Clear and Present Danger

This is the area in which Kishalay Bhattacharjee’s “Blood on My Hands: Confessions of Staged Encounters” shines through. It is, perhaps, the only book where a serving army officer, who has done counterinsurgency duties in Assam and Manipur, explains in detail how the system works. Although Bhattacharjee doesn’t disclose his identity, it is not very hard to surmise that the officer is a Colonel, who has commanded his infantry battalion and is now serving in a staff posting.

Although his confessions relate to the North East, most of the officer’s insights apply to other counterinsurgencies in India as well. For example, the classification of encounters into real, fake and false encounters. A real encounter is a genuine action between militants and soldiers; a fake encounter is when a genuine militant is killed in a staged action, while a false encounter means killing an outright innocent individual.

A lot of us would be willing to overlook a fake encounter but would definitely feel outraged by the killing of an innocent individual. Why does a false encounter happen? It is not a result of some sinister motives; rather, it is primarily driven by a quest for results within the army. Each unit wants to do well, earn a unit citation which needs a certain number of points. Points are awarded for each “kill”, weapons captured, surrenders and so on. The officers in the units want to do well, get more medals and be ahead in the race for promotions.

Insurgencies in decline present the toughest challenge. The senior commanders are still judging the results based on previous yardsticks when the militancy has gone down. It creates tremendous pressure on the unit and its commanding officer. This was particularly faced in the Kashmir Valley in the early 2000s when many of my friends posted with the Rashtriya Rifles found that a senior officer ask only one question on visiting them at their posts: “How many kills in the last two months?” Nothing else mattered.

Through that officer’s confession, Bhattacharjee builds the picture of a conflict economy where everything from weapon to innocent persons are available for money, and that money can come from the local army units allowing smuggling of drugs and timber. There might be some exaggerations in his account, and the situation in Kashmir where I served in uniform, was not as benign as in Assam, but it tells you of a system where everyone from political leadership to police to the army is in cahoots. The state has withered away to such an extent that there are no institutions which can provide checks and balances in a conflict torn area.

To add to the armyman’s confession, Bhattacharjee introduces us to Ananta Kalita, who miraculously survived a false encounter as the bullet into his forehead passed through his left jaw. He was pushed off the cliff but survived to tell the tale.

Then there are other explosive revelations. One chapter features some controversies which mattered in the saga of succession of army chiefs in the recent years. Although Bhattacharjee mentions no names, it is not hard to guess the army chief who went as the governor of Arunachal Pradesh, or who was commanding 3 Corps when his intelligence unit got involved in a dacoity case. For those in the know, the identity of a Muslim general who served in Northern Command allegedly being provided women by two brothers serving in the army is rather easy to guess.

Some people argue that these ugly actions mentioned in the book are needed to defeat insurgencies. They are wrong. These ugly tendencies only come to the fore when militancy has been contained and the violence controlled. The time is then ripe for the military to move out. For fears of revival of militancy or a lack of civil setup, the government plays safe by keeping the army there under the protection of AFSPA. Having developed its own institutional interests, the military is not keen to move out either. The conflict economy gets entrenched deeper and the cycle perpetuates itself.

The answer lies in finding a way to wean the state away from military support once militancy has peaked and is in decline. India has a few successful examples that are worthy of emulation: Mizoram and Tripura. The other alternative is to keep the military away as was done in Punjab where the state police took the lead in fighting militancy. Although Bhattacharjee devotes two chapters – one in the beginning and one in the end – he does not delve into this important area. These two chapters, focused on theory and academic research, also take away from the centerpiece of the book, the army officer’s confessions.

Many of the things mentioned in the book, perhaps, cannot be proven in a court of law. But it does not mean that they are not true. An awareness of how things happen, as detailed by Bhattacharjee in Blood on My Hands, is in fact essential to understanding India’s challenge in fighting and winning counterinsurgencies.