Late on Friday, July 21, soldiers from the Indian Army, dressed in civilian clothes, beat up members of the Jammu and Kashmir Police after being stopped at a checkpoint in Ganderbal district. The events of that night, which left eight policemen injured, have laid bare the fault lines between the various security forces operating in the Kashmir Valley.
In a statement made soon afterwards, the Indian Army’s Srinagar-based spokesperson described the incident as a “minor altercation”. The statement added: “No major injuries were suffered in the incident and the matter has been resolved by personal intervention of senior officers. Measures to prevent recurrence have been taken.”
The Director General of Police Shesh Paul Vaid reportedly lodged a protest with the general officer commanding of the Srinagar-based 15 Corps. On Sunday, JS Sandhu, the general officer commanding, asserted that the state police and the army worked like “brothers in arms” and blamed “anti-national elements” for “creating a wedge” between the two forces.
On Monday, Munir Khan, inspector general of the police, said the army had apologised for the incident and ordered an inquiry. Police accounts from Friday night, however, suggest that the incident was more than a minor altercation.
At the check point
According the police, the clash occurred when army personnel who were off duty were returning to their camps from a pilgrimage to the Amarnath shrine after road-opening parties of the police and paramilitary forces had been withdrawn for the day. Since the killings of eight Amarnath pilgrims in a terrorist attack in Anantnag on July 10, vehicles are prohibited from plying unless this security detail is present.
The group of four vehicles and 32 personnel reached a police checkpoint at Sonamarg, a little before 10 pm on Friday. After the attack, vehicles making the return journey from the yatra are supposed to set out early in the morning and pass through Sonamarg not later than 9 pm. According to police officials in the district, the soldiers did not produce their identity cards at the checkpoint. Instead, they pushed through the barricades and sped off. Police personnel at the spot notified the district police control room that unidentified persons had broken through the checkpoint. The police control room sent a message to the police station in Gund.
Around 10.30 pm, the vehicles were stopped at a checkpoint in Gund, manned by three police and 30 personnel from the Indo-Tibetan Border Police. Pilgrims are not allowed to pass through Gund, some 20 km from Sonamarg, after 11.15 am. Within minutes, police officials said, the soldiers had got off the vehicles and beat up the police personnel, leaving the assistant sub-inspector in charge of the checkpoint with head injuries. The two other police personnel were also injured.
Following the commotion on the streets, residents poured out. A police official who did not want to be named said that the station house officer of Gund police station arrived on the scene with two other policemen. “They managed to bring the army men to the police station,” he said. “The people dispersed within the next 10-15 minutes and everything seemed to be under control.”
To the police station
At the police station, the soldiers finally produced their army-issued identity cards, according to police officials, a junior commissioned officer of the army was among the party. Some of the soldiers at the station appeared to be drunk, they added. “There, the JCO spoke to his superiors, telling them that the police was cooperating,” said a district police official.
But by around 11.30 pm, he continued, there was more noise. The iron gates leading to the police station were broken and there “was yelling all around”, he said. Two companies from the nearby army camps at Mamar and Surfraw, led by a senior officer, entered the police station, he continued, they were in uniform and, along with their standard-issue weapons, carried hockey sticks, baseball bats, and machetes.
“They barged in and damaged things. The munshi [the station clerk] was beaten up, windows of the station were broken, two police cars were damaged, a tyre of the station’s patrol vehicle was burst open,” he said. “The SHO’s personal laptop and television and other items were also damaged.”
According to the official, there were less than 10 policemen in the station and five were injured during the attack. Most of those assualted that night have been injured on their arms and legs. “We were later held hostage in a room of the station while the uniformed soldiers took away their colleagues,” he said.
The police station also houses three companies of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police. Their personnel are posted on sentry duty at the station but did not intervene, the official said, adding that only police staff and property were harmed during the attack.
“I think directions came from the higher ups, their COs [Commanding Officers]” he alleged, while complaining that the army undermined the police’s authority. “They don’t even pick up a leaf without their COs permission. We stop pilgrims over security concerns, which has heightened since few weeks. How can we stop anyone now, who will listen to orders? Whom should we stop and whom should we allow?”
Scroll.in has made repeated attempts to contact the Army for its version of the night’s events. As of Tuesday evening, there had been no response.
‘A pretty common thing’
The Jammu and Kashmir police now seems to be buffeted by pressure on both sides. As the first line of response by the state, the police bears the brunt of popular anger. Recently, a senior police officer was lynched by an angry crowd in Srinagar. Now, separatist leaders of the Hurriyat have taken to social media to say that “even those who aid state oppression were not spared”.
