than there are homegrown ‘hybrid’ ones: locals with no history of anti-state action, and, therefore, untraceable both before and after the fact; and these locals know the lie of the land in as great microdetail as the VDGs. Fourth, as the security forces realised long ago, terrorists are maniacally suicidal; VDGs, being civilians without catastrophist agendas, are not. Fifth, terrorists are, by definition, proactive, just as VDGs will, by definition, activate themselves or be activated ex post facto.
These are significant drawbacks. For instance, the terrorist attacks on Dhangri—a Hindu-majority village of about 5,000 inhabitants, including 1,500 Muslims—happened despite the presence of nine VDCs with, reportedly, 71 Lee Enfields and adequate ammunition between them. “Their members had recently undergone training with the army but were probably unaware and complacent at the time of the recent attacks,” a police officer told the media. Only one of the village defenders fired—a single round, into the air.
Nevertheless, the rearming of civilians throughout the ten districts of Jammu began with handing out SLRs to 40 ex-servicemen in Dhangri and nearby Bal Jarallan (which last suffered a terrorist incident in 1999). Rajouri district alone is reported to have 5,200 operational VDGs.
What the security forces refer to as “special firing practice sessions” for volunteers—daylong en masse exercises usually held in army firing ranges—will not even begin to address the problem of adequate training and long-term motivation. These are just gap-fillers in what increasingly seems to be a political rather than a security programme to create an inadequate and vulnerable militia placed, by special diktat, an inch on this side of a fundamentally anti-vigilante law.
VDCs were first set in motion in 1996 by the top BJP leader Lal Krishna Advani. Even though the party was not a major league in J&K then, it was emphatic, and under Advani, over his following years as No. 2 in the Central government, the composition of VDCs became overwhelmingly Hindu, even in Muslim-majority districts.
Of the ten districts with VDGs, five are Muslim-majority, and one is nearly half-Hindus, half-Muslims. In the Chenab Valley—the erstwhile Doda district, which now consists of Doda, Kishtwar and Ramban districts—Muslims constitute 61% of the population (Census 2011).
However, according to Right to Information feedback, more than 90% of VDC members in the region are Hindu. The imbalance has not altered over a decade: a 2013 report by the Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society concluded that of 12,709 VDC members in the Chenab valley, an average of 93.2% were Hindu.
Everywhere in the world, what are called pro-government militias (PGMs)—Civilian Joint Task Force in Nigeria, village guards in Turkey, Rwanda’s Interahamwe militia, Janjaweed in Darfur, Basij in Iran, Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front, Burundi’s Imbonerakure—are notoriously difficult to control. In One or Many? Disentangling the Puzzle of Pro-Government Militia Deployment, Kamil Klosek and Emil Souleimanov write that PGMs are “notoriously unreliable military formations”, lacking discipline, agenda-driven, excessively violent against civilians and “hard to demobilise”.
If things go south—in a bristling communal habitat and in thrall to political forces, why wouldn’t they? —VDGs will be difficult to disband.
Kajal Basu
Veteran journalist