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Indian army fights losing battle over
truth
By Sultan Shahin
NEW
DELHI - The shame of Hill Kaka is deepening, and it has
already overshadowed the ignominy associated with the
Kargil incident of 1999 when Pakistani troops slipped
into Indian territory.
As if it was not enough
that hundreds of Pakistan-backed militants had been
occupying a so-called "liberated zone" of about 100
square kilometers for the past four years 35 kilometers
deep inside Indian territory in Kashmir, it now
transpires that the Indian army has allowed them to
escape alive and hide within Indian territory, while
claiming to have killed many of them in the month-long
Sarp vinash (Destruction of serpents)
Security agencies have now warned of major
terrorist offensives in the Doda, Rajouri and Poonch
areas of the Jammu region and the Shopian area of the
Kashmir Valley as more than 90 percent of the terrorists
hiding in the Hill Kaka region are understood to have
fled to these regions to escape the army's offensive.
Last week's suicide attack on Indian army barracks at
Sanjwan near Jammu, the winter capital of Kashmir,
killing at least 12 sleeping soldiers, is also being
attributed to these militants.
India's Press
Trust of India quoted sources in the Home Ministry as
saying that intelligence agencies have submitted a
report stating that several hundred terrorists belonging
to Pakistan-based outfits, including the Lashker-e-Taiba
(LeT), the Jaish-e-Mohammed, the Jamiat-ul-Mujahideen
and the Hizbul Mujahideen escaped from Hill Kaka
following an army attack.
The report confirmed
that only 28 terrorists had been killed during the
entire operation, despite claims by army authorities
that over 100 terrorists had been killed during April
and May this year. A private television channel, NDTV
24x7, put the figure of dead militants at only 24. The
first media outlet to investigate and break the news,
Frontline magazine (July 4), from the prestigious Hindu
group of publications, claimed that only 27 terrorists
may have been killed. It, however, threw doubts over
even this figure as the army has neither provided
neither the dead bodies nor photographic evidence to
back its claims.
Data available with the Jammu
and Kashmir police, who are informed by army authorities
after all encounters with terrorists, also show that 27
terrorists were eliminated, which included 14 killed by
the Nine Para army unit on April 22. It said that the
majority of terrorists had sneaked into neighboring
places in Jammu and Kashmir and that the army should
widen the scope of its operations to counter those
elements. The army, which had not fully appreciated
earlier messages from the intelligence agencies, has now
been asked to go after the militants, sources in the
agencies told the Press Trust of India.
During
the operation against Hill Kaka, the army was also not
able to find any big haul of weaponry as the
intelligence agencies suspect that the majority of it
had already been taken out of the area to safe places in
Thana Mandi and the Darhal forest areas of Rajouri.
Defense journalist Praveen Swami, who
investigated the Hill Kaka episode for Frontline, points
to the wild inconsistency in the claims of 103 militants
killed and the number and types of weapons recovered. He
concludes, "Now here is the unhappy truth: Operation
Sarp vinash is a hoax that is unprecedented in
the annals of the Indian army. It is a hoax that has
brought its perpetrators one step closer to medals and
promotions, but has undermined India's claims on
cross-border terrorism, dishonored the sacrifices made
by military and police personnel fighting in Jammu and
Kashmir, and committed troops to a sapping and
counter-productive mountain ground-holding commitment."
Most intriguing, it appears that the army was
aware for at least two years of the presence of
militants in the Hill Kaka region. North India's
largest-circulation newspaper the Hindustan Times
alleged in a front page report on Monday that the army
had "misled public opinion by denying the massive
occupation of Indian territory by Pakistani terrorists
around the Hill Kaka bowl in Jammu and Kashmir even when
the information became public two years ago." A
large-circulation newspaper in the local Hindi language,
Dainik Jagran, published a graphic account of the
"complete control" of the upper reaches of Rajouri by
terrorists on August 2, 2001. The army aggressively
denied this.
The Jagran report attributed its
report to security agencies and warned that Pakistani
terrorists were attempting to "repeat Kargil". It quoted
the then Jammu and Kashmir police chief A K Suri as
saying that "terrorists started infiltrating into this
area in large numbers barely a few days after Indo-Pak
hostilities ceased in Kargil in July 1999, and that
infiltration had kept continuously rising since". The
report said that these occupied areas were being used as
bases to stage niggling attacks on security forces and
unleashing terror in Poonch, Mandi, Surankot, Balakot
and Mendhar. A large number of armed encounters were
mentioned as an index of terrorist activity in the area.
The army shot off a press release the same day (August
2, 2001), describing the report as "baseless, factually
incorrect and misleading".
