What
happens to democracy when an army is at war in peacetime?
By Dr. MALEM NINGTHOUJA
On 3 December, Attorney General of
India (AGI) Mukul Rohatgi told the Supreme Court, “The army is
only discharging its sovereign function of defending the country
from external aggression and terrorist attacks, it cannot be blamed
if some people are killed. The killings are part of the sovereign
function discharged by the Union of India through the army.” This
was the government's explanation for rejecting the 2013 report of
Justice Santosh Hegde Committee. The apex court had set up the
committee to probe alleged extrajudicial killings in the Northeast
in the name of “encounters”.
The government's defence of murder by
‘security forces’ is in a piece with its stand on the draconian
Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), which has been widely
condemned across civil society for giving impunity to men in uniform
carrying out heinous crimes as part of counterinsurgency operations.
Rohatgi's submission in the Supreme Court was a rationalisation of
this impunity as well as a plea for further militarisation of the
conflict-torn region.
Opinions are divided on the timing and
political wisdom of the statement, though the regime in New Delhi
seems quite happy with it. For the BJP-led government, it is just a
prelude to more chest-thumping “surgical” operations against
“anti-nationals”. It also serves a more partisan political
purpose: such “bold” words from a representative of the regime,
that too in a court of law, is likely to help galvanise the support
of “nationalist” zealots for a government no longer as confident
of its feet on the ground as it was when it took power in May 2014.
Killing in the “national interest” gives strength to those who
reach out to the people in the name of an “imagined nation”.
The devil in the details, though,
unveils the following implications of the attorney general's
statement:
From denial to justification
The AGI’s statement was the last
attempt to defend the men who killed civilians in cold blood during
peacetime. So far, men in uniform have got away with murder through
a tangled process that starts with denial of involvement in the
crime. When that fails to pass muster with public opinion, evidence
is tampered with and impunity under AFSPA is invoked. If the crime
still manages to make it to the courts, the complexity of the
proceedings further brings down the possibility of justice.
In 2012, the Supreme Court responded
to a writ petition filed against 1,528 alleged extrajudicial
killings in the Northeast. It came as a breath of fresh air into the
claustrophobic chambers of impunity in cases of State violence. A
committee was appointed under Justice Hegde the following year to
investigate six cases. Testimonies and hectic hearings by the
committee revealed that all six were indeed cases of extrajudicial
killings.
Once the report was out, denial was no
longer an option for the security forces. No wonder the central
government's focus shifted to devising a politically emotive
statement aimed at inciting jingoism and mounting pressure on the
judiciary to justify the killings. The Hegde report had to be
consigned to the dustbin to protect the offenders from the law.
A boost to militarisation
The AGI’s statement falls easily
into the pattern of militarisation and its justifications that India
has seen since 1947. The edifice of the ‘nation’ that won
freedom from British rule was built on the military destruction of
the then existing princely states and the suppression of
recalcitrant tribes and other communities. Yet, it was the
insurgencies in Kashmir and the Northeast that are blamed for
forcing the Indian State to militarise these regions and impose
AFSPA on the people.
So, it's no surprise that the current
ruling party and its predecessors speak in one voice on the issue of
militarisation. On 17 August 2004, the then home minister Shivraj
Patil told Lok Sabha that it was “our bounden duty to see that the
morale of the armed forces is not allowed to be attacked.”
Top officers in the security
establishment in the Northeast, too, echo the same sentiment. For
instance, in response to a Human Rights Watch report in 2008, former
Manipur DGP Y Joykumar said “insurgency was an incurable disease”
that left them no other choice than eliminating the insurgents. In
2010, the Director General of Assam Rifles, India's oldest
paramilitary force that spearheads counterinsurgency in the
Northeast, said, “We (soldiers) function under orders and hence
our interests need to be protected.”
The underlying logic of this mindset —
buttressed by the dominant global narrative on the War on Terror —
is that more militarisation is the only possible response to
insurgency and whenever troops are deployed to fight insurgents,
there would be some degree of indiscriminate killings and violation
of rights, and so the security forces must be allowed some degree of
impunity to be able to do their job.
Propaganda is King
In the absence of political and
economic initiatives to address the systemic fault lines that run
through the body politic, insurgency is a given. The corollary is
that only the sincerity and demonstrable success of such initiatives
can make insurgencies redundant. But what does a government do when
the Indian State has failed so far to accomplish much of that?
