New York Times (May 3, 2012)
DELHI — In the fall of 2007, shortly after retiring as chief of the Indian army, J.J. Singh became president of the Delhi Gymkhana Club, one of those venerable social institutions where, sipping gin at the bar, it is difficult to imagine that the British ever left India. Pervez Musharraf was the president of Pakistan at the time, and the joke of the day was: See what distinguishes the two countries? While one army chief moves on to head a nation, the other moves on to head a social club.
Unlike the powerful Pakistani army, the Indian army has long been perceived as a largely benign, apolitical organization. Since India’s independence in 1947, it has fought several wars against Pakistan and China but expressed no political ambitions at home. And it has scored points with much of the population for being the face of rescue whenever large-scale disasters strike.
But this kindly perception is too partial, and it is preventing most Indians from understanding a major domestic crisis: the situation in Kashmir. There and in a few other border areas in the northeast, the Indian army has been fighting protracted insurgencies, and committing human rights violations in the process. Local populations are well aware of these abuses, of course, but the rest of India is not aware enough.
The Indian army functions in Kashmir like a state within the state, much as its counterpart does in Pakistan. Though Kashmir, a Muslim-majority area, became part of India after its Hindu king agreed to merge with the country at the time of Partition, it remains disputed territory. The current insurgency started as an armed movement with nationalist aims, but as support from Pakistan increased jihadi elements emerged much stronger.
The Indian army has fought the insurgency under the unusual protections conferred by the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (A.F.S.P.A.), which, among other things, shields any army personnel from being prosecuted in a criminal court without prior sanction from the central government. Abuses have abounded. Last year, a government human-rights commission published a detailed report about 2,156 bodies found in unmarked mass graves. Perhaps only some of these were victims of abuses by the security forces, but with the A.F.S.P.A. in place, people in Kashmir are willing to believe the worst.
Even for identified victims, justice is hard to come by. Also last year I reported for Open magazine on the case of Major Avtar Singh, who is wanted for the 1996 murder of Jaleel Andrabi, a human rights lawyer who had persistently denounced violations by the army. Singh is accused of having abducted Andrabi and taken him to an army camp, where Andrabi was tortured and killed and his body was later dumped in a river.
In 1997, even as the police were telling a Kashmiri court seized with the case that Singh could not be found, he was continuing to serve with the army in the neighboring state of Punjab. The court ordered that his passport be impounded, but somehow he managed to flee the country. He was traced only after being arrested for domestic violence in California in February 2011. Today, more than a year later, despite repeated court orders, the Indian government has yet to even complete the paperwork required to extradite Singh.
The army in Kashmir seems to believe that its own interests must be defended above those of the state. Over the past few years, the nature of the insurgency has changed: now young local men, not foreign-trained militants, are taking to the streets, and asking for independence. Though the army would naturally see its role in Kashmir diminish as a result, it has been unwilling to adjust.
It has withdrawn from some areas, including the state capital Srinagar and the district of Budgam. But it now stands as the largest obstacle to what might otherwise be a plausible solution to the crisis: recognizing as an international border the boundary that currently divides the parts of Kashmir that are controlled by India from those that are controlled by Pakistan, and granting the state of Kashmir within India greater autonomy.
The Indian government seems ready to make some of the necessary concessions. The democratically elected chief minister of Kashmir, Omar Abdullah, has proposed revoking the A.F.S.P.A. in the areas from which the army has withdrawn. The Indian minister in charge of internal security, P. Chidambaram, has seemed sympathetic to the idea. But the army chief V.K. Singh has said this is unacceptable because the army would need the legal protection if it ever redeployed in these areas.
Too bad the Indian army is less willing to make sacrifices for peace than for war.
Hartosh Singh Bal is political editor of Open Magazine and co-author of “A Certain Ambiguity.’’
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