June 08, 2010
Categories:Israel,Netanyahu,NSC .Maariv: Tensions in Netanyahu's national security cabinet
Former DNI Adm. Dennis Blair is not alone. Maariv's Ben Caspit writes of "world war" between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his national security advisor Uzi Arad over gaps between the latter's actual and technical authorities, with the military continuing to make end runs around him:
A severe crisis has broken out in the relationship between Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and National Security Adviser Uzi Arad. Things have reached the point of major fights in the last few days, which included harsh verbal exchanges, raised voices and even worse.
The issue: Arad’s uncompromising demand of the prime minister that he immediately enforce on the entire security establishment that it implement the National Security Council Law that was passed by the Knesset in 2008. Arad, who has looked and sounded particularly incensed in the last few days (even for him), says that the law is not implemented, that the security establishment does not send its representatives to meetings with him, that the staff work that precedes military operations and/or decisions as well as to security cabinet meetings is not coordinated by the National Security Council as dictated by law, and that all the NSC’s powers are basically given over to the entire military establishment in general and to the prime minister’s military secretary in particular (Maj. Gen. Yohanan Locker, an Air Force man). ...
At the end of last week the crisis reached a peak in a difficult meeting and a severe fight between Arad and the prime minister, who refused the latter’s unyielding demand to regulate the way in which the Counter-Terrorism Bureau operates and to call the security establishment leaders to order.
A senior official in the Prime Minister’s Bureau last week told a close associate that Arad had gone so far as to threaten to resign and said that he “would return the keys” if things continued as they were. In the past few months Arad has been waging a tenacious battle to get the law implemented and to receive, into his hands, the authority to coordinate security staff work. Beyond the duel between Arad and military secretary Locker, Ma’ariv has learned that recently Arad’s deputy sent letters to top officials of the security establishment and the IDF and warned them that they were breaking the law by not cooperating with the National Security Council in general, and with him in particular.
On the one hand, as far as the letter is concerned, Arad is right. ...On the other hand, Arad is known as someone who is incapable of coordinating team work. Many security establishment leaders would prefer to shinny down a rope at night from a helicopter onto a ship full of Turks rather than attend a meeting with Arad. ...
The Prime Minister’s Bureau’s response: “Netanyahu and National Security Adviser Uzi Arad have worked and continue to work in strong partnership. ....Netanyahu appointed Arad to head the National Security Council. One of the tasks at this time is the implementation of the National Security Council Law passed in 2008. ....The process of the implementation of the law is taking place gradually, with forethought, and it will continue for some time since at issue is a large organizational and even historic change in the organizations in Israel that deal with security and foreign relations.”
http://www.politico.com/blogs/laurarozen/0610/Maariv_Tensions_in_Netanyahus_national_security_cabinet.html
Showing posts with label Psychic Costs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Psychic Costs. Show all posts
8:35 PM
9:31 AM
Surrendering of militants and related issues
Bringing The LoC Home
AS A PROPOSAL TO REHABILITATE MILITANTS FROM POK GATHERS STEAM, PARVAIZ BUKHARI TRACKS THE EXPERIENCE OF THOSE WHO HAVE ALREADY MADE THE JOURNEY HOME WITHOUT PERMISSION
The prodigal son Home after 18 years, Shamim Ahmad Sheikh (extreme left) with his family
PHOTOS: JAVED DAR
Violent past A file photo of Kashmiri youth at a training camp at the height of militancy in the Valley
A QUIET MOVEMENT is underway in the Kashmir Valley — one that has no political father, although it is borne by a primal desire — that of a return to the homeland. Young Kashmiri men from Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir (PoK), in their ones and twos, have been returning home to the Indian side after spending the prime of their lives in “training camps” there. They catch flights from Pakistan to Nepal and enter India via the border town of Sonali to reach the Kashmir Valley. Having given up militancy, most of these returnees turn themselves in at police stations, desirous of leading “normal” lives alongside their families. Some get arrested by the police before they can surrender.
There is no official data on how many have returned so far. Estimates suggest that some 80 such people have arrived since 2008. Many have brought with them wives and children raised across the Line of Control (Loc). These are people who went to PoK for arms training but never came back to fight the Indian forces as they had initially intended.
During the early 1990s, tens of thousands of Kashmiri youth made the most hazardous journey of their lives through the high mountain passes, to cross the heavily militarised Loc that divides the two sides — driven by the dream of “liberating” Kashmir from India. Now they return with cautious yet unambiguous political views, clear in their minds that an armed tehreek (movement) could never change their political status.
Shamim Ahmed Sheikh returned home to his impoverished Tchoont Pathri village, Baba Reshi, Baramulla District. Family members and relatives surrounded the happy-looking young man, now 34, at his single-storey village house, to congratulate the family for their son’s return. He was showered with sweets and almonds and handed over small amounts of money — traditional Kashmiri gestures of good wishes. “I was welcomed like a bridegroom,” said Shamim. Chief Minister Omar Abdullah’s recently mooted proposal for a ‘new surrender policy’ intends to “welcome” those youth from the Valley living across the border who wished to return to the “mainstream”. But Shamim did not return because of this proposal — after 18 years away in PoK, he was homesick.
Abdullah’s controversial proposal is strongly backed by Union Home Minister P Chidambaram. But so far, it has been just an intention — no policy framework has been prepared for the return of the “prodigals” of militant ideology.
According to Shamim, one day in September 1991, gun-wielding militants appeared at his small family shop and took him away. Along with a group of 21 others he trekked for seven days and nights, crossing the Loc to finally land at a “training camp” outside Muzaffarabad, PoK, run by a militant organisation he does not want to identify.
BACK HOME, his father, Ghulam Rasool Sheikh, wrote letters for his son addressed to a “furniture shop” in Muzaffarabad. Over time, he succeeded in “moderating” his son’s views on militancy. Sheikh would show some of the letters he received from Shamim to police and Intelligence Bureau officers in Srinagar, informing them of Shamim’s transformed views — in the hope of making his eventual return safe.
OMAR ABDULLAH’S IDEA IS BACKED BY CHIDAMBARAM, BUT A CLEAR POLICY IS YET TO BE FORMULATED
Shamim wanted to come back immediately after receiving arms training. But his mother kept discouraging him. “Don’t come back yet, the situation here is very bad,” Shamim remembers his mother telling him every time he talked to her over the phone. From 1997, he worked at an X-ray clinic run by another Kashmiri in Muzaffarabad and started saving small amounts of money, hoping against hope that one day he would return home. “One thing that my mother used to tell me always remained with me. She would ask me to return as a human being,” Shamim reflects, wryly. His mother passed away two years before Shamim could finally make the journey home.
If crossing over to PoK was a “miracle”, the journey back “was nothing less than suicidal”, risking death or jail. First, he secured a Pakistani passport “through an agent” and then, without telling anyone there, flew to Kathmandu in September 2009. “Before crossing over to Uttar Pradesh, I destroyed the passport in Nepal to escape detection,” he says. At Jammu, Shamim was arrested by policemen in civvies, inside the train compartment he was travelling in. He endured five months of interrogation and torture in jail before being released on bail.
After 18 interminable years, Shamim now looks forward to setting up a small shop near his village, en route to the ski resort of Gulmarg. But he doesn’t hide his political views about Kashmir. In Muzaffarabad, he got ample time to reflect on the India-Pakistan relationship vis-à-vis Kashmir — so now, he has joined the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF). “India and Pakistan are similar countries, and both are aggressors in Kashmir,” he says, adding, “Kashmir has a unique social and cultural identity.”
Disgruntled with the leadership of both countries, as well as the separatists, he harbours no hopes of a resolution to the Kashmir issue. “Kashmir has become a battlefield for ISI and RAW.” He believes that only the people of Kashmir can change the status quo. “If Kashmiris sit on a hunger strike en masse, the world will support us,” Shamim says with conviction.
There are an estimated 30,000 Kashmiris, each living on Rs 1,500 per-month doled out by various tanzeems (militant groups) in “refugee camps” at Rawalakot, Bagh, Muzaffarabad, Kotli, and Mirpur, across the Loc. “Almost all of them want to come back, but they are scared of the Public Safety Act and rumours that new jails are being constructed in Kashmir,” says Shamim. “If I tell them my story, they won’t return,” he adds with conviction.
Top security officials say that the issue of bringing these boys back is a tricky one. There is no policy about what to do with them, which is why there is resistance to the idea from within the security establishment. Police recently discovered two returnees in Budgam District who were given pistols by militants on their return.
‘IF KASHMIRIS SIT ON A HUNGER STRIKE EN MASSE, THE WORLD WILL SUPPORT US,’ SAYS SHAMIM
Some of the returnees have married Pakistani women and come back with their children. “Their citizenship status is a big problem. Wives can be sent back, but what to do with their children?” a top security official told TEHELKA on condition of anonymity. Recently, one man whose wife from PoK had passed away, returned home to his village in Shopian District. He brought with him his two small kids. The family reported him to the police. He is now in jail while the children have been handed over to the grandparents. Security officials fear that these children will eventually become “voices of the Kashmir dispute” in the absence of a clear citizenship status. “They are bringing the Loc right into their extended families here,” said a security official.
A new life A former Hizb militant locked in his sister’s embrace after surrendering at Uri in 2007
Uncertain future Militants waiting in a queue to lay down arms at a recent surrender ceremony
Abdul Jabbar Khan and his two small kids are one such case. Khan, after his return from Muzaffarabad two months earlier — again via the Nepal route — has been familiarising his two kids with their new neighbourhood in Mazhama village of Budgam District. In 1989, when even his father — a (pro-India) National Conference office bearer — was threatened by militants, he felt that the tide had inexorably turned towards militancy. So, he joined them and crossed the Loc for weapons training. 18 years after his father was gunned down by suspected militants outside his house, Khan managed to return. Having lost his wife during childbirth just before his return, a traumatised Khan doesn’t like to talk much. “I didn’t come from another country. Across the Loc is just another part of the same Kashmir,” he says cuddling his 4-year-old son who clearly looks a bit bewildered in unfamiliar company and culture.
The returnees don’t come back for better economic opportunities either. Mohammad Ashraf Hajam, 35, returned in December 2009 with his family from Muzaffarabad. He had joined JKLF before crossing over in 1990. Later, as hopes of crossing the “deadly Loc” back again slowly faded, Hajam established a successful hairdressing saloon in Muzaffarabad and sent his two kids to a “good school”. But his heart belonged to the bewitchingly beautiful Chandiloora village near Gulmarg. After turning himself and his family in at a police station, Hajam now lives a life of penury in a dungeonlike one-room hutment with his wife and two children, who still “ask for pizzas”.
THE UNCERTAIN CITIZENSHIP OF RETURNEES’ CHILDREN BORN IN POK IS AN UNSOLVED RIDDLE
Hajam is now struggling to set up a barber shop near his village to keep the home fires burning. He alleges being continuously “harassed” by the police. “Everyone from there wants to come back,” he says.