Indians tend put the
army on a pedestal. They lionize their soldiers. While
they are prepared to put up with dereliction of duty on
the part of any other government servant, they don't
want to hear about any shameful incident involving the
army. So the shame of Kargil, where the army was
literally caught napping four years ago, and had to pay
a heavy price in terms of hundreds of lives lost, had
been quickly buried following an official investigation
to whitewash the army's failure to detect intruders in
time.
Pakistani militants and soldiers had then
occupied several Indian mountain peaks in the Kargil
area of Kashmir and were living there along with their
heavy weaponry for months before some shepherds saw a
few of them by chance and reported them. It was only
after they reported a second sighting a couple of months
later that the army took them seriously enough to send
some soldiers to investigate. Before this the army had
been reporting every fortnight after a supposed (fake)
trip to the uninhabited mountain peaks that all was
well.
It is beginning to dawn on some observers
that what has led to the shame of Hill Kaka now is the
way in which the shame of Kargil had been handled by the
political establishment. The ruling Bharatiya Janata
Party (BJP) was in the middle of a general election
campaign at that time. It didn't want any controversy to
take away from its claims of victory in Kargil, even
though it had come at great cost and with the
intervention of the then-president of the United States,
Bill Clinton, who brokered a deal with Pakistan's then
premier-Nawaz Sharif.
Though a rightwing party
of Hindu fundamentalists with a strong focus on national
security in its agenda, the BJP acted with its political
interests in mind. Incompetent army officials were
promoted and awarded medals. The lone officer in Kargil
who had been demanding troop reinforcements for some
time before the discovery of the intrusion was
unceremoniously sacked and is now embroiled in a case in
the High Court. Brigadier Surinder Singh was obviously
made a scapegoat to atone for the errors of his
superiors. Over 40 other officers of the rank of major
and below faced censure on charges ranging from command
failure to cowardice. The senior officers formed what
Swami calls "a close-knit cabal" to protect themselves
and their political masters from the consequences of
errors of judgment and strategic appraisals.
As
all sections of Indian people, from the media to
opposition parties, connived at the turn of events after
Kargil, for reasons of their own, it is absurd for them
to express outrage at the shame of Hill Kaka now. After
all, the same officers who had allowed the outrage of
Kargil to be perpetrated are in charge of the situation
now. Indeed, they are now holding even more responsible
positions.
The BJP's attitude has surprised many as
it has made a career out of championing national
security. Among other things, Kargil had revealed, for
instance, as former intelligence officer R K Raghavan
points out, a hiatus between the producers of
intelligence and those who used it in the field. The
Kargil review committee headed by defense analyst K
Subrahmanyam had said that there was "no
institutionalized mechanism for coordination or
objective-oriented interaction between the agencies and
consumers at different levels". The committee hoped that
the creation of a National Security Council (NSC) would
help. But not a single meeting of the NSC has taken
place since its formation.
Pakistan, it would
appear, has a much better measure of Indian defense
capabilities than the Indians. It did not waste any time
at all in perpetrating Hill Kaka once its gambit in
Kargil had been foiled by a couple of shepherds. Now, a
fear of other such "liberated zones" existing in
Kashmir, providing militants with much-needed bases, is
real enough. At this rate, one would probably not be
surprised if Pakistani President General Pervez
Musharraf's claim that militants are not being trained
on Pakistani soil proves to be correct. Why should
Pakistan use its own territory for training militants if
it can do the same on Indian soil?
Columnist
Pravin Sawhney points to the possibility of another
danger facing India in the Pioneer newspaper, "President
Musharraf has declared that had there been a war,
Pakistan would have resorted to unconventional means
against India. Experts in India concluded that the
Pakistan army chief had hinted at a use of nuclear
weapons. What he actually meant was that terrorists
would have played havoc with the Indian army's internal
lines of communication. This would have prevented the
Rashtriya Rifles [a counterinsurgency wing of the army]
from providing the second line of defense on the LoC
[Line of Control].
Even before the discovery of
the hoax perpetrated by the army in claiming to have
fought a war that it hadn't, India was outraged.
Comments in the Hindustan Times summarized the popular
reaction: "The discovery of terrorist camps on the
Indian side of the border is a scandal which even
outdoes the shame of the initially undetected Kargil
incursion. The Indian government never tires of pointing
out Pakistan's double game when it comes to turning the
infiltration tap off. Unfortunately, the sin of being
caught napping at the border post - with the knowledge
that there are constant machinations under way which put
the nation's security in serious jeopardy - is
unpardonable. India has been caught as much sinning as
sinned against in this department."
The Indian
media are traditionally reluctant to publish stories
about scandals involving the army. But in the face of
overwhelming evidence of the army's dereliction of duty,
coupled with deception and fraud, it is opening up.
Gradually newspapers and television channels are
beginning to publish stories they had known of for some
time. One can expect some more revelations in due
course.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co,
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