Monthly Archives: August 2018

Family of Lance Naik Ranjit Singh

Amir Karim Tantray

Tribune News Service

Burn/Gurasinghu, July 13

The anger against the Centre’s policies towards Pakistan and the wish to avenge the death of their father now run deep within the family of Lance Naik Ranjit Singh, who was killed in sniper firing in Keran sector of Kupwara district on the Line of Control (LoC) on Wednesday.The family is in a state of shock. All they want is justice from the government.As the day dawned, relatives and neighbours started gathering at the house of Hari Singh to express condolences for his son Ranjit’s death.Ranjit of Burn village and Satish Bhagat, another soldier from Gurasinghu village on the outskirts of Jammu, were killed in the ceasefire violation.Thirteen-year-old Kajal, Ranjit’s daugther, said, “My father was the best in the world. He used to play with me and my brother whenever he was home on leave. We used to have regular conversations with him on phone earlier but since he was posted near the border in Kupwara sector, he was not able to talk to us due to poor connectivity.”“My father wanted me to become an Indian Police Service (IPS) officer and I am going to fulfil his dream. Thereafter, I will avenge his death from those who are responsible for it,” she said.Ranjit is survived by wife Neha Devi, daughter Kajal, son Kartik (10), father Hari Singh and mother Beena Devi. He was the only breadwinner of the family.Kartik too wants to join the Indian Army so that he can “take revenge from Pakistan”.His wife Neha said, “Today, we have lost our loved one. Earlier, it was somebody else and tomorrow, it will be another person who loses his loved one. For how long will this happen?” she asked, adding, “India must go for an all-out attack against Pakistan to end this menace once and for all.”At Rifleman Satish Bhagat’s house in Gurasnighu village, things were no different. Bhagat’s mother and two elder sisters are yet to come to terms with the fact that they have lost him at the young age of 21.“He was too young to be killed and was the only hope of our family as his elder brother had suffered a lifelong injury in his leg in an accident sometime back,” said Kamlesh Kumari, Satish Bhagat’s mother. Bhagat’s sisters, Manju Kumari and Neelu Kumari, who are married, said, “Our brother was too young to be posted in a danger zone on the LoC. He had just completed his training,” they said.However, his father and brother are proud of his sacrifice for the nation. “I am proud of his sacrifice but I don’t want anyone else’s child to die. Peace must prevail so that all can live as brothers and nobody is killed,” said Jeet Lal, Bhagat’s father.

Darjeeling, July 10

Another army column moved into Darjeeling hills, which remained tense but incident-free on Monday as supporters of Gorkhaland held protest rallies for a separate state.

An Army column of 50 personnel was deployed in Kalimpong last night, defence sources said.

Two columns of the Indian Army were sent to Darjeeling and Sonada on Saturday after large-scale violence and arson was reported in the area.

No incident of violence has been reported since Sunday night, officials said.

A rally was organised from the Darjeeling station to Singhmari area by Gorkha Janmukti Morcha (GJM) — the organsation that is spearheading the campaign — demanding withdrawal of security forces from the hills and restoration of Internet services.

Internet services were suspended in Darjeeling and other violence-hit areas on June 18.

The GJM claimed seven supporters were killed in police firing since the protests began a month ago, including four on Saturday, but police contests the claim saying only two have died — including a truck driver whose vehicle was set ablaze — but “not a single shot” has been fired at protesters.

Security forces said they have been watching police stations, camps and outposts and entry and exit routes to prevent attacks by pro-Gorkhaland supporters.

Food supplies have run dry as indefinite strike entered its 26th day on Monday, prompting the GJM and various NGOs in the hills distribute them.

All shops except chemists, schools and colleges remained closed. PTI

Until the death of Burhan Wani, Kashmir’s new militancy on social media was little understood by the establishment, intelligence agencies and media

It’s exactly a year since Kashmir turned on its head and commenced a self-destruct campaign with the avatar of a new leadership and new foot soldiers. There are varying perceptions of why Burhan Wani’s death, in an encounter on 8 Jul 2016, led to the outpouring of emotions converted to extreme violence and a change in the nature of conflict. Most of these perceptions are one sided and based on what one wishes to believe. A recall of the circumstances of the period 2011-16 may help set the tone for analysis to seek more answers and suggest a way forward.