But reinstating the former militants is only a small part of a larger dilemma facing the state administration. There are an estimated 40,000 ex-militants inside Kashmir, who were captured by the security forces and have served long jail terms before being released. About 5,000 of them have organised an advocacy group known as the ‘People’s Rights Movement’ (PRM). They complain of hardships ranging from denial of passports to denial of legal clearance and police verification to start their own businesses. Unlike most of the PoK returnees, they remain wedded to their separatist ideology. “Our suffering at the hands of the State has only meant that we have shifted from a violent method of seeking our right to self-determination to a non-violent way,” says Abdul Qadeer, a former militant and president of the PRM.
GHULAM HASSAN (name changed), 40, returned in 2008 with 15 other militants, after 19 years in PoK. They have quietly mingled into their milieu, under the radar of the intelligence establishment. According to Hassan, some of them simply informed local policemen they knew. “We were advised by the police officers to shave off our beards and stay quiet,” said Hassan. “Pervez Musharraf (former president of Pakistan), crushed militancy across the border, but convinced a lot of us that the issue would be resolved. That triggered a desire among most of us to come back.” But Hassan is now terribly disappointed.
All the returnees TEHELKA spoke to expressed significantly diminished hope of a stable future. Most ascribe it to India being “a mighty country, difficult to defeat in Kashmir without global support”. But the kind of difficulties these returnees face, after their arduous journey through militancy and back, is bringing new dimensions of the Kashmir issue into the foreground. Something the incumbent chief minister will have to consider, for his ‘new surrender policy’ in-the-making to succeed in any significant measure.
WRITER’S EMAIL
parvaizbukhari@gmail.com
From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 7, Issue 11, Dated March 20, 2010
http://www.tehelka.com/story_main44.asp?filename=Ne200310bringing_the.asp
AS A PROPOSAL TO REHABILITATE MILITANTS FROM POK GATHERS STEAM, PARVAIZ BUKHARI TRACKS THE EXPERIENCE OF THOSE WHO HAVE ALREADY MADE THE JOURNEY HOME WITHOUT PERMISSION
The prodigal son Home after 18 years, Shamim Ahmad Sheikh (extreme left) with his family
PHOTOS: JAVED DAR
Violent past A file photo of Kashmiri youth at a training camp at the height of militancy in the Valley
A QUIET MOVEMENT is underway in the Kashmir Valley — one that has no political father, although it is borne by a primal desire — that of a return to the homeland. Young Kashmiri men from Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir (PoK), in their ones and twos, have been returning home to the Indian side after spending the prime of their lives in “training camps” there. They catch flights from Pakistan to Nepal and enter India via the border town of Sonali to reach the Kashmir Valley. Having given up militancy, most of these returnees turn themselves in at police stations, desirous of leading “normal” lives alongside their families. Some get arrested by the police before they can surrender.
There is no official data on how many have returned so far. Estimates suggest that some 80 such people have arrived since 2008. Many have brought with them wives and children raised across the Line of Control (Loc). These are people who went to PoK for arms training but never came back to fight the Indian forces as they had initially intended.
During the early 1990s, tens of thousands of Kashmiri youth made the most hazardous journey of their lives through the high mountain passes, to cross the heavily militarised Loc that divides the two sides — driven by the dream of “liberating” Kashmir from India. Now they return with cautious yet unambiguous political views, clear in their minds that an armed tehreek (movement) could never change their political status.
Shamim Ahmed Sheikh returned home to his impoverished Tchoont Pathri village, Baba Reshi, Baramulla District. Family members and relatives surrounded the happy-looking young man, now 34, at his single-storey village house, to congratulate the family for their son’s return. He was showered with sweets and almonds and handed over small amounts of money — traditional Kashmiri gestures of good wishes. “I was welcomed like a bridegroom,” said Shamim. Chief Minister Omar Abdullah’s recently mooted proposal for a ‘new surrender policy’ intends to “welcome” those youth from the Valley living across the border who wished to return to the “mainstream”. But Shamim did not return because of this proposal — after 18 years away in PoK, he was homesick.
Abdullah’s controversial proposal is strongly backed by Union Home Minister P Chidambaram. But so far, it has been just an intention — no policy framework has been prepared for the return of the “prodigals” of militant ideology.
According to Shamim, one day in September 1991, gun-wielding militants appeared at his small family shop and took him away. Along with a group of 21 others he trekked for seven days and nights, crossing the Loc to finally land at a “training camp” outside Muzaffarabad, PoK, run by a militant organisation he does not want to identify.
BACK HOME, his father, Ghulam Rasool Sheikh, wrote letters for his son addressed to a “furniture shop” in Muzaffarabad. Over time, he succeeded in “moderating” his son’s views on militancy. Sheikh would show some of the letters he received from Shamim to police and Intelligence Bureau officers in Srinagar, informing them of Shamim’s transformed views — in the hope of making his eventual return safe.
OMAR ABDULLAH’S IDEA IS BACKED BY CHIDAMBARAM, BUT A CLEAR POLICY IS YET TO BE FORMULATED
Shamim wanted to come back immediately after receiving arms training. But his mother kept discouraging him. “Don’t come back yet, the situation here is very bad,” Shamim remembers his mother telling him every time he talked to her over the phone. From 1997, he worked at an X-ray clinic run by another Kashmiri in Muzaffarabad and started saving small amounts of money, hoping against hope that one day he would return home. “One thing that my mother used to tell me always remained with me. She would ask me to return as a human being,” Shamim reflects, wryly. His mother passed away two years before Shamim could finally make the journey home.
If crossing over to PoK was a “miracle”, the journey back “was nothing less than suicidal”, risking death or jail. First, he secured a Pakistani passport “through an agent” and then, without telling anyone there, flew to Kathmandu in September 2009. “Before crossing over to Uttar Pradesh, I destroyed the passport in Nepal to escape detection,” he says. At Jammu, Shamim was arrested by policemen in civvies, inside the train compartment he was travelling in. He endured five months of interrogation and torture in jail before being released on bail.
After 18 interminable years, Shamim now looks forward to setting up a small shop near his village, en route to the ski resort of Gulmarg. But he doesn’t hide his political views about Kashmir. In Muzaffarabad, he got ample time to reflect on the India-Pakistan relationship vis-à-vis Kashmir — so now, he has joined the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF). “India and Pakistan are similar countries, and both are aggressors in Kashmir,” he says, adding, “Kashmir has a unique social and cultural identity.”
Disgruntled with the leadership of both countries, as well as the separatists, he harbours no hopes of a resolution to the Kashmir issue. “Kashmir has become a battlefield for ISI and RAW.” He believes that only the people of Kashmir can change the status quo. “If Kashmiris sit on a hunger strike en masse, the world will support us,” Shamim says with conviction.
There are an estimated 30,000 Kashmiris, each living on Rs 1,500 per-month doled out by various tanzeems (militant groups) in “refugee camps” at Rawalakot, Bagh, Muzaffarabad, Kotli, and Mirpur, across the Loc. “Almost all of them want to come back, but they are scared of the Public Safety Act and rumours that new jails are being constructed in Kashmir,” says Shamim. “If I tell them my story, they won’t return,” he adds with conviction.
Top security officials say that the issue of bringing these boys back is a tricky one. There is no policy about what to do with them, which is why there is resistance to the idea from within the security establishment. Police recently discovered two returnees in Budgam District who were given pistols by militants on their return.
‘IF KASHMIRIS SIT ON A HUNGER STRIKE EN MASSE, THE WORLD WILL SUPPORT US,’ SAYS SHAMIM
Some of the returnees have married Pakistani women and come back with their children. “Their citizenship status is a big problem. Wives can be sent back, but what to do with their children?” a top security official told TEHELKA on condition of anonymity. Recently, one man whose wife from PoK had passed away, returned home to his village in Shopian District. He brought with him his two small kids. The family reported him to the police. He is now in jail while the children have been handed over to the grandparents. Security officials fear that these children will eventually become “voices of the Kashmir dispute” in the absence of a clear citizenship status. “They are bringing the Loc right into their extended families here,” said a security official.
A new life A former Hizb militant locked in his sister’s embrace after surrendering at Uri in 2007
Uncertain future Militants waiting in a queue to lay down arms at a recent surrender ceremony
Abdul Jabbar Khan and his two small kids are one such case. Khan, after his return from Muzaffarabad two months earlier — again via the Nepal route — has been familiarising his two kids with their new neighbourhood in Mazhama village of Budgam District. In 1989, when even his father — a (pro-India) National Conference office bearer — was threatened by militants, he felt that the tide had inexorably turned towards militancy. So, he joined them and crossed the Loc for weapons training. 18 years after his father was gunned down by suspected militants outside his house, Khan managed to return. Having lost his wife during childbirth just before his return, a traumatised Khan doesn’t like to talk much. “I didn’t come from another country. Across the Loc is just another part of the same Kashmir,” he says cuddling his 4-year-old son who clearly looks a bit bewildered in unfamiliar company and culture.
The returnees don’t come back for better economic opportunities either. Mohammad Ashraf Hajam, 35, returned in December 2009 with his family from Muzaffarabad. He had joined JKLF before crossing over in 1990. Later, as hopes of crossing the “deadly Loc” back again slowly faded, Hajam established a successful hairdressing saloon in Muzaffarabad and sent his two kids to a “good school”. But his heart belonged to the bewitchingly beautiful Chandiloora village near Gulmarg. After turning himself and his family in at a police station, Hajam now lives a life of penury in a dungeonlike one-room hutment with his wife and two children, who still “ask for pizzas”.
THE UNCERTAIN CITIZENSHIP OF RETURNEES’ CHILDREN BORN IN POK IS AN UNSOLVED RIDDLE
Hajam is now struggling to set up a barber shop near his village to keep the home fires burning. He alleges being continuously “harassed” by the police. “Everyone from there wants to come back,” he says.
But reinstating the former militants is only a small part of a larger dilemma facing the state administration. There are an estimated 40,000 ex-militants inside Kashmir, who were captured by the security forces and have served long jail terms before being released. About 5,000 of them have organised an advocacy group known as the ‘People’s Rights Movement’ (PRM). They complain of hardships ranging from denial of passports to denial of legal clearance and police verification to start their own businesses. Unlike most of the PoK returnees, they remain wedded to their separatist ideology. “Our suffering at the hands of the State has only meant that we have shifted from a violent method of seeking our right to self-determination to a non-violent way,” says Abdul Qadeer, a former militant and president of the PRM.
GHULAM HASSAN (name changed), 40, returned in 2008 with 15 other militants, after 19 years in PoK. They have quietly mingled into their milieu, under the radar of the intelligence establishment. According to Hassan, some of them simply informed local policemen they knew. “We were advised by the police officers to shave off our beards and stay quiet,” said Hassan. “Pervez Musharraf (former president of Pakistan), crushed militancy across the border, but convinced a lot of us that the issue would be resolved. That triggered a desire among most of us to come back.” But Hassan is now terribly disappointed.
