Kashmir Is Killing India’s Military and Democracy

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By Pankaj Mishra
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In July 1995, an Islamic fundamentalist group called Al Faran kidnapped six foreign tourists, including two Americans, in Kashmir. For a few weeks, the world’s attention was fixed on the Himalayan valley as the allegedly Pakistan-backed militants negotiated with Indian security officials and foreign diplomats.

Eventually, one of the Americans escaped. Another hostage, a Norwegian, was beheaded. The other four were never found.

“The Meadow: Kashmir 1995 -- Where the Terror Began,” a staggeringly well-researched new book by two respected journalists, Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark, concludes that the hostages were killed by local mercenaries funded and controlled by Indian army and intelligence.

The authors argue that the drawn-out negotiation, during which Indian intelligence allegedly knew the hostages’ whereabouts, was a charade, part of India’s larger effort to portray Pakistan as a sponsor of Islamist terror, thereby delegitimizing the Kashmiri struggle for freedom.

Certainly, India today no longer needs to highlight the role of the Pakistani army and intelligence in sponsoring extremist groups. It has also succeeded in shifting international attention away from the appalling facts of its counter-insurgency operations in Kashmir -- tens of thousands killed, and innumerable many tortured, mutilated and orphaned. The tallying in 2009 of 2,700 unmarked graves containing the remains of people (often buried in groups) killed by security forces barely provoked any comment in the international media, let alone expressions of concern by Western leaders.

Killers in Khaki
But India’s diplomatic and public relations success has been achieved at considerable costs: the rise of militaristic nationalism, the assault on civil liberties, and a dangerously enhanced role in politics for men in uniform.

Most of the million-plus men and women in the Indian military still manifest what Shashi Tharoor once described as “increasingly rare” qualities in India: “high standards of performance, honesty, hard work, self-sacrifice, incorruptibility, respect for tradition, discipline, team spirit.” As a child, I had myself wanted, like many Indians of my generation and class, to acquire the virtuous glow of an army officer’s uniform, and even attended a military school.

It was therefore shocking and demoralizing to encounter, during a visit to Kashmir in 2000, accounts of extrajudicial killings and torture and rape by Indian soldiers -- stories that, though commonplace in Kashmir, were largely kept hidden from the Indian public by a patriotic media.

But to those who reported from Kashmir in the past decade and a half -- as opposed to the many more who were content to disseminate briefings from Indian army and intelligence officials -- “The Meadow” presents a disturbingly familiar picture.

I was there when, during Bill Clinton’s visit to South Asia in March 2000, Indian army officers allegedly kidnapped and killed five Kashmiri villagers and presented their mutilated corpses to the international news media as the Pakistani killers of the 35 Sikhs who had been murdered by unidentified gunmen just hours before Clinton’s scheduled arrival in India. It has taken 12 years for India’s legal system even to acknowledge this well-documented atrocity: Last week, the Supreme Court gingerly asked the army how it wishes to prosecute the officers suspected of the coldblooded murder.

Since 2000, the number of armed militants has steadily decreased in Kashmir. But the human rights situation has not improved. Under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act in effect in Kashmir and the northeastern states (where the Indian army was first deployed in counter-insurgency), soldiers can kill on the basis of mere suspicion while continuing to enjoy near-total legal immunity.

Regime of ImpunityThe result is a regime of impunity. A coalition of Indian human rights groups in a report to the United Nations this year documented 789 extrajudicial killings in the northeastern state of Manipur alone between 2007 and 2010.

In recent years, the army has also been dragged into Operation Green Hunt, the Indian state’s extraordinarily big, armed offensive against Maoist insurgents in central India. Predictably, the use of scorched-earth tactics once deployed in border areas has undermined the general rule of law in the states of Jharkhand, Chattisgarh and West Bengal.

The widened powers of the military against the new electronic media’s background chorus of hypernationalism have given army officers a public role they never had. Breaking with old protocols, the previous army chief openly speculated about a “limited” war under a “nuclear overhang” with Pakistan.

It is also not at all clear if there is any proper governmental oversight of the Indian intelligence agencies, which, mimicking the doomed Pakistani quest for “strategic depth,” have been trying out potentially useful proxies in Pakistan’s Balochistan province as well as Afghanistan. These adventurist spies and the perennially belligerent men in uniform now seem to constitute as formidable a lobby against peace between India and Pakistan as the Islamic zealots on the other side of the border.

