| The personnel of an Indian Army unit tempted three north Kashmiri rural men with promise of jobs and killed them last month alleging them as jihadists attempting to infiltrate in to India and the Northern Army Commander Lt. Gen. R S Jaswal has assured that the culprits would be brought to book. That is insufficient, because there is serious dissatisfaction over the counter-insurgency formations of the Indian Army and the internal mistaken means, as seen in the past. Facts available with police, prove that Srinagar based XV Corps should have smelt rat much earlier than the relatives of the dead men filed complaints. But top Commanders did not know as to what rogue units under them were doing. Four years back a police investigation unearthed evidence that Rashtriya Rifles formations had been involved in killing of several people in south Kashmir and terming them as jihadists died in combats. Two years before this, an unknown informer in the Army exposed that four porters hired from Jammu and Punjab had been killed in the same way by 18 Rashtriya Rifles. These offenders went scot-free since Army authorities were lax to take any action. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s assurance of zero-tolerance on human rights violations will be useless until the Army develops a criminal justice system worth its name.
Militaries the worlds over have to struggle with criminal acts by their men on higher scale than what soldiers in Jammu and Kashmir have committed. Earlier this month, soldiers of the U.S. Army’s 5 Stryker Brigade butchered many Afghan civilians just like the usual torture of alleged terrorists in Iraq. But, in many instances, military detectives brought in convincing and visible trials. Indian military heads have, in many cases, instinctively overlooked the transgressions. From 1993 to 2007, the Army’s Human Right Cell probed 1,321 accusation of human rights breach in J & K and the North East but only 54 incidents were supported by evidence and just 115 were penalized. Further, the details of investigations and the proceedings were kept as secret. The assumption that publishing the details will bring down army enthusiasm is not justified. By the by, the criminal acts of few military personnel degrade the sacrifices of those patriots who risk their lives in real counter-insurgency actions. |