All the returnees TEHELKA spoke to expressed significantly diminished hope of a stable future. Most ascribe it to India being “a mighty country, difficult to defeat in Kashmir without global support”. But the kind of difficulties these returnees face, after their arduous journey through militancy and back, is bringing new dimensions of the Kashmir issue into the foreground. Something the incumbent chief minister will have to consider, for his ‘new surrender policy’ in-the-making to succeed in any significant measure.
WRITER’S EMAIL
parvaizbukhari@gmail.com
From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 7, Issue 11, Dated March 20, 2010
http://www.tehelka.com/story_main44.asp?filename=Ne200310bringing_the.asp
9:26 AM
Poor soldiers of India and their travails and of getting fed-up
soldiers of MISFORTUNE
BEFORE THE HOME MINISTRY RAISES NEW PARAMILITARY BATTALIONS, IT NEEDS TO ASK WHY THE OLD ONES ARE QUITTING IN DROVES. RAMAN KIRPAL REPORTS ON A BREWING CRISIS
SITTING DUCKS Jawans look out after a car-bomb explosion near a CRPF camp in Srinagar
Photo: AFP
SURINDER KANG joined the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) as a constable in 1990. Twenty years later, he’s risen no more than just one rank: he’s a havaldar now. What has risen dangerously over the years, though, are his chances of dying on duty.
So Kang, at 40, has sought voluntary retirement. He wants his pension (even if it is just 2/3rd of what he would otherwise get), an easier job — and he does not want to die. Needless to say, Surinder Kang has a different real name.
What makes Kang’s story extremely disturbing is that it is not an individual story of disillusionment: it is symptomatic of a rampant and growing feeling in the paramilitary. At a time when the Home Minister is speaking of raising dozens of new paramilitary battalions, apart from Kang, hundreds of other men with real names and real fears and real grievances are queuing up to quit the services. In fact, according to official data, an unprecedented 14,422 jawans applied for premature voluntary retirement from service (VRS) in 2009 — up 85 percent from the previous year and 112 percent from 2007. Compare this with the fact that only 4,622 soldiers sought voluntary retirement from the Indian Army — which is three times larger than all the paramilitary forces put together — in the same period, and the contrast becomes painfully stark.
So, why the exodus?
A few days ago, EN Rammohan, former Director General of the Border Security Force (BSF), submitted his one-man enquiry report to Home Minister P Chidambaram on what went wrong in the recent Dantewada massacre, in which Maoists ambushed and killed 76 CRPF jawans. Predictably, the report blamed “leadership failure” and “a lack of coordination between the CRPF and the state police”. Based on this, a few individual heads down the ranks will roll. But if the government stops at that, it will have misread the crisis and lose a crucial opportunity for introspection and drastic overhaul.
The truth is the Dantewada massacre is only one kind of cautionary tale about what ails the Indian paramilitary. The cautionary tale of Surinder Kang runs much deeper and is more alarming.
Kang has realised that India doesn’t honour its jawans. He’d rather be a private guard
IF ONE were merely to read the surface signs, it might seem a fear of dying is propelling the exodus. The year 2010 has barely begun and already 79 CRPF men have died. The number was 58 in 2009. The stark contrast with Indian Army VRS figures also seems to suggest that battling one’s own countrymen has become much tougher and more wearisome than battling enemies outside — both physically and psychologically. As Gautam Kaul, a retired IPS officer who served as Additional Director General of CRPF in 1997-98, says, “Both death in action and voluntary retirement are higher in the CRPF and BSF than in the Army. The spurt in political and civil unrest in the country does not match [the] planning and preparedness of these paramilitary forces. The demand is massive and the paramilitary forces just can’t meet the demand.”
But fear of dying does not seem to be the key reason Surinder Kang wants to leave the CRPF. Something deeper nags him. Kang has 20 long years of fighting guerilla wars and insurgencies. He has been posted thrice in Jammu and Kashmir, twice in the Northeast, and two times each in Lalgarh and Bastar. Besides this, he has been on election duty in Gujarat, Bihar, Delhi, West Bengal and Orissa. Kang is 40 now and has grayed a little. He is extremely fit and no amount of training can bring you his experience. But Kang has queued up for VRS. He is resolved to leave the forces and work as a small-time private guard at some ATM or private industry. Kang has realised the country does not honour those who serve it. Now, he wants to be with his family at any cost.
Disillusion simmers like an epidemic. 14,422 want to quit the paramilitary forces
“I spent one third of my 20 years in the CRPF just travelling. Of these 20 years, I could spend only three years with my children. I took medical leave to get married. I could only reach my village five days after I received news of my father passing away. I am the eldest in my family but I couldn’t even perform the last rites. I couldn’t COVERSTORY attend three of my four sisters’ marriages. I had to arrange a separate house for my wife and kids after my father’s death because my brother threw them out from the joint family house. But if you take any of these problems to your officers, they just shoo you away.”
Kang is not the only one. Disillusion is simmering like an epidemic beneath the disciplined skin of the paramilitary, and its reasons straddle a wide spectrum: poor work conditions; demeaning terms of service; long years away from families; arbitrary orders and a niggling sense that their life is cheap and death would come without honour.
THE FALLING RANKS
While the army, which has more personnel than all paramilitary forces combined, has seen a gradual fall in attrition rates, it has shot up exponentially in the latter
JUST WALK around the paramilitary headquarters in Delhi and this honour fatigue begins to unravel. Talk to a constable under a tree and word spreads that someone is asking about their troubles. The jawan inside the canteen, the jawan walking with heaps of files to the grievance department, the jawan loading trucks, all stop to listen in. Everyone wants your number on a scrap of paper. They can’t talk now, but they all have a story to tell. Of how they have lived in torn tents with no drinking water. Of how the holes were big enough for heat waves and pouring rain. Of how the officers live in concrete houses with three servants. Of how it’s not the government, but their own departments that ensure the welfare schemes never reach them. Of how salaries are cut even when they are injured on duty. Of how a jawan does not get paid if he is in hospital for more than six months. The recurring theme is “pressure: — of how there is too much “dabav” from commanders to blindly follow orders. Of how most of these orders are things that fall outside the purview of duty. Of how they are never consulted even while their lives are at stake. Of how they all plan to take voluntary retirement as soon as they complete 20 years of service.
There’s a jawan from Uttaranchal who has been trying to get a transfer to his home state of Gujarat for the last five years. His wife is mentally ill and unable to look after his three young children. “The officers tell me to get my wife treated in Uttaranchal,” says he. “But our camp is in the mountains, in the middle of a jungle. How is this possible?” Once he returned a few days late from a visit home. His wife’s ill-health was not a good enough shield. He lost an entire month’s pay.
Another jawan has spent 16 years in the CRPF — six in Jammu and Kashmir, three in Assam, three in Tripura, and three in Manipur. Too scared to talk at the CRPF headquarters, he calls late at night to share his story. During a posting in Srinagar, he was charged with indiscipline and lost 15 days of pay for daring to complain about inedible food and cockroaches in his dal. When he fell sick in Tripura, he couldn’t get a car to get to hospital. “I had to hire a jeep,” says he. “Only if 15-20 constables fall sick and need a car together, there’s a chance of us getting it. Otherwise the cars are busy ferrying the officers’ children. This country got independence in 1947, but we still live like slaves. Our officers order us to do unauthorised things; we have no right to express ourselves. They tell us to barge into people’s homes and pick up bricks and cement and construct our quarters. They pocket lakhs of welfare money; they take commissions from ration shops.
We pay Rs 1,326 per month for food. The bills are for A-grade rations but we get C-grade food. The commander is like the king of a battalion. He runs it the way he wants. As a driver, I am sent all the time for unauthorised pick ups. All the risk of being caught is on me. You live under so much pressure, you either shoot yourself or shoot someone else. I am just waiting to complete 20 years so I can get a part of my pension and then I’ll quit."
A wise administration would retain these men, but the dominant mood is complacency
THE ANGRY stories duplicate endlessly. A jawan from Gorakhpur with 17 years of service behind him speaks of how he was not granted leave to be in time for his first child’s delivery, though he was posted just a few hours away in Allahabad. When he reached a week later, his son was dead. “After the 6th Pay Commission, we were supposed to be given Rs 2,000 education allowance and a travel allowance, but I haven’t got it yet,” says he. “The officers find ways to make sure we don’t get this education allowance. Just a school certificate is not enough. They ask for bills for the child’s uniform, shoes, notebooks. How are we going to run around getting all this when we barely get leave?”
(A jawan is entitled to two months of earned leave in a year but they rarely get leave on time. “A battalion has seven companies and all the seven companies are located at different locations. The battalion commandant sits at Chandigarh. How can a jawan get leave on time if he is located in Dantewada and his commandant is in Chandigarh,” says Gautam Kaul. “Better systems have to be thought through.”)
‘The Naxalites never repeat mistakes, but we never learn from ours,’ says a forlorn jawan
Clearly, the issue of family — and an inability to provide adequately for them — looms large for the jawan. “We had witnessed an exodus in the paramilitary forces in 1991 too when violence had escalated in Jammu and Kashmir,” says Prakash Belgamkar, retired DIG (Operations), CRPF. “We had discovered then that a soldier’s motivation revolves around his family. But he becomes a nomad after joining the forces. The nucleus of his nuclear family goes away. He has no fixed address, his life gets fragmented.”
But no lessons seem to have been learnt since 1991. Far from any internal memos in the Home Ministry sounding alarm signals about the surge in VRS applications, or directives in paramilitary headquarters urging officers to motivate jawans, the dominant mood seems to be callous complacency: there’s more where those came from. “Yes, we have seen a spurt in voluntary retirements,” says CRPF spokesperson Ajay Chaturvedi. “But there are enough applications coming in of boys who want to join. We have filled in the vacancies. We have raised six new battalions in a year. We don’t have a crunch anymore. There’s nothing to worry.”
NO RESPITE CRPF jawans patrol in Gaganpalli village in Chhattisgarh’s Dantewada district
Photo: MISHRA V
A wise administration would stop men like Kang, if it could. Their experience is hard won, and no training course can duplicate that. But the official position seems to be just about numbers. Building morale, quality and pride in work is not on the radar. Retaining experience seems unnecessary. In a poor country, there will always be replacements. There will always be fresh fodder for all cannons.
TO GET a real sense of the implications of the diving morale of the paramilitary jawan, one needs to understand first the nature and work of the paramilitary forces. India has about 7 lakh paramilitary forces which include the Central Reserve Police Force (strength 2.30 lakh); Border Security Force (strength 2.15 lakh); Central Industrial Security Force (strength 1.12 lakh); Assam Rifle (strength 50,000); Indo- Tibetan Border Police (strength 74,000) and a Sashastra Seema Bal (strength 29,000). The tasks of these battalions range across fighting internal counter-insurgencies, protecting heritage sites and national installations, providing relief during calamities, controlling riots, providing VIP security and executing election duties. (Their motto is ‘Any Task, Any Time, Any Where’ and ‘Duty unto Death’ — as opposed to the army’s which is ‘Shoot to Kill’. But far from pride, this seems to evoke cynical scorn in jawans now.)
