An army, media-trained

On the right hand side is the EME (Electrical Mechanical Engineers) battalion camp. There is the usual, mechanically operated bar, as the first check point before you reach the strong steel gate. There is a five feet distance between the bar and the gate.

At 6 a.m. on Tuesday, a small blue van appears outside the bar and the gate. Did the van, carrying the militants, crash past the bar? No. Just at that moment, a motor cycle is leaving the camp. The bar lifts.

Three men alight from the van, cross the bar (lifted to facilitate the passage of the motorcycle), and ask the sentry to open the gate. The sentry is shot. Two of the intruders are in military uniform. The third is in “civvies”. In front of the gate is a metal road, leading to barracks and other structures on either side.

The militant who is in civilian clothes is checked by two jawans in a bunker facing the gate, fires his AK 56, runs up the road. He is shot dead. Meanwhile, two have run behind the building on the right, towards a motor repair shed where some men are working. Four are shot. The militants continue towards the unit’s temple. Pandit Govind Tripathi, purohit of the unit, is shot dead. (This and the attack on Vaishno Devi pilgrims is designed to invite a communal backlash).

By now the two are being fired upon from directions difficult to fix in the confusion. From the temple, the two run past a thick “Ecology Preservation Jungle”. One crosses the main road on which his companion in civilian clothes is lying dead. He reaches the JCO dormitory. An exchange of fire leaves him dead in front of the dorm. Where is the third militant?

Since Tanda is only 30 kms from Jammu, the media, cameramen, OB vans etc all have laid siege to the corps commander’s officer. Meanwhile, officers in the camp have blocked the chunk of the national highway in front of the EME camp. At 10.30 a.m. an “all clear” is indicated. The road is reopened to traffic. But where is the third militant?

Any inquiry will have to sort out this riddle. Did the bleary eyed keepers of the EME battalion only notice two militants? If they saw three, why was search not continued until the body of the third was found? If the body was not located, the only conclusion could be that the third terrorist was lurking in the camp. Under these circumstances, how did the senior-most officers of the northern command, audaciously walk down the same road where the terrorist in civvies was shot dead in the morning?

The senior officers walked along the road, on their way to examine the body of the militant killed in front of the JCO dorm. This is what officers in the camp told me. Really? Do army commanders examine bodies of dead terrorists? Such hand crafted dedication would be unheard of in the annals of military history.

In the event, what happened? As the group walked past the “Ecology Jungle”, the third militant leapt from the jungle, his body draped in explosives, and pounced on the group, fatally wounding Brig. V.K. Govil of the EME and causing injury to all. It is probably a matter of pointless detail that two of the militants had “Janbaz” inscripted on their epaulettes. One of them had also disguised himself as a lieutenant in the Pakistan army.

There are several lessons to be learnt from the episode, but I shall focus on one. When I first covered the ministry of defence in the late ’60s and ’70s, the Statesman was the army’s favoured newspaper and the rest did not matter. Today, the army is confronted by a media explosion — alert, competitive journalists covering events to saturation point. Before news of militant activity reaches army headquarters, the top brass have watched snippets on TV and experts have expended their punditry on the event.

The poor, untrained, army PR attached to unit X or Y, has been forced to blurt out his tentative version before the event has even registered with his superiors. If the PR is on the screen regularly, why should the brigadier and the general miss out in the media free-for-all? Not just the national media, the local press is posing its own challenge. The local media can unknowingly become the carrier of the militant’s message.

There is a reason why economic ministries have developed a degree of sophistication in handling the media: Professionalism rubs off on these ministries during their interaction with the media savvy private industry. But the army is a bit of a frog-in-the-well. So, when an incident like Tanda takes place, and an energetic, persistent media knocks at the door of the army commander who has had no training in coping with the media, he reacts dramatically, sometimes tragically, as on that afternoon in the EME camp.

What is required is a new chain of command, of trained journalists, PR men and women, with generous inputs from private industry, virtually a new division before the armed forces are ready to cope with the challenges posed by the media — from the mofussil upto the national and international levels.

The adverse publicity attracted by Sarp Vinash, a perfectly efficient operation, also has something to do with this lack. All the wonderful work Indian peacekeeping troops have done remains largely an untold story because the armed forces have no tradition of professionally skillful interaction with the media. It is the new media pressure which is one of the reasons for the disastrous indiscretion committed by the army top brass at Tanda. This pressure will only grow and has to be professionally managed.