The peaceful period of 2011-13 followed in the wake of the stamina sapping 2008-10 when the Separatists attempted a strategy of combining terror and street turbulence to make their struggle more relevant. However 2011-13 was also recovery time which the Indian establishment failed to cash on despite its default actions of changed strategy of outreach and engagement, and the Interlocutors’ genuine attempt at discerning the aspirations and seeking the path towards compromise. The ray of hope created in the people, especially the youth, did not find matching energy or sense of commitment and continuity in the establishment.  The demand by the State Government to do away with AFSPA and the contestation by the Army only helped create wrong narratives and took the focus away from the emerging situation.  Drift was the order of the day with little idea of the direction towards which it was heading. It is this drift and the dashing of hope of the people that led to the rise of Burhan Wani and the renewed romanticism with the gun.  It was brushed aside as just an isolated resurgence among renegades but the groundswell of support eluded our assessment. The flood of 2014, followed by the elections, the heavy voter turnout, attempts at political experimentation, its initial disappointments and the passing away of Mufti Sayeed, all kept the eye away from the scanner.  The engagement with the people once again became transactional providing the window that was needed by the Separatists to energize the movement. Pakistan had probably never considered that an opportunity was emerging and emerging fast. It desisted from anything major in the Valley and concentrated its focus South of Pir Panjal in its strategy of keeping the fires burning. Recall that major actions in the Valley had ceased prior to 8 Jul 2016. In repeated assessments I wrote at that time that making things happen in the Valley was becoming increasingly more difficult forcing Pakistan’s efforts to the Jammu sector because it was easier to infiltrate and execute actions in a single night. Pakistan found that the ground under its feet in the Valley had substantially shifted as Burhan and his friends were not listening to Pakistani advice nor remain under the tutelage of Syed Salahuddin and the United Jihad Council.

It may be important to note from a lessons point of view that the new militancy characterized by the presence of social media wielding youth was little understood by the establishment, intelligence agencies and the media. Their assessments were archaic and based on assumed beliefs. While the youth may have focused on weapon snatching to overcome arms shortage, many were also killed in encounters. All the while they were building a new narrative of resistance through social media outreach. The state was observing this but did little to launch an effective counter in the domain that mattered, social media or any form of communication to the public. Simultaneously a quiet process of radicalization was also on. Social media, ideology and   religion are the last things that security establishments understand because it involves rebooting, relearning, mastering technology and most importantly getting to know the religious underpinnings of the time. With their typical tenure based approach to problem solving the establishment of the security forces (SF) does not display the capability to assess intellectually or learn nuances beyond the ordinary response involving gun on gun. Intelligence agencies have a better measure of institutional continuity but lack the means of persuasion to convince and thereby alter understanding and planning. It is not as if the media had any measure of things to come. Mainstream media was suggesting in late 2013 that the Army should withdraw and give the dividends of success achieved to the people of Kashmir in terms of more freedom of space from the constraining environment brought on by large uniformed presence.

This is not a blame game assessment but an attempt to look at areas where perhaps the ideas of the time remained out of sync with the situation. One of them surprisingly is also in the domain of military deployment. The Army always laid great stress on North Kashmir. This was quite natural with three of its major formation headquarters located there and the task of counter infiltration based on LoC deployment which is essentially  Army oriented.  The romance attached to big ticket achievements in forest tracts also colored the view. By contrast South Kashmir had only a single Rashtriya Rifles (RR)) force headquarters but it had Pulwama, Shupian, Anantnag and Pampore, all trouble spots where better educated youth reside. In sheer statistics of achievements in terms of terrorists killed, the three army formations of the north out did Victor Force the South Kashmir based formation. It created a picture for the leadership that the focus was required in North Kashmir and the south could be treated as a bank for resources because the achievement pattern there was in bits and pieces. In effect the mistake made was that the period of the Nineties and early millennium was forgotten when the major operations and achievements were in the south. The lesson for planners is simple; absence of or lower level of military achievements does not mean normality. It is the social parameters which need to be viewed. Not having done that and not having had an eye on history cost all of us dear. The virtual denudation of the southern belt below Shupian Kulgam and the overall inadequacy of troops in the south allowed the local militancy to bloom.  When it did we fought it in the physical domain while it was actually flowering in the virtual and psychological domain.