Though law and order are State subjects that, ideally, should be handled by the State police, the National Crime Record Bureau confirms there is a shortage of two lakh policemen in the country. This places an added burden on the paramilitary forces. As former Home Secretary Madhukar Gupta says, “There is a diversity of challenges from terrorism to insurgency today, which has affected rotation and training of these paramilitary forces. This does lead to stress. The private security business has also attracted them away from the forces. This is an evolving situation and the government has to take major initiatives to improve things.”
The story about the diving morale of the jawan then is not just a story about individual griping. It should be of national concern. The jawan is the primary interface between civilians and the State in a conflict zone. Their conduct is crucial to the history of these conflicts. They need to be sensitised not brutalised. Kashmir, the Northeast, Chhattisgarh, Lalgarh (in West Bengal), Narayanpatna (in Orissa) are all rife with stories of malafide behaviour by jawans. But how can any virtuous cycles set in? As a jawan in Lalgarh says after his friend was refused a visit to his pregnant wife, “I was so angry, I wanted to shoot someone.” (See box Case Study 1)
Difficulty in getting leave and family anxieties though are not the only reasons jawans are quitting in droves. The terms of service, over all, seem to need a major revision. A retired IPS officer who has served in the CRPF, ITBP and CISF in different capacities says, “Why shouldn’t the paramilitary jawans leave? I pity them for sacrificing their lives when our pay commissions do not even recognise them as ‘skilled’ workers.”
TRANSIT HOME Paramilitary forces at a local school in Lalgarh, West Bengal. In conflict zones, the troops are stationed inside unused government buildings, schools, old godowns and cloth tents
Photo: INDIAN EXPRESS ARCHIVE
This seems merely the tip of a huge iceberg of service dissatisfactions. Army men are considered skilled workers, while paramilitary jawans trained to fight in some of the most dangerous and difficult circumstances are not considered “skilled” enough. A jawan gets a salary ranging from Rs 12,000 to Rs 15,000 (same as a civilian clerk); and an additional Rs 3,000 if he is on a ‘hard posting’ in a ‘difficult area’. (It is typical of Indian bureaucracy that while J&K and the Northeast are considered ‘difficult areas’, Chhattisgarh, Bastar and Lalgarh are yet to feature in this category though many more jawans have been killed in service here than elsewhere.) A jawan also gets Rs 1,100 — Rs 1,300 for rations but has to pay for his own mess expenses on the field, often having to find rations and cook for themselves.
Apart from these living conditions, many veterans say the essential command structure of the paramilitary forces is flawed. Kaul believes too many agencies have authority over a jawan and that contributes hugely to the low morale. “As director general of a paramilitary force, I am only entitled to perform house-keeping jobs for a jawan. I can train him and monitor his service record, but I have no powers to decide on his battalion movement and deployment,” says he. Only Home Ministry officials perform this critical job: they have the list of battalions, they assess the demand and assign locations.
This can lead to many Kafkaesque situations. One retired jawan remembers a tortuous journey in 2004 that stretched 8,000 kilometers over two months as the Home Ministry ordered his company like a pawn to move from Agartala to Gujarat via Bangladesh, Delhi, Kashmir and back to Agartala. Crowded trains, no reservations, no accommodations, no sense of why they were being deployed anywhere, and, most of all — no sense of respect. “I have fought insurgents for 20 years,” says the jawan bitterly, “but this one journey showed me my standing in my country’s eyes. How can you fool around with so many human beings on the pretext of an emergency situation?” (See box Case Study 2) Other jawans speak of being summoned to places for six months and being asked to stay for six years.
“Battalion movements are very frequent in the CRPF and this often leads to individual hardship. The very nature of their duty is temporary and is bound to dislocate them constantly. In the army, soldiers undertake an operation then go back to the base camp; the CRPF jawans have no fixed place to return. They are always on the move,’’ says Kaul.
THIS SENSE of the ad-hoc permeates every aspect of their lives. (For instance, it appears the Home Ministry had no idea that the CRPF had only three satellite phones till former Home Minister Shivraj Patil went to Amarnath and had a sudden desire to speak to his family from the shrine. A phone was found with great difficulty for him. This is the only reason he came back to Delhi and remembered to sanction 68 satellite phones for the CRPF and an equal number for other paramilitary battalions.)
BODY COUNT A jawan on guard outside a barricaded CRPF camp in Lal Chowk, one of Srinagar’s high-risk zones
Photo: SHAILENDRA PANDEY
But often, this can have much more ominous implications. Kang speaks of his dread in being asked to go on an ‘area domination’ exercise in Chhattisgarh. “We hadn’t slept for days. We landed, and our induction was cut short midway, because there were no policemen for patrolling. We had no clue about the local language, culture, terrain, and most importantly, we had no intelligence about the enemy. We were there physically but had to rely on local intelligence. The paramilitary does not even have its own intelligence. So if the input is good, we succeed; if not, we become sitting ducks.”
This idea of being a ‘sitting duck’ is a powerful and repetitive leitmotif. Another retired jawan who has seen service in J&K, Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh and Jharkhand, says, “Naxalites fight with military precision. They commit mistakes but they never repeat them.” He recalls an incident in Erabore in 2005 when 200 Naxalites tried to bomb a police armory and the CRPF bunker near it. The jawans resisted the attack and informed their base camp. Help came quickly and the Naxals were repulsed. Three months later, the CRPF battalion raided a Naxal hideout and found a document titled: Why we failed in the Erabore Police Armory Operation. The document said they had failed because they had underestimated the strength of the armory and bunker wall, and so had taken insufficient explosives, and, secondly, they had not anticipated that the CRPF’s base camp could send help that fast. A few months later, Naxals killed 23 CRPF jawans in a landmine attack. The jawans were on their way to rescue policemen trapped in an attack: the Naxals had anticipated this and laid landmines to blow the vehicle.
“We are never debriefed so thoroughly,” says the jawan. “We are constantly pushed into mindless ‘area domination’ exercises without any intelligence. We never seem to learn from our mistakes.”
What can reverse the tide then? What can stop the attrition and turn this force into a humane, yet proud and efficient line of defence? Former Home Secretary Madhukar Gupta says some initiatives were underway in his time: raising more police force, providing housing, reducing telephone rates for calls home, and counselling (when more than 10 jawans from a company apply for VRS). Prakash Belgamkar re-emphasises the need for this: “A jawan has other alternatives today. If the State wants to retain him, it has to free him of his worries about his family. If this is done, he’ll be yours for the rest of his life.” That might be only the first of many urgent correctives. The most primary one will have to be an essential change of attitude — wherein retaining men begins to matter more than merely replacing them.
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“MY PATRIOTISM IS DEAD”
ANONYMOUS, West Bengal
AFTER 12 YEARS of serving in the paramilitary forces, Ashok Ray, 34, wants to quit. He joined the forces in 1998, inspired by his grand father — a freedom fighter who later served in the Indian Army. Ray’s father, a CPWD electrical operator in Howrah, West Bengal, had warned him against it — “It’s a terrible life away from your family.”
Today, serving as a constable holed up in a broken house in West Bengal’s Naxal-hit forests, putting up plastic packets on his window to keep away the scorching heat, Ray wishes he had taken the advice. Ask Ray what it’s like working in these jungles, searching for the elusive Maoist, and he repeats the one word you didn’t expect to hear from a jawan — human rights. “We have no human rights,” he whispers, asking you to ensure his identity remains hidden. “If an officer wants water or cold drinks, 10 cars will go to get it. But if a jawan wants to go on leave, it’s a big risk to give him a car to get out of Jangalmahal.” Ray earns a salary of Rs 15,000 a month and stays in a camp with 100 other jawans. They were offered cloth tents and two old godowns with no ventilation. The squad found an old house, once used for a government scheme, and converted it into a camp. Four people stay in a room. Those who couldn’t get these rooms sleep outside in tents. There are no toilets. Ray bathes at the nearest well and pays Rs 32 a day for rice and dal cooked in the mess, run by the jawans themselves.
One of the defining moments for Ray came when he had a motorbike accident as he was returning to his base camp. “I could have died of a haemorrhage,” he says. “My eyes were bleeding and my bones were fractured.” It was past sunset, and too late to make the 15 kilometre journey through dense forests. When Ray tried to stay at the nearest police station, he was turned away. “We need orders,” he was told by the inspector.
But the lowest point came when he was returning after treatment in Howrah, having spent Rs 50,000. Still weak from surgery, he asked his brother, a security guard in a private company, to accompany him. After a train and bus ride, he reached a point in the forest where public transport ends. From here, jawans must call their base camp for a vehicle. “The inspector refused to send a car if I came with my brother and luggage.” Ray had to spend his own money to hire a taxi. Once at the camp, his brother was refused a place to stay. “Where would I find him a hotel in this dense Maoist area?” The human rights violations didn’t end there. The doctor had issued Ray a medical certificate that said he could do “light” work. “The inspector asked me to get a certificate saying I am fit.”
Another shocking incident Ray remembers is when a colleague asked for leave to see his pregnant wife. “Will you deliver the baby yourself?” the jawan was told. “Tell her to go to her in-laws.” That’s when Ray began to lose all faith in the system. “I was so angry, I wanted to shoot.”
‘AS JAWANS, WE HAVE NO HUMAN RIGHTS. I FEEL I WILL BE DYING FOR NOTHING,’ RAY SAYS, READY TO QUIT THE JOB
His most recent tenure in Jangalmahal, West Bengal, has made Ray question the old ideas of patriotism. “I always wanted to be a sainik to serve my country,” he says, “but now I feel I will be dying for nothing. I have seen so many illegal things happening. We have to blindly follow orders. When we go for operations, we don’t know who a Maoist is. Poor Adivasis are being beaten and innocents are being killed. I don’t feel that I am doing anything for the nation. My patriotism is dead.”
Clearly disillusioned, Ray admits the morale of the forces is at the lowest. “What is this operation? What is success? What have we achieved in all these months of being here,” he asks. “There is no intelligence and we don’t know what the strategy is.”
The latest orders from the West Bengal DGP have perturbed him further. After the Silda attack, the jawans were told, “If you think he is a Maoist — kill him.”
“I have not yet beaten anyone yet because I don’t know if he is a Maoist,” Ray says. “All I can see is that he is poor and one of our known. But some of the villagers are also with the Maoists. If we sympathise, it’s a problem, if we don’t, it’s a problem. I don’t know what to do.”
TUSHA MITTAL
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“WE FELT LIKE PAWNS”
ANONYMOUS, Chhattisgarh
I NURTURED a dream to travel the world one day. I had never stepped out of my village in Hoshiarpur, Punjab until I was 15, when I finally boarded a bus to an inter-college event. But a train was still a distant possibility. I had little contact with the outside world.
My dreams were fulfilled in 1990, when I joined the CRPF as an Assistant Sub Inspector. I knew that the life in the paramilitary forces is tough, but you get a chance to travel the world if you are lucky. 20 years later, I feel miserable, having spent half my life aboard a train. Even now, as I say this, I am supposed to be in transit.
