THE north eastern region of India is a rugged picturesque territory of approximately 225,000 kms of hills and plains located between four neighbouring countries of India, namely, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China and Myanmar. With an international border stretching up to 4,500 kms, the region has been plagued by insurgency and social unrest since India’s independence. The first armed ethnic movement for independence from India was launched by the Nagas in 1956 under the leadership of the Naga National Council (NNC) which was formed in 1946. The Naga armed movement is active till date under the aegis of the National Socialist Council of Nagalim led by Thuingaleng Muivah and Isak Chisi Swu – NSCN(IM).

Manipur has also suffered armed violence with the formation of the United National Liberation Front of Manipur (UNLF) on 24 November 1964. Another significant Manipuri separatist armed group known as the Revolutionary People’s Front (RPF) and its armed wing, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has been engaging in armed struggle since 1976. Most feared, however, is the Kanglei Yawol Kanna Lup (KYKL), which has taken up social afflictions such as fighting corruption, drug trafficking and sub-standard education practices. Another group known as the People’s Revolutionary Party of Kangleipak (PREPAK) was established in the 1970s with the objective of fighting for Manipur’s independence from India.

Neighbouring Assam, the most dominant state in the North East in terms of demography and resources, has also been plagued by insurgent violence since 1979 with the formation of the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA). The hill districts of Assam, North Cachar Hills and Karbi Anglong, are also prone to violence led by armed groups like the Dima Halam Daogah (DHD) and the United People’s Democratic Solidarity (UPDS).

It is important to note that most of these insurgent groups have primarily thrived due to strong external influences. Countries like China in the 1960s and the 1970s as well as Pakistan and later on Bangladesh have supported most of these outfits in their fight against India by making available arms, training and, most importantly, base areas for underground camps. Also, most of the underground camps of the UNLF are located in the India-Myanmar border region.

In response to the multiple insurgencies in the North East, India deployed its army in the region, beginning with the counter-insurgency operation against the Nagas since 1956. The army continues to operate in insurgency affected areas of the North East till date. However, despite such a long innings on a counter-insurgency mode, the Indian Army continues to view counter-insurgency as secondary to its primary duty of defending India from external conventional threats.¹ Hence, not much attention has been given to doctrinal innovation within the Indian Army with regard to insurgent contingencies, including the nature of civil-military relations in insurgency affected areas of India. Most often, counter-insurgency operations are based on an informal ‘community of knowledge’ drawn from experiences of personnel stationed in insurgency affected zones, and not really on any body of knowledge attuned to unconventional warfare. As a result, such unconventional military wisdom is open to various interpretations.

 

On the one hand, positively speaking, such informality could result in adaptability and flexibility. On the other hand, it might also result in a flawed understanding of the conflict zone, the strategic context and the issues at stake. It is critical to bear in mind that the behaviour of the Indian Army while conducting counter-insurgency operations in the North East has a direct bearing on the legitimacy of the democratic political structures under which it functions. The disproportionate use of violence affecting civilians directly and restraining their movements results in increased legitimacy of the insurgents. In this context, the nature of civil-military relations is therefore critical in insurgency affected areas of India. This article makes an attempt to capture that relationship in the North East, primarily based on the field knowledge of the author.

 

Civil-military relations are a critical ingredient for a successful political strategy to counter insurgencies in areas like the North East. Better civil-military relations in states like Mizoram ensured that a twenty year old Mizo insurgency (1961-1986) was rooted out through joint civil-military strategies like the grouping of villages, which had relocated nearly 80 per cent of Mizoram’s population to 102 new villages known as ‘protected and progressive’ villages.² It must be recognized, however, that while it was successful as a counter-insurgency strategy in disarming the Mizo National Front (MNF), it created hardships for the local people as it resulted in forced displacements, destruction of centuries old homes, and upset livelihoods.³ 

Another critical aspect in countering insurgencies in the North East is the institutional coordination of military planning and implementation. This was absent in the earlier years of counter-insurgency there. In 1997, a Unified Command and Control – the three tier command structure of the Indian Army – was set up in Assam to supervise and coordinate operational planning and implementation. Earlier, the Indian Army regiments functioned without a common coordinating body, resulting in operational and strategic hazards while fighting armed groups like the ULFA and the National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB).

However, the creation of the Unified Command and Control structure was looked upon with disfavour by the then Assam state government. It was argued that such unifying military structures strengthened the hand of the army and weakened legitimate democratically elected bodies like the state assembly. Moreover, since the post of the Governor of Assam at that time was held by Lieutenant General S.K. Sinha (Retd), some civilian observers claimed that there was an underlying plan on the part of the Union government to skew the civil-military relationship in favour of the army.⁴ 

 

Whether these accusations about the intentions of the Union government held true at that time is debatable. But the fact remains that most of the governorships in the north eastern states are occupied by either generals or those drawn from the police services, which no doubt creates apprehensions amongst the political elite and civil society that there is perhaps some attempt at Union control of the state administrations.