There are at least three areas of focus essential to contain and progress towards normality. First the deployment of all forces must be more balanced and no premature withdrawal should be executed on basis of statistical inputs. Second, the fight in the psychological domain can no longer be ignored. This needs an approach beyond what the Army has provided; the Army‘s achievements were highly creditable but can no longer remain the only domain of focused strategic communication. Lastly, the continuity factor in a hybrid conflict environment has to be taken into consideration. Personnel management practices cannot override national needs and the best talent must be made available to fight the enemies of the state. It is only then that the campaign becomes comprehensive.

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Taking it too far: A tank should have no place on any campus.

S Nihal Singh

THE amazing proposal of JNU VC Jagadesh Kumar to station an Army tank on the campus is the tip of the iceberg. In reality, it represents the second phase of the Sangh Parivar’s programme to change the idea of India.The first phase of the ruling dispensation was to “catch’em young”, as the old adage would have it. It began with the indoctrination of young schoolchildren by revising textbooks, banning foreign language instruction. For older school-goers, a drastic revision of textbooks was undertaken, with the Mughal period airbrushed, new heroes lauded and the myths of the RSS propagated. The indefatigable RSS warrior, Dina Nath Batra, is still at it, calling for editing of India’s Nobel laureate poet Rabindranath Tagore to take out words of foreign origin.   The second phase of the BJP’s programme is the militarisation of Indian society. The Parivar has always been jingoistic in its nationalism and what the world witnessed in the 20th century through the rise of Nazism and Mussolini’s fascism comes naturally to it. Employing the venue of the JNU has a ring of triumphalism for the Parivar’s supporters because the institution has long been in its sights. The JNU is all that the Parivar abhors: free thinking along several shades of the Left, a fraternity of rebels, as every such institution should be, and scholarship combined with testing the limits of conventions. Like the early morning drills with staves that are the staple of the RSS, the Parivar prizes obedience also to the myths of a bygone age.Thus the appeal of Jagdesh Kumar to the former Army chief and now a junior minister, Gen VK Singh (retd), to get him a tank for the university is a natural follow-up of the Parivar’s philosophy. Nationalism has to be clothed in the Tricolour to be effective after the examples of Hitler and Mussolini. And with the elections of 2019 looming on the horizon, few high-level decisions are taken without the electoral calendar in mind. The Parivar misses few occasions to conflate religion with politics. Its very ideal of a Hindu India derives from the nation being a Hindu country with Muslims and other minorities living on sufferance, as it were. Religion can be a potent force, as we have seen in the Arab world in more recent times, but it is ultimately raw nationalism that, given the right circumstances, drives peoples to frenzy.Cow protection vigilantes, fake or genuine, and their fondness for lynching those transporting cattle often to death are one aspect of mixing religious creed and the Hindu veneration of the cow with criminal activity. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s dilemma is that he cannot cross the red lines drawn by the RSS and after long delays in commenting upon brutal acts of barbarity, he has now chosen to pass on the buck to the BJP-ruled states. But the problem will not go away.The problem of the militarisation of the country is of a different order. It is, in a sense, moulding the mind of the young into an attitude of obedience because discipline is a sine qua non of a good Army. And in the Parivar, discipline and obedience are valued above all virtues. The Parivar is obsessed with discovering the cause of foreign conquerors ruling India over centuries. Its simple conclusion seems to be that it was the people’s unpreparedness for war and the martial arts that let foreigners invade and rule. Thus far, its recipe is two-fold: the morning drill with staves substituting for guns and building of and conjuring up a golden ancient age in which India was a superpower.We have it on the authority of Modi that modern planes flew in ancient India, a country then proficient in cosmetic surgery and transposing heads and reaching a very high level of knowledge. His speech at an opening ceremony of a Mumbai hospital lauding the wonders of ancient India was quickly deleted on the web, but his beliefs are a reminder that he spent his formative years in the RSS cradle.Thus far, the JNU Vice-Chancellor’s suggestion of installing a tank on the campus has invited much derision and a riposte from the JNU Teachers Association suggesting that the university cannot be made into a “theatre of war”, and that the JNU was not a “boot camp”. But the ruling dispensation is serious about its intent to spread the message across institutions of learning that the armed forces must be an object of adulation and the discipline that keeps them alert and ready for all eventualities is the new motto of the patriotic student.This new campaign to reboot the country’s student population is bound to fail because although the BJP’s student wings will do all they can to burrow their way into unions’ leadership posts, the young are by nature rebellious and somewhat wild. It is an acknowledged fact that every conservative in later life was once a fire-breathing Left-wing student. If the space for dissent in student politics is closed, the young can only go to extreme philosophies to express themselves. There is little reason to doubt the seriousness of the Parivar in militarising the student body. But it remains an open question whether it has thought through the seriousness of the consequences of its decision on the country’s future. Leaving students with no option but to espouse extremist creeds to express their rebelliousness even as the country’s security forces are already fighting Maoists and others is a bad idea.The occasion for pronouncing Kumar’s words of wisdom was the celebration of the Kargil Vijay Diwas for the first time in the university’s history. Whether the tank will duly arrive remains to be seen but the thought processes of the Parivar and its supporters are clear. The RSS has reluctantly given up shorts for trousers for its obligatory morning drill but its thought processes have not changed.