In the Northeast, for instance, the
government's substitute for structural transformation is increased
reliance on the means of violence at its command to graft the
official version of Indian nationalism — to tattoo it on people's
minds, so to speak — by crushing the resistance by all means
possible.
The repercussions are mindboggling.
For instance, many critics of the counterinsurgency policy point out
that the desperation to beat down long-raging insurgencies has often
forced the State to manipulate various groups into working at
cross-purposes and promoting sectarian conflicts among them. Many go
on to argue that the policymakers and the bureaucracy do not want
the insurgency to end as it is a golden goose that yields huge
dividends in the name of funds for counterinsurgency, some of which
ends up in the coffers of the corrupt.
Among those at the receiving end of
the counterinsurgency stick, however, there is little doubt that it
is the defining factor that curtails the possibility of exercising
all the rights guaranteed by the Constitution of India. Also, it
would be misplaced to pin the blame on security personnel alone, as
they are trained primarily to engage the enemy in do-or-die battles,
not assist the civil administration. No wonder avoiding collateral
damage is often a tall order for a counterinsurgent force.
So, how does the government try to
minimise the chances of people's rage against State violence
snowballing into democratic pressure to rethink the basics of the
dominant model of counterinsurgency? That's where propaganda comes
in. Deceptive jargon such as “national security”,
“counter-terrorism”, “law and order problem” and more come
handy to confuse and distort. The propaganda cover to questionable
acts of violence by the ‘security forces’ is provided by a vast
network of the disseminators of political misinformation set up by
the State.
The weapon of choice in the propaganda
war involves dehumanising the insurgency by reducing it to a few
insistently repeated negative phrases, images and concepts. Repeated
a thousand times, the proverbial lie acquires the status of
objective truth, served cut-and-dried to millions of unsuspecting
consumers who lap it up without asking questions. That is how a huge
sections of the masses come to believe that the victims of
militarisation are outside the perimeter of democracy and deserve no
rights. The AGI’s statement justifying killing citizens in
the name of nationalism is just more of the same.
Us vs Them: A State of War
In November 2012, the Supreme Court
expressed shock and asked “how can a state government file an
affidavit stating that they are killing ‘us’ and so we are
killing ‘them’... Are we in a state of war?” The fake
encounters probed by the Justice Hegde committee had all been
carried out in cold-blooded manner during peace time, and had little
to do with “collateral mistakes” as wrongly interpreted in the
AGI's submission.
The AGI may dismiss <Blood on My
Hands: Confessions of Staged Encounters> by investigative
journalist Kishalay Bhattacharjee, even though it is based on
“anonymous confessions” by an army officer, but how will he
console the thousands of victims of State violence? What can he do
to rectify a system that allows troops to kill and torture at will,
also to fulfil vested personal interests such as scoring more
‘points’ for promotion and pride, extortion, settling personal
grudges, or in pursuit of malicious emotions such as sexual
aggression, jealousy and hatred, or simply enjoying it as a game of
domination that pleases a sadist?
The culture of impunity also promotes
the growth of a category of criminals as collaborators, who indulge
in different types of crimes without fear because of their
connection with the ‘security forces’.
The AGI’s statement reflects the
degree of militarisation that the State finds acceptable in some
parts of India where citizens and their fundamental rights,
including the right to life, are “officially” treated as
secondary to the ‘nation’. In every region that is declared
“disturbed” under AFSPA, the top priority of the State is to
uphold the dominant idea of “national interest” even at the cost
of innocent lives.
New Delhi’s spirit of tolerance
towards unrestrained growth and spread of the culture of impunity in
which the army and other law enforcing agencies operate, has been
built on jingoism, invoked, promoted and justified by the polemics
of an infallible “mother nation” and intolerance towards
insurgency. Few care to find out how the “nationalist” rhetoric
is manufactured and blunders defended in the name of the ‘nation’.
One symptom of the malaise that
impunity for security forces promotes among people in “disturbed
areas” is the craze among many youngsters to join the very forces
whose excesses they protest against. The craze is because no other
vocation provides that kind of access to the means of exercising
brute power on other individuals, and also enables corrupt
money-making on the side. Indeed, “national interest” seems to
be the last of the concerns on the ground. If this remains
unchecked, it won't be long before the ‘nation’ is eaten up by
“national security”.
- See more at:
http://ilps.info/index.php/en/current-events/statements-and-press-releases/142-middle-east/929-killing-in-the-name-of-the-indian-nation#sthash.rE3QqKLV.dpuf
No comments:
Post a Comment