Aheli Moitra
Last week we saw a strange press conference. An Indian Army Major, Nitin Leetul Gogoi, walked to a table-chair set up in a garden with news channel mikes on it. He was in full military camouflage. He gave a statement on why he had tied up a Kashmiri youth to the front of his troop’s jeep as a shield, fumbled at the most critical moment and left as soon as he finished his rehearsed piece.
There was little reason for Gogoi to be so scared. Most Indian news channels declared him a super hero. The Chief of Army Staff (COAS), General Bipin Rawat, even awarded Gogoi the Army Chief’s Commendation Card.
According to Gogoi, he was surrounded by people pelting stones during by-polls in Kashmir and in order to save his team, and himself, he used the best possibility he could envision—a human shield. A gallant feat? Rawat thought so. While defending Gogoi, the COAS said the gallantry award was meant to boost the morale of army personnel.
Gogoi, no doubt, was caught in a tight spot. He was surrounded. He was in fear. The only tools made available to him in such a volatile situation were violence and de-humanization, and he used them to the best of his limited imagination.
The COAS also showed fear and vulnerability. He seemed appalled that the Kashmiris were not even according the army the honour of using weapons, instead attacking personnel with figments of the earth, stones.
Militarism is a belief that a country should maintain a strong military capability and be prepared to use it aggressively to defend or promote national interests. Both the army men were defending ‘national interest’ through the only, and easiest, human capability drilled into them: violence. Thinking of any other solution is too much work in a thickly regimented system. Yet militarism has not resolved any of the conflicts that have overwhelmed the subcontinent. Militarism is not helping the army either.
In his 1958 essay, ‘Pilgrimage to Nonviolence’, Martin Luther King Jr. noted how racial violence may have scarred the bodies of the people of colour, but it had scarred the souls of the segregationists. In the subcontinent, we see security personnel having to tackle difficult political situations with nothing else but a stubborn system of repression and distrust. In their area of operation, thus, they are hated and feared, emotions they reciprocate. Add to this impunity and corresponding power, army men make such decisions as using a human shield, staging encounters or torturing civilians. These actions come with huge costs to the soul. Major Avtar Singh’s life, and death, stands witness to this.
Albeit physically destroyed, the Kashmiri soul is protected in community, history and unity in aspiration. The army, on the other hand, is a remnant of India’s colonial, violent past. It is used to forward the same colonial paradigm today in the absence of political will and imagination. Leetul Gogoi, of Axom origin, is an inheritor of that violence. Imagine the damage to the souls of these human beings who have to carry the burden of their individual ancestry as well as the collective shame and guilt of having destroyed multiple Kashmiri generations. Every year, around 100 armed personnel of the security forces commit suicide, reported the Times News Network. It quoted defense ministry estimates—597 military personnel had committed suicide in just 5 years, between 2009 and 2013. A Press Trust of India report further revealed that since 2014, 348 armed forces personnel committed suicide, with the highest 276 from the army.
The system pays scant attention to individual personnel of the armed forces. If it did, it would work from the root upwards and ensure justice to the people, which could stop the stone pelting and petrol bombs, laying base for JustPeace. ‘Morale boosting’ has done, and will do, little for security personnel—or for the situation—if the pain, trauma and suffering they undergo is not acknowledged and healed. Similarly, there will be no peace and reconciliation if the pain, trauma and suffering they have caused the Kashmiri people go unacknowledged and unhealed. Violence will only beget more violence, internal and external.
Towards the east, the Government of India has made a systemic possibility of addressing these traumas by acknowledging Naga history and political rights. It was the Indian army, led by perceptive military leaders at some point, which had suggested that militarism be complemented with negotiation. The approach created a world of possibilities, and will hopefully end militarization of the region subsequently. That possibility should not be denied to Kashmir, or the armed forces.
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