While defending the nation against terrorists and insurgents, one incident showed me where I really stood. It was an endless journey that lasted two months, covering 8,000 km. It began in 2004. I was posted at Agartala, Tripura. Besides insurgents, the place was full of deadly mosquitoes, which had already killed two jawans. We used to religiously swallow two tablets of quinine every evening during the roll call.
One day we were ordered to go to Gujarat on election duty. The prospects of not taking quinine sounded convincing, and so our 100-strong company set off, going around Bangladesh to reach Lumding, Assam, driving in rain. It took us more than a day, after which we took a meter-gauge train to Guwahati 16 hours later.
We had no reservations on the train and there were no extra bogies available. The railway authorities would not be bothered about adjusting us in any of the trains going to Mumbai or Delhi. Despite the huge demand for berths, we managed to get on a Delhibound train, which was supposed to leave three days after our arrival at Guwahati. So five days were lost, and we were still stuck in the North-East.
We stayed in a makeshift transit camp in Guwahati, which was as good as the station platform. Finally, we managed to make the three-day insurlong journey. We had barely touched the Delhi railway station, and had just informed our superiors about our location, when we were asked to divert to Kashmir, as there was an ‘emergency’ situation.
We collected new travel warrants and requested our headquarters to use their influence in getting us on to any train going to Jammu. Luckily, we got an overnighter to Jammu the very next day, reaching Jammu on the morning of our tenth day of nonstop travel. 100 jawans needed at least three trucks to move in a convoy to the Valley. For this, we had to wait for another two days. When we finally got going, the 15-hour journey became a 24-hour crawl due to the Vaishno Devi pilgrim rush.
I had stopped counting days after I reached Kashmir. In one word, it was ‘pathetic’. The Kashmir police did not require our service, as the situation was under control by then. We were given some space in Police Lane and were told to sort out where we should go next.
We contacted our field commander and sought further directions, which came after three days: “Gujarat’’
WE DON’T HAVE SPECIAL TRAIN BOGIES LIKE THE ARMY. WE DEPEND ON THE KINDNESS OF THE RAILWAYS
A hundred of us started packing. We requested for trucks again and rolled back to Jammu, to spend two more days at a transit camp near Jammu Railway Station. We reached Delhi and then began the long wait for space in any train that goes to Gujarat.
We never get reservations in the train, and unlike armymen we don’t have the honour of having special bogies. We have to request the Railways and convince them how important it is for us to reach our destination. The Railway officials are kind on most occasions, but they are also helpless during rush seasons.
We then spent a few days in a Delhi transit camp and finally headed for Gujarat. On our arrival at Ahmedabad, we were told that we were late. We had already been replaced by another company. The election duties were already assigned. “Go back to Agartala,’’ were the next orders.
How mindless can one be! Please don’t calculate financial and man-hour losses that this journey entailed. Think of us. We were used as ‘dead material’ and were kicked around like football.
My blood boils, when I think of it even today.
RAMAN KIRPAL
With inputs from Tusha Mittal
WRITER’S EMAIL:
raman@tehelka.com
From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 7, Issue 18, Dated May 08, 2010
http://www.tehelka.com/story_main44.asp?filename=Ne080510CoverStory.asp
BEFORE THE HOME MINISTRY RAISES NEW PARAMILITARY BATTALIONS, IT NEEDS TO ASK WHY THE OLD ONES ARE QUITTING IN DROVES. RAMAN KIRPAL REPORTS ON A BREWING CRISIS
SITTING DUCKS Jawans look out after a car-bomb explosion near a CRPF camp in Srinagar
Photo: AFP
SURINDER KANG joined the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) as a constable in 1990. Twenty years later, he’s risen no more than just one rank: he’s a havaldar now. What has risen dangerously over the years, though, are his chances of dying on duty.
So Kang, at 40, has sought voluntary retirement. He wants his pension (even if it is just 2/3rd of what he would otherwise get), an easier job — and he does not want to die. Needless to say, Surinder Kang has a different real name.
What makes Kang’s story extremely disturbing is that it is not an individual story of disillusionment: it is symptomatic of a rampant and growing feeling in the paramilitary. At a time when the Home Minister is speaking of raising dozens of new paramilitary battalions, apart from Kang, hundreds of other men with real names and real fears and real grievances are queuing up to quit the services. In fact, according to official data, an unprecedented 14,422 jawans applied for premature voluntary retirement from service (VRS) in 2009 — up 85 percent from the previous year and 112 percent from 2007. Compare this with the fact that only 4,622 soldiers sought voluntary retirement from the Indian Army — which is three times larger than all the paramilitary forces put together — in the same period, and the contrast becomes painfully stark.
So, why the exodus?
A few days ago, EN Rammohan, former Director General of the Border Security Force (BSF), submitted his one-man enquiry report to Home Minister P Chidambaram on what went wrong in the recent Dantewada massacre, in which Maoists ambushed and killed 76 CRPF jawans. Predictably, the report blamed “leadership failure” and “a lack of coordination between the CRPF and the state police”. Based on this, a few individual heads down the ranks will roll. But if the government stops at that, it will have misread the crisis and lose a crucial opportunity for introspection and drastic overhaul.
The truth is the Dantewada massacre is only one kind of cautionary tale about what ails the Indian paramilitary. The cautionary tale of Surinder Kang runs much deeper and is more alarming.
Kang has realised that India doesn’t honour its jawans. He’d rather be a private guard
IF ONE were merely to read the surface signs, it might seem a fear of dying is propelling the exodus. The year 2010 has barely begun and already 79 CRPF men have died. The number was 58 in 2009. The stark contrast with Indian Army VRS figures also seems to suggest that battling one’s own countrymen has become much tougher and more wearisome than battling enemies outside — both physically and psychologically. As Gautam Kaul, a retired IPS officer who served as Additional Director General of CRPF in 1997-98, says, “Both death in action and voluntary retirement are higher in the CRPF and BSF than in the Army. The spurt in political and civil unrest in the country does not match [the] planning and preparedness of these paramilitary forces. The demand is massive and the paramilitary forces just can’t meet the demand.”
But fear of dying does not seem to be the key reason Surinder Kang wants to leave the CRPF. Something deeper nags him. Kang has 20 long years of fighting guerilla wars and insurgencies. He has been posted thrice in Jammu and Kashmir, twice in the Northeast, and two times each in Lalgarh and Bastar. Besides this, he has been on election duty in Gujarat, Bihar, Delhi, West Bengal and Orissa. Kang is 40 now and has grayed a little. He is extremely fit and no amount of training can bring you his experience. But Kang has queued up for VRS. He is resolved to leave the forces and work as a small-time private guard at some ATM or private industry. Kang has realised the country does not honour those who serve it. Now, he wants to be with his family at any cost.
Disillusion simmers like an epidemic. 14,422 want to quit the paramilitary forces
“I spent one third of my 20 years in the CRPF just travelling. Of these 20 years, I could spend only three years with my children. I took medical leave to get married. I could only reach my village five days after I received news of my father passing away. I am the eldest in my family but I couldn’t even perform the last rites. I couldn’t COVERSTORY attend three of my four sisters’ marriages. I had to arrange a separate house for my wife and kids after my father’s death because my brother threw them out from the joint family house. But if you take any of these problems to your officers, they just shoo you away.”
Kang is not the only one. Disillusion is simmering like an epidemic beneath the disciplined skin of the paramilitary, and its reasons straddle a wide spectrum: poor work conditions; demeaning terms of service; long years away from families; arbitrary orders and a niggling sense that their life is cheap and death would come without honour.
THE FALLING RANKS
While the army, which has more personnel than all paramilitary forces combined, has seen a gradual fall in attrition rates, it has shot up exponentially in the latter
JUST WALK around the paramilitary headquarters in Delhi and this honour fatigue begins to unravel. Talk to a constable under a tree and word spreads that someone is asking about their troubles. The jawan inside the canteen, the jawan walking with heaps of files to the grievance department, the jawan loading trucks, all stop to listen in. Everyone wants your number on a scrap of paper. They can’t talk now, but they all have a story to tell. Of how they have lived in torn tents with no drinking water. Of how the holes were big enough for heat waves and pouring rain. Of how the officers live in concrete houses with three servants. Of how it’s not the government, but their own departments that ensure the welfare schemes never reach them. Of how salaries are cut even when they are injured on duty. Of how a jawan does not get paid if he is in hospital for more than six months. The recurring theme is “pressure: — of how there is too much “dabav” from commanders to blindly follow orders. Of how most of these orders are things that fall outside the purview of duty. Of how they are never consulted even while their lives are at stake. Of how they all plan to take voluntary retirement as soon as they complete 20 years of service.
There’s a jawan from Uttaranchal who has been trying to get a transfer to his home state of Gujarat for the last five years. His wife is mentally ill and unable to look after his three young children. “The officers tell me to get my wife treated in Uttaranchal,” says he. “But our camp is in the mountains, in the middle of a jungle. How is this possible?” Once he returned a few days late from a visit home. His wife’s ill-health was not a good enough shield. He lost an entire month’s pay.
Another jawan has spent 16 years in the CRPF — six in Jammu and Kashmir, three in Assam, three in Tripura, and three in Manipur. Too scared to talk at the CRPF headquarters, he calls late at night to share his story. During a posting in Srinagar, he was charged with indiscipline and lost 15 days of pay for daring to complain about inedible food and cockroaches in his dal. When he fell sick in Tripura, he couldn’t get a car to get to hospital. “I had to hire a jeep,” says he. “Only if 15-20 constables fall sick and need a car together, there’s a chance of us getting it. Otherwise the cars are busy ferrying the officers’ children. This country got independence in 1947, but we still live like slaves. Our officers order us to do unauthorised things; we have no right to express ourselves. They tell us to barge into people’s homes and pick up bricks and cement and construct our quarters. They pocket lakhs of welfare money; they take commissions from ration shops.
We pay Rs 1,326 per month for food. The bills are for A-grade rations but we get C-grade food. The commander is like the king of a battalion. He runs it the way he wants. As a driver, I am sent all the time for unauthorised pick ups. All the risk of being caught is on me. You live under so much pressure, you either shoot yourself or shoot someone else. I am just waiting to complete 20 years so I can get a part of my pension and then I’ll quit."
A wise administration would retain these men, but the dominant mood is complacency
THE ANGRY stories duplicate endlessly. A jawan from Gorakhpur with 17 years of service behind him speaks of how he was not granted leave to be in time for his first child’s delivery, though he was posted just a few hours away in Allahabad. When he reached a week later, his son was dead. “After the 6th Pay Commission, we were supposed to be given Rs 2,000 education allowance and a travel allowance, but I haven’t got it yet,” says he. “The officers find ways to make sure we don’t get this education allowance. Just a school certificate is not enough. They ask for bills for the child’s uniform, shoes, notebooks. How are we going to run around getting all this when we barely get leave?”