Backed by Hindu nationalist leaders, they even dare to overrule elected politicians such as Omar Abdullah, Kashmir’s chief minister, who has been pleading in vain for a withdrawal of the much-despised special powers act.

Their jingoism, echoed by hawkish think tanks and websites (India’s own military-intellectual complex), goes necessarily together with dubious arms purchases. India is now the world’s biggest arms market; a series of scandals have not stopped spending sprees that, as the recent outbursts of the outgoing army chief reveal, do little to prepare India for any conceivable war.

No Banana Republic
Things are about to get worse. The next Indian army chief comes into office later this month, trailed by allegations of his involvement in an extrajudicial killing in Kashmir. He was also in charge of Indian peacekeeping soldiers accused in 2008 of sexual misconduct in the Congo.

Unlike its Pakistani rival, the Indian army remains firmly under civilian control. A sensationalist recent story in a major Indian newspaper claimed that unauthorized movements of soldiers near New Delhi earlier this year had “spooked” the government. But it is hard to imagine the foolhardy army officers who would attempt a coup in India. Although beset by internal wars and draconian laws and chaotic governance, India is very far from degenerating into, as an exasperated Ratan Tata feared last year, a “banana republic.”

Yet there are plenty of reasons for alarm and dismay over a process that, starting in obscure battles in the northeastern states in the 1960s, was accelerated during the two previous decades in the valley of Kashmir. Levy and Scott-Clark’s book mainly excavates one of the many murky incidents of the 1990s. But its revised draft of history also sheds light on the present -- how a democratic state’s addiction to colonial-style dirty wars has damaged not so much the Kashmiri cause of freedom as India’s frail democracy and one of its last uncompromised institutions.

(Pankaj Mishra, whose new book, “From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia,” will be published in August, is a Bloomberg View columnist, based in London and Mashobra, India. The opinions expressed are his own.)

Today’s highlights: the View editors on bank-capital rules and force-placed insurance; William D. Cohan on e-mails from the fall of Lehman; Albert R. Hunt on congressional elections; Michael Ross on Vladimir Putin’s oil-money machinations.

About Pankaj Mishra
Pankaj Mishra is the author of "Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond," "The Romantics: A Novel" and "An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World."
To contact the writer of this article: Pankaj Mishra at pmashobra@gmail.com.

$4.5bn Indo-Israel arms deal

NEW DELHI 29 May: India and Israel are in the process of inking a $4.5 billion (Rs 20,000 cr) arms deal for air-to-ground and air-to-air missiles and other related systems. The deal could put Israel in the forefront once again as one of India's leading arms suppliers, reports Anuradha Mukherjee in The Sunday Guardian.

Official sources told The Sunday Guardian that the deal could contain a package of Derby and Python missiles, and even a hybrid of them, and other related equipment. The indigenous fighter, Tejas, is to be fitted with Derby air-to-air missiles from Rafael Advanced Systems.

Recent visits by the deputy chief of staff of the three services to Israel as part of a delegation led by Union Defence Secretary Pradip Kumar a few weeks ago indicated that the deals were meant for both the Air Force and the Navy. DRDO chief V.K. Saraswat was also in Israel recently to participate in the talks.

India's defence deals with Israel have faced criticism for the shroud of secrecy surrounding them. "We are buying arms without competitive bidding and transparency. To some extent, in the arms business, you have to make government to government deals. In our case, we don't even try to play one supplier against another to get competitive prices. The way India is making these procurements, we are paying much higher prices," said Brahma Chellaney, strategic analyst and professor with the Centre for Policy Research.

Saraswat's presence was required since these technologies were supposed to be undertaken as joint development programmes in which the DRDO usually ended up with a peripheral role, sources said.

Experts said that if the deal was cleared, it would be a major breakthrough from 2010, when several Israeli companies were blacklisted for irregularities in striking deals. The Israeli arms industry, which was beset by allegations of corruption, had also hit a bad patch in clinching the arms deals. The Ministry of Defence had admitted as much in Parliament in November 2010, but stopped short of naming the companies.

The Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), one of the most powerful Israeli arms manufacturers, was blacklisted by the MoD for its alleged involvement in the Ordnance Factory Board scam. Several other foreign companies were also blacklisted.

Chellaney said that with its offset policy Indian indigenous defence research did not stand much of a chance in the face of defence procurements from foreign countries. India diluted its offset policy earlier this year. The offset policy mandated that 50% raw material used in such joint projects had to be sourced from India. "Now it is not needed," said Chellaney. (Writer-South Asia)

US-NATO-JEWIS WAR: 'US Drones Kill 938 Pakistanis in 2010'

By: Sheikh GULZAAR
Srinagar, March 20 : The US has stepped up its drone attacks in Pakistan's tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, a new report by a Pakistani Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) says.

The Islamabad-based NGO, Conflict Monitoring Center, revealed the details of the deaths by US drone attacks in its annual report.

The report gives detailed accounts on how the CIA killed innocent people merely on the suspicion of being militants.

In 2010, the CIA carried out an unprecedented 132 drone attacks in tribal areas, claiming the lives of 938 people, it said.

The Conflict Monitoring Center points out that none of the media organizations throughout last year reported on body counts from independent sources.

Many analysts believe the geo-strategic game plan of the US has turned out to be counterproductive.

The year 2010 was one of the deadliest years for civilians living in the tribal regions, as the number of drone strikes exceeded the combined number of such attacks carried out from 2004 to 2009.

The report states that 2,052 people lost their lives in drone strikes during the 5-year period between 2004 and 2009. The rising civilian causalities have left behind many tragic stories in the tribal areas.

The reaction of Pakistani people against the frequent use of drone strikes is finally gathering momentum. In the worst of several US air strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan in recent days, up to 51 civilians were killed last Thursday in Afghanistan’s north-eastern Kunar province. General David Petraeus, the commander of the US forces in Afghanistan, expressed the colonial-style hostility of the occupation force’s senior command toward the Afghan population, reportedly accusing local residents of burning their children to fake evidence of civilian casualties.

In a five-hour operation on the night of February 17, US Apache helicopters strafed a group of alleged Afghan insurgents with gunfire, rockets and Hellfire missiles. Surveillance drones guided the helicopter assault in the mountainous district of Ghaziabad, near the Pakistan border, and according to the Washington Post, bombs were dropped by at least one of the unmanned Predator aircraft. The attack was one of a number of recent US operations in the district, ordered as part of President Barack Obama’s broader escalation of the Af-Pak war.

Rear Admiral Gregory Smith, senior military spokesman in Kabul, stated that three dozen people were killed in the incident. He maintained they were all “suspected insurgents who had gathered to attack US and Afghan troops”. However, the remarks of one unnamed military official, cited by theWashington Post on Monday, made clear that American authorities had no knowledge of the identities of those killed. The official admitted that those targeted had been wearing civilian clothes.

Kunar Governor Said Fazlullah Wahidi contradicted Smith’s claims. He said: “According to our information 64 people were killed: 13 armed opposition, 22 women, 26 boys and 3 old men.” The governor sent a three-man “fact-finding team” to the area on Saturday, which returned with seven injured people suffering burns and shrapnel wounds, including a young man and woman and five boys and girls.

Dr. Asadullah Fazli, chief doctor at the provincial hospital in Asadabad, the capital of Kunar, told the New York Times that the hospital had treated at least nine wounded from the area, including three women, four children and two men. One two-year-old girl had to have her leg amputated because of shrapnel injuries. The Times noted: “There were several other military operations in the area over the last few days, so it was not clear which one caused those injuries.”

In an attempt to defuse outrage among the Afghan population over the latest atrocity carried out by the occupation forces, President Hamid Karzai issued what has become a pro forma denunciation of American military operations. He stated that “about 50 civilians have been martyred” and pledged to send investigators to the scene of the killings.

Karzai met with his national security council and General Petraeus at the presidential palace in Kabul on Sunday. According to an account of the meeting published in the Washington Post, “Petraeus, the top US commander in Afghanistan, dismissed allegations by Karzai’s office and the provincial governor that civilians were killed and said residents had invented stories, or even injured their children, to pin the blame on US forces and force an end to the operation.”