As Aadhaar becomes the norm in India, and gets skewered for the involuntary nature of its imposition, our northern neighbours, as is their wont, want to do a number that will make this appear benign. That’s the proposed ‘social credit’, which the non-profit Freedom House, in its latest report, describes as a regime that “would connect each citizen’s financial, social, political, and legal data to produce a single numerical rating of his or her behaviour and trustworthiness.” Fittingly, it’s coordinated by the Orwellian-sounding Central Leading Group for Comprehensively Deepening Reforms. This reality contrasts with the alternate vision seen by some in recent months of China occupying a central place in the world as Donald Trump’s America withdraws into itself.
That the Chinese machinery has managed to further such propaganda is no surprise. As China unveiled a monumental $200 million new embassy building in Washington in 2010, it was a symbolic and in-yourface marker of its outsize ambitions. It employs lobbyists across the K Street corridor of the Beltway, including some dedicated to image-making for its ambassador. American companies with manufacturing bases in China are force multipliers for Beijing, while inroads into American academia and media add to its influence. China has ventured capital into Silicon Valley. Its investments into Hollywood, for instance, have made support for Tibet within the film community nearly non-existent.
Those are credible reasons why voices once raised over China’s actions, in Tibet or Xinjiang, have been muted to whispers, of the sort that country’s netizens have to resort to in questioning the regime, since even Winnie the Pooh can be blacklisted by the Chinese checkers for bearing an alleged resemblance to President Xi Jinping. Money can talk but, even better, it can buy silence.
As a result, the death by negligence of Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo attracts bromides from the White House. As China watcher Jocelyn Ford poignantly noted in an article for Asia Society, this summer as Liu was essentially condemned to death, the World Economic Forum had its annual summer meeting in China. Despite its tagline ‘committed to improving the state of the world’, she wrote, it “self-censors on issues that China may take as an affront.” Beijing uses its support for a globalism, for example the Paris climate agreement, as it segues into its practical and tactical agenda.
Yet another Nobelist, the Dalai Lama, meanwhile, once had to exit the Obama White House via the back, walking out amidst ranks of garbage bags. While the human rights industrial complex hums along nicely in the democratic world, it confronts a barrier in the Great Wall of China.

The world, led by the United States, has vacated the moral space in challenging China. And that has allowed Beijing to, literally, push the boundaries of its megalomania. India’s vaunted soft power projection may have its votaries, but the Chinese velvet glove has punched its way into the heavyweight category.

The new bridge inaugurated at Chumathang on the Leh-Loma road. Tribune Photo

Tribune News Service

Jammu, July 21

The Border Roads Organisation (BRO) in eastern Ladakh has created yet another landmark by constructing the Chumathang bridge in the region.The bridge will connect Leh with important towns like Hanle and Loma in addition to the upcoming tourist destination of the Tso Morari lake.The 111 Road Construction Company (RCC ) of the 16 Border Road Task Force (BRTF) under Project Himank led by Brigadier DM Purvimath, Chief Engineer, has launched this 50-metre class 70 ton steel structure across the Chumatang nullah, which will facilitate smooth movement of various military and civilian vehicles on this important axis.The BRO is executing the work for upgrade of the Leh-Loma axis from the existing single lane to double lane, including replacement of existing temporary bridges.The Chumathang bridge was inaugurated by Lt Gen SK Shrivastava, Director General Border Roads, on Thursday during a solemn inauguration ceremony. He complimented the team of the 111 RCC for having completed the bridge despite the extreme working conditions in the region.Speaking on the occasion, he asked all ranks of Project Himank to make efforts to expedite the double-laning work of the Leh–Loma road as well as efficient maintenance and upgrade of other roads in the eastern Ladakh region.