(A jawan is entitled to two months of earned leave in a year but they rarely get leave on time. “A battalion has seven companies and all the seven companies are located at different locations. The battalion commandant sits at Chandigarh. How can a jawan get leave on time if he is located in Dantewada and his commandant is in Chandigarh,” says Gautam Kaul. “Better systems have to be thought through.”)
‘The Naxalites never repeat mistakes, but we never learn from ours,’ says a forlorn jawan
Clearly, the issue of family — and an inability to provide adequately for them — looms large for the jawan. “We had witnessed an exodus in the paramilitary forces in 1991 too when violence had escalated in Jammu and Kashmir,” says Prakash Belgamkar, retired DIG (Operations), CRPF. “We had discovered then that a soldier’s motivation revolves around his family. But he becomes a nomad after joining the forces. The nucleus of his nuclear family goes away. He has no fixed address, his life gets fragmented.”
But no lessons seem to have been learnt since 1991. Far from any internal memos in the Home Ministry sounding alarm signals about the surge in VRS applications, or directives in paramilitary headquarters urging officers to motivate jawans, the dominant mood seems to be callous complacency: there’s more where those came from. “Yes, we have seen a spurt in voluntary retirements,” says CRPF spokesperson Ajay Chaturvedi. “But there are enough applications coming in of boys who want to join. We have filled in the vacancies. We have raised six new battalions in a year. We don’t have a crunch anymore. There’s nothing to worry.”
NO RESPITE CRPF jawans patrol in Gaganpalli village in Chhattisgarh’s Dantewada district
Photo: MISHRA V
A wise administration would stop men like Kang, if it could. Their experience is hard won, and no training course can duplicate that. But the official position seems to be just about numbers. Building morale, quality and pride in work is not on the radar. Retaining experience seems unnecessary. In a poor country, there will always be replacements. There will always be fresh fodder for all cannons.
TO GET a real sense of the implications of the diving morale of the paramilitary jawan, one needs to understand first the nature and work of the paramilitary forces. India has about 7 lakh paramilitary forces which include the Central Reserve Police Force (strength 2.30 lakh); Border Security Force (strength 2.15 lakh); Central Industrial Security Force (strength 1.12 lakh); Assam Rifle (strength 50,000); Indo- Tibetan Border Police (strength 74,000) and a Sashastra Seema Bal (strength 29,000). The tasks of these battalions range across fighting internal counter-insurgencies, protecting heritage sites and national installations, providing relief during calamities, controlling riots, providing VIP security and executing election duties. (Their motto is ‘Any Task, Any Time, Any Where’ and ‘Duty unto Death’ — as opposed to the army’s which is ‘Shoot to Kill’. But far from pride, this seems to evoke cynical scorn in jawans now.)
Though law and order are State subjects that, ideally, should be handled by the State police, the National Crime Record Bureau confirms there is a shortage of two lakh policemen in the country. This places an added burden on the paramilitary forces. As former Home Secretary Madhukar Gupta says, “There is a diversity of challenges from terrorism to insurgency today, which has affected rotation and training of these paramilitary forces. This does lead to stress. The private security business has also attracted them away from the forces. This is an evolving situation and the government has to take major initiatives to improve things.”
The story about the diving morale of the jawan then is not just a story about individual griping. It should be of national concern. The jawan is the primary interface between civilians and the State in a conflict zone. Their conduct is crucial to the history of these conflicts. They need to be sensitised not brutalised. Kashmir, the Northeast, Chhattisgarh, Lalgarh (in West Bengal), Narayanpatna (in Orissa) are all rife with stories of malafide behaviour by jawans. But how can any virtuous cycles set in? As a jawan in Lalgarh says after his friend was refused a visit to his pregnant wife, “I was so angry, I wanted to shoot someone.” (See box Case Study 1)
Difficulty in getting leave and family anxieties though are not the only reasons jawans are quitting in droves. The terms of service, over all, seem to need a major revision. A retired IPS officer who has served in the CRPF, ITBP and CISF in different capacities says, “Why shouldn’t the paramilitary jawans leave? I pity them for sacrificing their lives when our pay commissions do not even recognise them as ‘skilled’ workers.”
TRANSIT HOME Paramilitary forces at a local school in Lalgarh, West Bengal. In conflict zones, the troops are stationed inside unused government buildings, schools, old godowns and cloth tents
Photo: INDIAN EXPRESS ARCHIVE
This seems merely the tip of a huge iceberg of service dissatisfactions. Army men are considered skilled workers, while paramilitary jawans trained to fight in some of the most dangerous and difficult circumstances are not considered “skilled” enough. A jawan gets a salary ranging from Rs 12,000 to Rs 15,000 (same as a civilian clerk); and an additional Rs 3,000 if he is on a ‘hard posting’ in a ‘difficult area’. (It is typical of Indian bureaucracy that while J&K and the Northeast are considered ‘difficult areas’, Chhattisgarh, Bastar and Lalgarh are yet to feature in this category though many more jawans have been killed in service here than elsewhere.) A jawan also gets Rs 1,100 — Rs 1,300 for rations but has to pay for his own mess expenses on the field, often having to find rations and cook for themselves.
Apart from these living conditions, many veterans say the essential command structure of the paramilitary forces is flawed. Kaul believes too many agencies have authority over a jawan and that contributes hugely to the low morale. “As director general of a paramilitary force, I am only entitled to perform house-keeping jobs for a jawan. I can train him and monitor his service record, but I have no powers to decide on his battalion movement and deployment,” says he. Only Home Ministry officials perform this critical job: they have the list of battalions, they assess the demand and assign locations.
This can lead to many Kafkaesque situations. One retired jawan remembers a tortuous journey in 2004 that stretched 8,000 kilometers over two months as the Home Ministry ordered his company like a pawn to move from Agartala to Gujarat via Bangladesh, Delhi, Kashmir and back to Agartala. Crowded trains, no reservations, no accommodations, no sense of why they were being deployed anywhere, and, most of all — no sense of respect. “I have fought insurgents for 20 years,” says the jawan bitterly, “but this one journey showed me my standing in my country’s eyes. How can you fool around with so many human beings on the pretext of an emergency situation?” (See box Case Study 2) Other jawans speak of being summoned to places for six months and being asked to stay for six years.
“Battalion movements are very frequent in the CRPF and this often leads to individual hardship. The very nature of their duty is temporary and is bound to dislocate them constantly. In the army, soldiers undertake an operation then go back to the base camp; the CRPF jawans have no fixed place to return. They are always on the move,’’ says Kaul.
THIS SENSE of the ad-hoc permeates every aspect of their lives. (For instance, it appears the Home Ministry had no idea that the CRPF had only three satellite phones till former Home Minister Shivraj Patil went to Amarnath and had a sudden desire to speak to his family from the shrine. A phone was found with great difficulty for him. This is the only reason he came back to Delhi and remembered to sanction 68 satellite phones for the CRPF and an equal number for other paramilitary battalions.)
BODY COUNT A jawan on guard outside a barricaded CRPF camp in Lal Chowk, one of Srinagar’s high-risk zones
Photo: SHAILENDRA PANDEY
But often, this can have much more ominous implications. Kang speaks of his dread in being asked to go on an ‘area domination’ exercise in Chhattisgarh. “We hadn’t slept for days. We landed, and our induction was cut short midway, because there were no policemen for patrolling. We had no clue about the local language, culture, terrain, and most importantly, we had no intelligence about the enemy. We were there physically but had to rely on local intelligence. The paramilitary does not even have its own intelligence. So if the input is good, we succeed; if not, we become sitting ducks.”
This idea of being a ‘sitting duck’ is a powerful and repetitive leitmotif. Another retired jawan who has seen service in J&K, Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh and Jharkhand, says, “Naxalites fight with military precision. They commit mistakes but they never repeat them.” He recalls an incident in Erabore in 2005 when 200 Naxalites tried to bomb a police armory and the CRPF bunker near it. The jawans resisted the attack and informed their base camp. Help came quickly and the Naxals were repulsed. Three months later, the CRPF battalion raided a Naxal hideout and found a document titled: Why we failed in the Erabore Police Armory Operation. The document said they had failed because they had underestimated the strength of the armory and bunker wall, and so had taken insufficient explosives, and, secondly, they had not anticipated that the CRPF’s base camp could send help that fast. A few months later, Naxals killed 23 CRPF jawans in a landmine attack. The jawans were on their way to rescue policemen trapped in an attack: the Naxals had anticipated this and laid landmines to blow the vehicle.
“We are never debriefed so thoroughly,” says the jawan. “We are constantly pushed into mindless ‘area domination’ exercises without any intelligence. We never seem to learn from our mistakes.”
What can reverse the tide then? What can stop the attrition and turn this force into a humane, yet proud and efficient line of defence? Former Home Secretary Madhukar Gupta says some initiatives were underway in his time: raising more police force, providing housing, reducing telephone rates for calls home, and counselling (when more than 10 jawans from a company apply for VRS). Prakash Belgamkar re-emphasises the need for this: “A jawan has other alternatives today. If the State wants to retain him, it has to free him of his worries about his family. If this is done, he’ll be yours for the rest of his life.” That might be only the first of many urgent correctives. The most primary one will have to be an essential change of attitude — wherein retaining men begins to matter more than merely replacing them.
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“MY PATRIOTISM IS DEAD”
ANONYMOUS, West Bengal
AFTER 12 YEARS of serving in the paramilitary forces, Ashok Ray, 34, wants to quit. He joined the forces in 1998, inspired by his grand father — a freedom fighter who later served in the Indian Army. Ray’s father, a CPWD electrical operator in Howrah, West Bengal, had warned him against it — “It’s a terrible life away from your family.”
Today, serving as a constable holed up in a broken house in West Bengal’s Naxal-hit forests, putting up plastic packets on his window to keep away the scorching heat, Ray wishes he had taken the advice. Ask Ray what it’s like working in these jungles, searching for the elusive Maoist, and he repeats the one word you didn’t expect to hear from a jawan — human rights. “We have no human rights,” he whispers, asking you to ensure his identity remains hidden. “If an officer wants water or cold drinks, 10 cars will go to get it. But if a jawan wants to go on leave, it’s a big risk to give him a car to get out of Jangalmahal.” Ray earns a salary of Rs 15,000 a month and stays in a camp with 100 other jawans. They were offered cloth tents and two old godowns with no ventilation. The squad found an old house, once used for a government scheme, and converted it into a camp. Four people stay in a room. Those who couldn’t get these rooms sleep outside in tents. There are no toilets. Ray bathes at the nearest well and pays Rs 32 a day for rice and dal cooked in the mess, run by the jawans themselves.
One of the defining moments for Ray came when he had a motorbike accident as he was returning to his base camp. “I could have died of a haemorrhage,” he says. “My eyes were bleeding and my bones were fractured.” It was past sunset, and too late to make the 15 kilometre journey through dense forests. When Ray tried to stay at the nearest police station, he was turned away. “We need orders,” he was told by the inspector.