One unnamed participant in the meeting said: “He claimed that in the midst of the [operation] some pro-Taliban parents in contact with a government official decided to create a civilian casualty claim to pressure international forces to cease the [operation]. They burned hands and legs of some of their children and sent them to the hospital.”

The discussion demonstrates the contempt with which the American military command regards Karzai, the figurehead first installed as Washington’s stooge shortly after the 2001 invasion.

The Washington Post reported that Karzai and his colleagues found Petraeus’s baseless allegations “deeply offensive” and “shocking”. One official declared: “Killing 60 people, and then blaming the killing on those same people, rather than apologising for any deaths? This is inhuman. This is a really terrible situation.”

Petraeus declined to respond to the published account of his meeting with the Afghan president. The day after his provocative remarks on the Kunar killings, more Afghan civilians were killed in a US air strike. In Qilgha village in Nangarhar province, immediately south of Kunar, a missile destroyed a family’s home, killing the parents and four children aged between three and eight who had been sleeping inside. The father, named Patang, was a member of the Afghan national army.

A provincial official told the AFP news agency that American forces had targeted three insurgents planting mines on nearby road, but had hit the home by mistake. NATO spokesmen confirmed there had been civilian casualties, but said no further details would be released, pending an investigation.

One village resident told Pajhwok Afghan News that foreign forces intercepted a vehicle taking the wounded father to hospital, halting it for two hours. “The troops beat us and tied our hands,” the man, Psarlay, said. “Meanwhile, Patang died because of excessive bleeding.”

Another resident, 26-year-old Ezatullah, told the Wall Street Journal: “The house was completely destroyed by the strike. Only two children [aged] four and six survived.” He added that “thousands of people attended the funeral of the slain family Monday and are planning a protest against coalition forces Tuesday”.

A report issued February 1 by the Afghanistan Rights Monitor (ARM) tallied at least 2,421 civilian deaths and 3,270 injuries inflicted last year by US-NATO forces, Taliban and resistance groups, and Afghan government police, soldiers, and militia. The violence in 2010 was the worst since the invasion a decade ago. The real casualty rate for civilians is likely to be significantly higher than the ARM tally, with US-NATO forces routinely covering up their crimes and labelling victims as “insurgents” or “terrorists”.

 The Obama-Petraeus counter-insurgency strategy effectively centres on the use of overwhelming force against the population, aimed at crushing continued resistance to the occupation of the resource-rich and strategically vital country. At the same time, the Obama administration has illegally extended the war into Pakistan, with US ground forces active in the border region near Afghanistan, backed by a steady bombardment of CIA drone missile attacks.

On Sunday and Monday, two drone attacks killed a reported 12 people. In the first incident, seven alleged militants were killed —including, according to Pakistani intelligence agents cited by various media outlets, an Iraqi Al Qaeda operative—after multiple missiles struck a house in the tribal agency of South Waziristan. Five more alleged militants were killed the next day in North Waziristan.

These operations mark the resumption of US drone attacks after a four-week pause—the longest period in which Pakistan had not been hit by American missiles since December 2009. The temporary cessation was widely believed to have been connected with Washington’s efforts to secure the release of CIA agent Raymond Davis, arrested on January 27 in Lahore on murder charges. Obama’s bombings have generated enormous anger among ordinary Pakistanis, and destabilised the government in Islamabad. The US government is nevertheless proceeding, underscoring the ruthlessness of its Af-Pak war.

An article in the Washington Post on Monday pointed to the indiscriminate character of the missile strikes. It explained that at least 581 alleged militants had been killed by drones in Pakistan last year, but just two of the victims had been previously listed on the US list of “most wanted” terrorists.

 “Despite a major escalation in the number of unmanned Predator strikes being carried out under the Obama administration, data from government and independent sources indicate that the number of high-ranking militants being killed as a result has either slipped or barely increased,” the Washington Postexplained. “Even more generous counts—which indicate that the CIA killed as many as 13 ‘high-value targets’—suggest that the drone program is hitting senior operatives only a fraction of the time.”

The article noted that drones were no longer restricted to striking known targets. Anyone in Pakistan witnessed doing something deemed suspicious, such as travelling to or from alleged terrorist-controlled buildings, could be killed by CIA assassins, operating the drones from Langley, Virginia.