For instance, in the insurgency affected states of the North East, there are several layers of decision-making with the state government responsible for making requests for the deployment of the army in order to maintain law and order. However, ceasefires with the armed groups are engineered by the Union home ministry with peace interlocutors mostly chosen from the All India level bureaucracies and not the state bureaucracies. The non-involvement of the states concerned in the ceasefire frameworks creates dysfunctional structures of law enforcement which fails to address the illegitimate extortion networks and parallel governments run by the insurgent actors as well as in averting everyday insurgent violence resulting in the death of non-combatants.

This state of affairs is well captured by Sanjib Baruah:

‘The apex decision-making node is the Home Ministry in New Delhi housed in North Block on Raisina Hill. The operational node which implements the decisions consists of the Indian Army, and other military, police and intelligence units controlled by the central and state governments, and involves complex coordination. This apparatus also involves the limited participation of the political functionaries of insurgency affected states. Elected state governments, under India’s weak federal structure, can always be constitutionally dismissed in certain situations of instability. But New Delhi has generally preferred to have them in place while conducting counter-insurgency operations. Since the insurgencies have some popular sympathy, albeit not stable or stubborn, the perception that the operations have the tacit support of elected state governments is useful for their legitimacy.’⁵ 

 

In states like Manipur and Nagaland, which are heavily infested by long-standing insurgencies like the UNLF, the RPF, the PLA and the NSCN-IM, to name but a few, the civil-military balance has taken years to reach a stage of some understanding about operational and strategic matters, though the general fear of the security forces amongst the civil society creates a situation wherein political leaders target the military quite frequently.

In a speech on 13 August 2008, on the occasion of Patriot’s Day in Manipur, the Manipur chief minister admonished the Union government and its agencies (read the Indian Army) for high handed behaviour in the state. The case is similar in Nagaland, where the army is blamed by civilian authorities for slight indiscretions whereas insurgent actors like the NSCN (IM) and the National Socialist Council of Nagaland led by S.S. Khaplang (NSCN-K) easily get away with indiscriminate violence in which civilians are the main victims. The focus on the army’s behaviour by both local state actors and the civil population is intense. Hence, there is a critical need for the Indian Army to exercise caution and professionally manage public perception.

 

In Manipur, for instance, civil-military relations are plagued by stress and finger-pointing instead of convergence and nuanced understanding of the local political and security landscape. The army blames the state government for maintaining close ties with the insurgents, which by itself is a counter-productive narrative. Such statements by Indian Army officers leads the local populace to perceive the army as directly advancing New Delhi’s putative agenda of maligning the local people as anti-national and anti-India. This in turn creates antipathy towards the Indian state and nation. Hence, a vicious cycle is established.

Given this distrust in the civil-military sphere, the army maintains secrecy in its operational plans, which creates a further disconnect between the civilian and military authorities; it goes against the accepted democratic ethos that the army will be guided and directed by the elected political leadership. Local politicians believe that the army is dictated by the Union government and cares little for their intervention since the overall conduct of counter-insurgency as well as ceasefire and peace talks are conducted directly by the Union government with the armed insurgent groups.

Further, the military routinely blames the civilian government for lacking ‘political will’ in rooting out insurgencies. In 1990 and 1991, when the Indian Army launched Operation Rhino I and Operation Rhino II against the ULFA in Assam, the general criticism from the army about these operations was that they were called off in their most critical phases because the Assam state government lacked the political will to oversee the counter-insurgency operations to a conclusive end. Hence, as a result of a lack of effective civil-military coordination, many ULFA leaders were able to escape across the international border to Bhutan and Bangladesh.⁶ 

 

Most telling in this regard were the views expressed by the 57 Mountain Division Field Artillery Brigade stationed in Haflong, North Cachar Hills, in July 2007. The author had at the time visited the district and interviewed certain officers of the brigade who expressed strong scepticism about the commitment of the local North Cachar Hills District Council to fight the local insurgencies. This was more so due to the news flashing at that time which was as follows: the N.C. Hills District Council was scheduled to hold elections on 12 June 2007. In order to garner votes, three Congress District Council members consulted the Black Widow faction of the Dima Halam Daogah (DHD-Garlosa) faction. The end result of this particular outreach was tragic for the local Dimasa political community.

On 4 June 2007, in a gory act of violence, the then chief executive member, District Council, Purnendu Langthasa along with executive member, Nindu Langthasa, both belonging to the Congress party, were shot at point-blank range by Black Widow militants at a location near Umrangshu police station area.⁷ Such open engagements between local politicians and the armed groups obstruct the generation of a trusting civil-military relationship. Ironically, the 57 Mountain Field Artillery Brigade then stationed in Haflong, Assam, was tasked with countering the DHD-Garlosa faction, whose support was being sought by the three local politicians for their election to the District Council at that time.