But the lowest point came when he was returning after treatment in Howrah, having spent Rs 50,000. Still weak from surgery, he asked his brother, a security guard in a private company, to accompany him. After a train and bus ride, he reached a point in the forest where public transport ends. From here, jawans must call their base camp for a vehicle. “The inspector refused to send a car if I came with my brother and luggage.” Ray had to spend his own money to hire a taxi. Once at the camp, his brother was refused a place to stay. “Where would I find him a hotel in this dense Maoist area?” The human rights violations didn’t end there. The doctor had issued Ray a medical certificate that said he could do “light” work. “The inspector asked me to get a certificate saying I am fit.”
Another shocking incident Ray remembers is when a colleague asked for leave to see his pregnant wife. “Will you deliver the baby yourself?” the jawan was told. “Tell her to go to her in-laws.” That’s when Ray began to lose all faith in the system. “I was so angry, I wanted to shoot.”
‘AS JAWANS, WE HAVE NO HUMAN RIGHTS. I FEEL I WILL BE DYING FOR NOTHING,’ RAY SAYS, READY TO QUIT THE JOB
His most recent tenure in Jangalmahal, West Bengal, has made Ray question the old ideas of patriotism. “I always wanted to be a sainik to serve my country,” he says, “but now I feel I will be dying for nothing. I have seen so many illegal things happening. We have to blindly follow orders. When we go for operations, we don’t know who a Maoist is. Poor Adivasis are being beaten and innocents are being killed. I don’t feel that I am doing anything for the nation. My patriotism is dead.”
Clearly disillusioned, Ray admits the morale of the forces is at the lowest. “What is this operation? What is success? What have we achieved in all these months of being here,” he asks. “There is no intelligence and we don’t know what the strategy is.”
The latest orders from the West Bengal DGP have perturbed him further. After the Silda attack, the jawans were told, “If you think he is a Maoist — kill him.”
“I have not yet beaten anyone yet because I don’t know if he is a Maoist,” Ray says. “All I can see is that he is poor and one of our known. But some of the villagers are also with the Maoists. If we sympathise, it’s a problem, if we don’t, it’s a problem. I don’t know what to do.”
TUSHA MITTAL
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“WE FELT LIKE PAWNS”
ANONYMOUS, Chhattisgarh
I NURTURED a dream to travel the world one day. I had never stepped out of my village in Hoshiarpur, Punjab until I was 15, when I finally boarded a bus to an inter-college event. But a train was still a distant possibility. I had little contact with the outside world.
My dreams were fulfilled in 1990, when I joined the CRPF as an Assistant Sub Inspector. I knew that the life in the paramilitary forces is tough, but you get a chance to travel the world if you are lucky. 20 years later, I feel miserable, having spent half my life aboard a train. Even now, as I say this, I am supposed to be in transit.
While defending the nation against terrorists and insurgents, one incident showed me where I really stood. It was an endless journey that lasted two months, covering 8,000 km. It began in 2004. I was posted at Agartala, Tripura. Besides insurgents, the place was full of deadly mosquitoes, which had already killed two jawans. We used to religiously swallow two tablets of quinine every evening during the roll call.
One day we were ordered to go to Gujarat on election duty. The prospects of not taking quinine sounded convincing, and so our 100-strong company set off, going around Bangladesh to reach Lumding, Assam, driving in rain. It took us more than a day, after which we took a meter-gauge train to Guwahati 16 hours later.
We had no reservations on the train and there were no extra bogies available. The railway authorities would not be bothered about adjusting us in any of the trains going to Mumbai or Delhi. Despite the huge demand for berths, we managed to get on a Delhibound train, which was supposed to leave three days after our arrival at Guwahati. So five days were lost, and we were still stuck in the North-East.
We stayed in a makeshift transit camp in Guwahati, which was as good as the station platform. Finally, we managed to make the three-day insurlong journey. We had barely touched the Delhi railway station, and had just informed our superiors about our location, when we were asked to divert to Kashmir, as there was an ‘emergency’ situation.
We collected new travel warrants and requested our headquarters to use their influence in getting us on to any train going to Jammu. Luckily, we got an overnighter to Jammu the very next day, reaching Jammu on the morning of our tenth day of nonstop travel. 100 jawans needed at least three trucks to move in a convoy to the Valley. For this, we had to wait for another two days. When we finally got going, the 15-hour journey became a 24-hour crawl due to the Vaishno Devi pilgrim rush.
I had stopped counting days after I reached Kashmir. In one word, it was ‘pathetic’. The Kashmir police did not require our service, as the situation was under control by then. We were given some space in Police Lane and were told to sort out where we should go next.
We contacted our field commander and sought further directions, which came after three days: “Gujarat’’
WE DON’T HAVE SPECIAL TRAIN BOGIES LIKE THE ARMY. WE DEPEND ON THE KINDNESS OF THE RAILWAYS
A hundred of us started packing. We requested for trucks again and rolled back to Jammu, to spend two more days at a transit camp near Jammu Railway Station. We reached Delhi and then began the long wait for space in any train that goes to Gujarat.
We never get reservations in the train, and unlike armymen we don’t have the honour of having special bogies. We have to request the Railways and convince them how important it is for us to reach our destination. The Railway officials are kind on most occasions, but they are also helpless during rush seasons.
We then spent a few days in a Delhi transit camp and finally headed for Gujarat. On our arrival at Ahmedabad, we were told that we were late. We had already been replaced by another company. The election duties were already assigned. “Go back to Agartala,’’ were the next orders.
How mindless can one be! Please don’t calculate financial and man-hour losses that this journey entailed. Think of us. We were used as ‘dead material’ and were kicked around like football.
My blood boils, when I think of it even today.
RAMAN KIRPAL
With inputs from Tusha Mittal
WRITER’S EMAIL:
raman@tehelka.com
From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 7, Issue 18, Dated May 08, 2010
http://www.tehelka.com/story_main44.asp?filename=Ne080510CoverStory.asp
9:19 AM
Corruption in Army stores
The Price Of Keeping Watch
LT COL BS GORAYA FACES THE WRATH OF HIS SUPERIORS FOR EXPOSING AN ARMY CANTEEN FRAUD. KUNAL MAJUMDER REPORTS
THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE
March 14, 2009 Goraya finds illegal watches being sold without proper billing in the Kalka Battalion canteen. Informs his Commanding Officer, Col Shad
May 08, 2009 In Shad’s absence, Goraya seals the almirah from where a bill for 200 watches, worth Rs 1.3 lakh, in the name of the CO is retrieved later
May 25, 2009 A Court of Inquiry is instituted to look into Goraya’s allegations of corruption against Shad. Shad accuses Goraya of misconduct
May 11, 2010 After COI exonerates Shad, he is promoted to the NSG as Logistic Commander, even as Goraya struggles to get his due promotion
RESIDENTS OF northern Jammu & Kashmir have long grown used to a river of military tankers winding their way past the icy peaks overlooking Kargil. Their destination: Leh, site of the army’s largest oil depot. In 2005, in a major embarrassment for the military, a major racket was uncovered: many “fuel” tankers were found to be carrying water, not diesel. Though several officers including a brigadier were charged with criminal conspiracy, a quick remedy — and preventive measures — was the need of the hour. The right man for the job turned out to be 43- year-old Lt Col Baljinder Singh Goraya, who, in his earlier posting had shown himself to be someone who brooked not even the faintest scent of graft — he had gone so far as to have his commanding officer booked for corruption.
COL VK SHAD
Former Commanding Officer of the army's Kalka Battalion, now promoted to the NSG, has a number of corruption charges against him.
Few can take the rigours of the cold desert and separation from their families for more than a few months; Goraya soldiered on for three years. The result? An efficient, pilferage-proof logistics system to fuel strategically crucial operations not only in J&K but also on the Siachen glacier. True to his principles, Goraya reported cases of corruption wherever he saw them: in 2007, truckers were found shipping empty oil barrels and wheat sacks, and taking money from both the army and the Food Corporation of India. In 2009, Goraya received the Chief of Army Staff’s Commendation when he found and fixed chronic, critical inadequacies in aviation fuel supply for forward areas of Ladakh. With 18 years of service behind him, when Goraya reported to a posting in Kalka, Haryana, after his extremely successful Leh stint, the omens looked bright for him. They were misleading. Goraya has been denied promotion, has been summarily attached to headquarters and continues to face daily harassment from his superiors.
On March 14, 2009, Goraya went to the battalion’s canteen to buy some gifts for a visit to his hometown. While he got a proper bill for his other purchases, he was given a handwritten bill worth Rs 289 for a ‘BPL Watches’ wristwatch. Queries revealed a glaring irregularity — the watches were absent from the canteen’s stock registers and their sale proceeds were never deposited in the bank. Shockingly, the canteen staff told Goraya that the procedure was adopted on the orders of Col VK Shad, the Commanding Officer (CO). That very day, Goraya wrote a letter to Shad about this practice, placing the matter on record and then proceeded to go on leave. This missing bill for a watch worth a mere Rs 289 would lead to a full-blown investigation and a Court of Inquiry (COI) to examine corruption among senior officers.
When he returned, Goraya began to dig a little deeper. On May 8, 2009, he asked the canteen adjutant for the bill under which the watches were procured. “The adjutant called up the CO who was away on temporary duty. The CO ordered her not to hand over the bill,” stated Goraya in the COI. Goraya then called up Western Command HQ, asking for someone to intervene and help retrieve the bill. He was ignored. As the senior officer in Shad’s absence, Goraya had the cupboard in which the bill was kept locked and sealed. On his return, an incensed Shad alleged in writing that Goraya was guilty of mutiny. Although Goraya immediately communicated these events to Maj Gen RK Kalra, Shad’s superior and the officer in charge of discipline for Western Command, Goraya states that he observed “inaction” on Kalra’s part: the cupboard remained sealed for 13 days. Ultimately, the cupboard divulged damning evidence: a bill for 200 watches from “Empire Electronics” dated November 2008 worth Rs 1.37 lakh in the name of “CO, 5682 ASC Bn” (Shad’s designation).
LT COL BS GORAYA
An army officer with a history of whisteblowing, faces the brunt for exposing his superior's corrupt practices. His promotion has been pending for over a year.
Western Command instituted a COI on the issue on May 25, 2009. Shad denied the allegations of wrongdoing levelled at him by Goraya, retorting instead that Goraya was aware of the sale of wristwatches before the incident. “The officer is being tried for levelling false allegations. He’s trying to subvert the judicial process,” Shad told TEHELKA. Shad testified before the Court — without offering evidence to support his claim — that he had informed Goraya about the illegal sale of watches through a letter and had also discussed the matter on February 7, 2009. The COI discovered that the racket had been on since 2003 and found that a fortnight after getting the letter from Goraya informing him of the racket, Shad ordered another officer to ‘streamline’ the sale of wristwatches.