But some police officials dismiss the incident as a trivial one. “It’s a pretty common thing for the army, everywhere in India,” said one officer. “It is being blown out of proportion because it has happened in Kashmir. The army has always had that kind of a bravado. It’s a sense of an institutional superiority.”
Such incidents have been known to happen in other states. In 2007, army personnel ransacked a police station in Kolkata after two officers were arrested on charges of sexual harassment in 2007. In February 2012, army personnel beat up policemen and civilians in Maharashtra’s Pune after a squabble over a traffic violation.
In January 2015, army personnel resorted to stonepelting and beat up police personnel at the police station in in Upnagar, also in Maharashtra. The same year, in September, army personnel ransacked and beat up police personnel at the Vijay Nagar police station in Madhya Pradesh.
Within Jammu and Kashmir, a similar incident occurred in September 2012, when army personnel ransacked a police station and beat up policemen in Kathua district in the Jammu region. In May 2014, six policemen were injured in an skirmish in Sonamarg when personnel from the Army’s High Altitude Warfare School were being questioned by the police about a hit and run case. According to Greater Kashmir, the soldiers snatched a weapon from the police and barged into Sonamarg Police Station and resorted to firing.
But then, tensions between the Indian Army and the Jammu and Kashmir Police go back decades. These chronic tensions are perhaps common to conflict zones in various parts of the country where various security forces must work together.
The local and the non-local
On social media, a section of Kashmiris exhorted the police to reenact the protest of 1993. In April that year, a police constable was killed in army firing at militants who had launched an attack. It sparked off dissensions within police ranks. Police personnel, along with their service rifles, staged protests and took over the police control room in Srinagar. Finally, the protest ended with an army operation that disarmed and rounded up the policemen.
Today, police officials say that there is a “general overall synergy” between the two forces, but frictions remain. Part of the tension arises from the fact that most of the police constabulary consists of local residents of the Valley while military and paramilitary personnel tend to be drawn from outside the state.
Former chief of the army’s Northern Command, DS Hooda, said that after the initial surge of militancy in the 1990s, which overwhelmed central forces, it was felt that a local force needed to be involved. “It has to be the local police that generates information and intelligence and has a better outreach to the local population,” he explained. All forces worked together at the Unified Headquarters, set up in the early 1990s.
Yet one senior officer from the Central Reserve Police Force in Delhi claimed that the central forces tended to regard the local police with suspicion, with doubts that they may have militant sympathies.
This mistrust is reflected in routine practices. In some instances, the army’s lack of regard for police authority can lead into law and order problems. “Seventy percent of the problems are created by the army,” complained one police official. “For example, when they get into accidents, as happened recently. If we try to arrest the driver or seize the vehicle, they say that they have their own military police.”
This often angers nearby crowds, which, observing that no action has been taken against errant military drivers, can often resort to stone pelting.
The official further added that army patrols are limited on certain days of the week, creating resentment. Besides, he claimed, the army often did not inform the police of its movements, despite the guidelines.
“Sometimes, some army officers allege information is being leaked from the police’s end [to the militants], that creates bad blood,” he said. “Basically, it’s that grapes are sour. Their lack of penetration in Kashmiri society bothers them, earning us their ire.”
Joining forces
As joint operations between the army, police and paramilitary became an established method of counterinsurgency, other frictions emerged. The jostling begins at the intelligence-gathering stage.
One former counterinsurgency official said that credible inputs on the presence of militants were generated by the police; the army was included “owing to its firepower, and monetary resources”.
A senior police official added that in the rare instances when the army generated inputs, it was usually because it had coopted one of the police informers, “pleading with and paying one of our guys for information”.
Hooda, however, acknowledged that the police played a primary role in generating inputs for counterinsurgency operations. The relationship between the police and the army, he said, was “based on the fact that we need each other”.
Second, press releases attribute operations to joint parties, but the role by different forces is a matter of internal debate.
“Practically it is not feasible for the police to send their people with each and every patrol, they have their own responsibility for law and order,” Hooda said. “Definitely, they accompany us where the army feels it could get into problems with the civil population and we don’t want to be ones to do the law and order duty.”
Yet, both police officers in the Valley and the CRPF officer in Delhi claimed that if they got specific information about the whereabouts of militants, they would reach the spot first and try to engage them.
“There is an impression in the country that it is only the army that is conducting anti-militancy operations,” complained one senior police official. He added that police shied away from taking credit since it could put local Kashmiris involved in counterinsurgency operations at risk.
But for now, all three forces assert that there is smooth intelligence sharing and coordination when it came to joint operations. Friction between the forces, Hooda said, was limited to a few “odd incidents”.