 

The core requirement of civil-military relations is a smooth coordination of decision-making between the civilian and military leaders. However, in most cases, the relationship has been far from easy. The balance between the civilians and the military is crucial especially in the way force is used to counter insurgencies in the North East, for the insurgents are citizens of India and therefore need to be persuaded to give up arms and be rehabilitated into the society.

In working towards this end, it is for the local political leadership to decide the best possible strategic option that should guide the operation. While taking into account the military’s expert advice, they should squarely focus on the benefits of the counter-insurgency operation at the strategic level: the end of violence and the emergence of a cohesive and peaceful society. Towards this end, the military must also be more sensitive to the limits of politics, which imposes restrictions on the options a politician could exercise with regard to the use of force in areas from where he/she has to get himself/herself elected.

 

Civil-military relations in the context of insurgency and counter-insurgency especially in the north eastern states should plausibly operate within the contours of a ‘trust and nurture’ strategy. The most important element to nurture trust is the ability to deliver on commitments, be it the absence of insurgent violence, better democratic institutions, or basic security to the insurgency affected population. The ability to deliver is crucial to ensure the population’s support for counter-insurgency operations as the available choices for the former are intertwined with a certain degree of risk. Consequently, the choice made by the local population to cooperate with the counter-insurgency unit has a direct bearing on information and knowledge sharing: fundamental factors for the success of any counter-insurgency operation.

While India’s counter-insurgency operations have been successful in bringing down levels of violence in states like Assam, Mizoram and Nagaland, and ceasefire and peace-talks have been in place with one of the longest running insurgencies in India, the Naga insurgency, much remains to be addressed in the realm of civil-military relationship, percolating from the structures of decision-making in the Union government, the army and the state administrations.

Due to a lack of trust between local politicians and the army, the counter-insurgency culture is one of conflict management and not resolution. As a result, there is a lack of creativity in the civil-military ethic, which in turn has resulted in the ability of insurgent actors to run parallel government structures, establish clandestine networks across national and international borders, which subsequently has led to basic insecurities, distrust of the armed forces, and general alienation of the local population. Local communities thereby argue that they do not trust their lives with either the state’s armed forces or the insurgent actors, but reach a ‘hurting compromise’ due to the lack of a better alternative.

 

This situation can be addressed with greater institutionalization of the civil-military relationship and a genuine undertaking of roles that have an important impact on the overall conduct of counter-insurgency operations in the North East. The local political leaders, instead of continuously blaming the army as an agent of the Union government, should be more accepting of the fact that the Indian Army has played a major role in countering armed violence in the insurgency affected states. The local population should also recognize this particular important deed by the army. The Indian Army, on the other hand, must also refrain from the ‘blame game’ which it often resorts to, by stating that while all is well with the army, it is a lack of ‘political will’ on the part of the local politicians that compromises most counter-insurgency operations.

India is a democracy and thereby the use of force must be informed by its democratic political culture, measured military methods which do not compromise that culture, and the human rights of its population, social and cultural awareness and vision of an integrative nation-building approach. In this, the civil-military relationship has a major role to play especially since violence is the order of the day in states like Assam, Manipur and Nagaland. Institutionalization of the relationship at all levels of the decision-making loop is the key to better understanding and coordination.

 

Footnotes:

1. Namrata Goswami, ‘India’s Counter-Insurgency Experience: The "Trust" and "Nurture" Strategy’, Small Wars & Insurgencies 20(1), March 2009, pp. 66-86.

2. Vijendra Singh Jafa, ‘Counter-Insurgency Warfare: The Use and Abuse of Military Force’, at http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/publication/faultlines/volume4/Fault4-JafaF1.htm (Accessed on 15 May 2010).

3. Namrata Goswami, ‘The Indian Experience of Conflict Resolution in Mizoram’, Strategic Analysis 33(4), 2009, pp. 579-589.

4. Sanjib Baruah, ‘Generals as Governors: The Parallel Political Systems of North East India’, at http://www.indowindow.com/sad/article.php?child=22&article=17 (Accessed on 27 May 2010).

5. Ibid.

6. Field observation and interviews undertaken by the author in 2008 and 2009 with army personnel in Assam, or who have served in Assam at that time. Names of interviewees are not revealed in order to protect sources.

7. See Nava Thakuria, ‘Counter-Productive for Congress in N.C. Hills’ at http://www. indigenousherald.com/innerpages/commentaries9.html (Accessed on 9 August 2007). Interview with Alan Jeme, judge, NC Hills District Council, Haflong, Assam, 20 July 2007.