SHAD HAS BEEN PROMOTED TO THE NSG IN SPITE OF ANOTHER PENDING FRAUD INQUIRY
Goraya revealed another matter to the COI: liquor companies such as Diageo, the UB Group and Radico Khaitan, — which are paid through Canteen & Stores Department HQ in Mumbai — had given Shad cash and cheques for “sponsoring events”. While Shad claims this was merely a continuation of past practices and that he had received only small amounts, army regulations strictly prohibit personnel from receiving money from companies. Shad levelled a volley of counter-allegations: among them, Goraya had allegedly, ‘cancelled New Years’ celebrations,’ ‘changed the décor of the battalion’s guest room’ and, ‘was unaccompanied at some official functions by his wife.’ The Court found no merit in these charges.
SURPRISINGLY, THOUGH the findings acknowledged Goraya’s role as a whistleblower, they credited Shad with stopping the illegal trade in watches, reasoning that Shad was merely continuing a past practice. But if Shad was aware of the racket since his posting as battalion CO in 2008, why did he stop it only after Goraya detected it and formally placed it on record in March 2009?
Ultimately, Shad was given a plum posting: Commander (Logistics) for the prestigious National Security Guards. Goraya, however, continued to be targeted: On August 11, 2009, he was shunted out of Kalka battalion and attached to HQ. His promotion, which was due in May 2009 has been delayed for over a year. Goraya appealed against this delay to the Armed Forces Tribunal, which ruled in his favour on April 30 this year, asking the Military Secretary to consider his promotion. The army, however, plans to challenge the Tribunal’s ruling in the Supreme Court.
Why is a whistleblower being subjected to so much harassment? Why was the COI so lenient towards Shad? When contacted, the Western Command would only reply, “The case is under active consideration and a decision will be taken on merit.” Interestingly, on May 12, 2010, another COI was instituted against Shad to look into yet another canteen fraud in Kalka battalion.
A senior officer points out on condition of anonymity that the army is the only organisation whose regulations state that it is the “obligatory duty” of anyone in military service to immediately inform his immediate superior of any incident of dishonesty or fraud. However, he points out that unlike the US, India does not have any law to protect whistleblowers. Until such a law is enacted, officers like Lt Col Baljinder Singh Goraya will continue to be targets.
WRITER’S EMAIL
kunal@tehelka.com
From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 7, Issue 23, Dated http://www.tehelka.com/story_main45.asp?filename=Ne120610the_price.asp
LT COL BS GORAYA FACES THE WRATH OF HIS SUPERIORS FOR EXPOSING AN ARMY CANTEEN FRAUD. KUNAL MAJUMDER REPORTS
THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE
March 14, 2009 Goraya finds illegal watches being sold without proper billing in the Kalka Battalion canteen. Informs his Commanding Officer, Col Shad
May 08, 2009 In Shad’s absence, Goraya seals the almirah from where a bill for 200 watches, worth Rs 1.3 lakh, in the name of the CO is retrieved later
May 25, 2009 A Court of Inquiry is instituted to look into Goraya’s allegations of corruption against Shad. Shad accuses Goraya of misconduct
May 11, 2010 After COI exonerates Shad, he is promoted to the NSG as Logistic Commander, even as Goraya struggles to get his due promotion
RESIDENTS OF northern Jammu & Kashmir have long grown used to a river of military tankers winding their way past the icy peaks overlooking Kargil. Their destination: Leh, site of the army’s largest oil depot. In 2005, in a major embarrassment for the military, a major racket was uncovered: many “fuel” tankers were found to be carrying water, not diesel. Though several officers including a brigadier were charged with criminal conspiracy, a quick remedy — and preventive measures — was the need of the hour. The right man for the job turned out to be 43- year-old Lt Col Baljinder Singh Goraya, who, in his earlier posting had shown himself to be someone who brooked not even the faintest scent of graft — he had gone so far as to have his commanding officer booked for corruption.
COL VK SHAD
Former Commanding Officer of the army's Kalka Battalion, now promoted to the NSG, has a number of corruption charges against him.
Few can take the rigours of the cold desert and separation from their families for more than a few months; Goraya soldiered on for three years. The result? An efficient, pilferage-proof logistics system to fuel strategically crucial operations not only in J&K but also on the Siachen glacier. True to his principles, Goraya reported cases of corruption wherever he saw them: in 2007, truckers were found shipping empty oil barrels and wheat sacks, and taking money from both the army and the Food Corporation of India. In 2009, Goraya received the Chief of Army Staff’s Commendation when he found and fixed chronic, critical inadequacies in aviation fuel supply for forward areas of Ladakh. With 18 years of service behind him, when Goraya reported to a posting in Kalka, Haryana, after his extremely successful Leh stint, the omens looked bright for him. They were misleading. Goraya has been denied promotion, has been summarily attached to headquarters and continues to face daily harassment from his superiors.
On March 14, 2009, Goraya went to the battalion’s canteen to buy some gifts for a visit to his hometown. While he got a proper bill for his other purchases, he was given a handwritten bill worth Rs 289 for a ‘BPL Watches’ wristwatch. Queries revealed a glaring irregularity — the watches were absent from the canteen’s stock registers and their sale proceeds were never deposited in the bank. Shockingly, the canteen staff told Goraya that the procedure was adopted on the orders of Col VK Shad, the Commanding Officer (CO). That very day, Goraya wrote a letter to Shad about this practice, placing the matter on record and then proceeded to go on leave. This missing bill for a watch worth a mere Rs 289 would lead to a full-blown investigation and a Court of Inquiry (COI) to examine corruption among senior officers.
When he returned, Goraya began to dig a little deeper. On May 8, 2009, he asked the canteen adjutant for the bill under which the watches were procured. “The adjutant called up the CO who was away on temporary duty. The CO ordered her not to hand over the bill,” stated Goraya in the COI. Goraya then called up Western Command HQ, asking for someone to intervene and help retrieve the bill. He was ignored. As the senior officer in Shad’s absence, Goraya had the cupboard in which the bill was kept locked and sealed. On his return, an incensed Shad alleged in writing that Goraya was guilty of mutiny. Although Goraya immediately communicated these events to Maj Gen RK Kalra, Shad’s superior and the officer in charge of discipline for Western Command, Goraya states that he observed “inaction” on Kalra’s part: the cupboard remained sealed for 13 days. Ultimately, the cupboard divulged damning evidence: a bill for 200 watches from “Empire Electronics” dated November 2008 worth Rs 1.37 lakh in the name of “CO, 5682 ASC Bn” (Shad’s designation).
LT COL BS GORAYA
An army officer with a history of whisteblowing, faces the brunt for exposing his superior's corrupt practices. His promotion has been pending for over a year.
Western Command instituted a COI on the issue on May 25, 2009. Shad denied the allegations of wrongdoing levelled at him by Goraya, retorting instead that Goraya was aware of the sale of wristwatches before the incident. “The officer is being tried for levelling false allegations. He’s trying to subvert the judicial process,” Shad told TEHELKA. Shad testified before the Court — without offering evidence to support his claim — that he had informed Goraya about the illegal sale of watches through a letter and had also discussed the matter on February 7, 2009. The COI discovered that the racket had been on since 2003 and found that a fortnight after getting the letter from Goraya informing him of the racket, Shad ordered another officer to ‘streamline’ the sale of wristwatches.
SHAD HAS BEEN PROMOTED TO THE NSG IN SPITE OF ANOTHER PENDING FRAUD INQUIRY
Goraya revealed another matter to the COI: liquor companies such as Diageo, the UB Group and Radico Khaitan, — which are paid through Canteen & Stores Department HQ in Mumbai — had given Shad cash and cheques for “sponsoring events”. While Shad claims this was merely a continuation of past practices and that he had received only small amounts, army regulations strictly prohibit personnel from receiving money from companies. Shad levelled a volley of counter-allegations: among them, Goraya had allegedly, ‘cancelled New Years’ celebrations,’ ‘changed the décor of the battalion’s guest room’ and, ‘was unaccompanied at some official functions by his wife.’ The Court found no merit in these charges.
SURPRISINGLY, THOUGH the findings acknowledged Goraya’s role as a whistleblower, they credited Shad with stopping the illegal trade in watches, reasoning that Shad was merely continuing a past practice. But if Shad was aware of the racket since his posting as battalion CO in 2008, why did he stop it only after Goraya detected it and formally placed it on record in March 2009?
Ultimately, Shad was given a plum posting: Commander (Logistics) for the prestigious National Security Guards. Goraya, however, continued to be targeted: On August 11, 2009, he was shunted out of Kalka battalion and attached to HQ. His promotion, which was due in May 2009 has been delayed for over a year. Goraya appealed against this delay to the Armed Forces Tribunal, which ruled in his favour on April 30 this year, asking the Military Secretary to consider his promotion. The army, however, plans to challenge the Tribunal’s ruling in the Supreme Court.
Why is a whistleblower being subjected to so much harassment? Why was the COI so lenient towards Shad? When contacted, the Western Command would only reply, “The case is under active consideration and a decision will be taken on merit.” Interestingly, on May 12, 2010, another COI was instituted against Shad to look into yet another canteen fraud in Kalka battalion.
A senior officer points out on condition of anonymity that the army is the only organisation whose regulations state that it is the “obligatory duty” of anyone in military service to immediately inform his immediate superior of any incident of dishonesty or fraud. However, he points out that unlike the US, India does not have any law to protect whistleblowers. Until such a law is enacted, officers like Lt Col Baljinder Singh Goraya will continue to be targets.
WRITER’S EMAIL
kunal@tehelka.com
From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 7, Issue 23, Dated http://www.tehelka.com/story_main45.asp?filename=Ne120610the_price.asp
3:55 PM
Psychic Costs
A psychic cost is a subset of social costs that specifically represent the costs of added stress or losses to quality of life. In managerial economics and marketing, psychic costs "measure the stress of having to think about a transaction".
In The Psychic Cost of Segregation, a 1954 article by James W. Prothro and Charles U. Smith of Clark Atlanta University, the authors examined the impact of segregation on the personalities of black Americans. An example of the psychic cost is that some white people still feel fear of blacks, which can make it hard for black people to get jobs or apartments in white-dominated neighbourhoods. As well, for business owners with mainly black clientele, some white clients may not come into their restaurant or theater because of perceptions that it may not be safe.
Relevance to War
In The Psychic Cost of Segregation, a 1954 article by James W. Prothro and Charles U. Smith of Clark Atlanta University, the authors examined the impact of segregation on the personalities of black Americans. An example of the psychic cost is that some white people still feel fear of blacks, which can make it hard for black people to get jobs or apartments in white-dominated neighbourhoods. As well, for business owners with mainly black clientele, some white clients may not come into their restaurant or theater because of perceptions that it may not be safe.
Relevance to War
The after-affect of a war will most likely produce psychic costs. The trauma and shock accompanied with emotional anger are resultant elements that form part of psychic costs.
The proponents of war argue that psychic costs are irrelevant when compared with a nation's security issues. The proponents of anti-war make a counter-argument that national security is of no use when people of that nation are culturally impaired.
The proponents of war argue that psychic costs are irrelevant when compared with a nation's security issues. The proponents of anti-war make a counter-argument that national security is of no use when people of that nation are culturally impaired.
This part of the website engages an active debate on the topic:
"War is of no use when people of that nation are culturally impaired"
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