(En)counter insurgency: How the Army killed innocents in the Northeast

In the winter of 2010, I was a trainee reporter in the Guwahati bureau of a national newspaper. I wrote 200-word stories about Christmas-special cake shows and ethnic food festivals that almost never made it to the paper.

The most striking memory of my stint, though, are not carrot cakes and roast duck delicacies. It is the occasional presence of a mild-mannered whisky-loving gentleman in the newsroom who didn’t belong there: a public relations officer of a certain unit in the Indian Army. I didn’t understand then why he was there so often, and I was too low down in the food chain to ever ask.

Last Saturday – almost five years on – I think I got my answer in the most unlikely of places: a book launch at Delhi’s India International Center.

The book being launched was Blood On My Hands, authored by journalist Kishalay Bhattacharjee. Blood On My Hands comprises the confessions of an anonymous army officer who spills the beans about many “staged” encounters in the Northeast.

Staged encounters, for the uninitiated, are not “encounters” at all: they are shootouts so orchestrated by (officers of) the Army, often with the police and paramilitary force’s connivance, that they come across as encounters. Why, you ask, would the highly disciplined and heavily decorated Indian Army do such a terrible thing? Because gallantry awards in the Indian Army are contingent on “headcounts” — and slaughtering unarmed migrants in “staged encounters” is easier than killing well-armed insurgents in real encounters.

Explaining the modus operandi, Bhattacharjee said there exists an organised mafia that provides men — often recently crossed over Bangladeshi migrants with no identification papers — who are used for these encounters by the highest bidders in the Army. According to the Army officer Bhattacharjee spoke to, when the mafia would fail to provide men, representatives from Army units would go “shopping” in Guwahati. Shopping for men who could be killed and passed off as insurgents.

During the course of the hour-long event, Bhattacharjee admitted more than once that he had reported many of these staged encounters when they had taken place — and had got almost all of them wrong.  Simply because he had bought in the “official” version – the Army’s version – and the hectic news cycle never let him scratch beyond the surface. He recounted one instance, which he had reported as the encounter of an insurgent of the National Democratic Front of Bodoland. Bhattacharjee later discovered, while researching for the book, that the insurgent was, in fact, a leprosy-afflicted beggar.

The presence of a PR personnel from the Army in the newsroom finally made perfect sense to me.

The book launch was part of The Caravan Conversations and included a panel discussion moderated by The Caravan’s Political Editor Hartosh Singh Bal. The other panelists, apart from the author, were Satyabrata Pal, a former member of the National Human Rights Commission and Shiv Sahai, Assistant Director General of the Jammu and Kashmir police. Predictably, Sahai maintained that fake encounters were more of an anomaly than a norm — and they were not an institutionalised practice but just the doing of certain opportunistic officers. Pal obviously did not quite accept Sahai’s contention but the venue – genteel IIC in the capital as opposed to a news studio in Mumbai’s Lower Parel – ensured that that all disagreements were perfectly civil. Also, almost everyone on the panel and in the audience seemed to acknowledge and appreciate the fact that it was rather brave on the part of a serving officer to agree to be part of the discussion.

Bal raised an important question: is the problem embedded in our way of dealing with conflict or are these encounters just reflective of the general style of policing in this country?  After all, police atrocities in states like Uttar Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh, where there is no conflict in the conventional sense, are quite common too. Pal suggested that it was a combination of both – and in conflict-affected areas the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) made things even worse. The idea of performance being measured by kills, Pal argued, was highly problematic in a democracy.

Also, would things really be all right if the contentious AFSPA is repealed? Sahai said a reasonable way forward was to follow the model of Srinagar — where the AFSPA is still in effect currently, but there’s no Army presence in reality. Author and journalist Sanjoy Hazarika, who has written extensively about the Northeast, vociferously objected to that suggestion. The AFSPA, he reiterated, just had no place in the Northeast: a sentiment most people in the audience, which consisted largely of people from the region, seemed to echo.

When Bal asked Bhattacharjee why he thought journalists couldn’t see through these staged encounters, he said it was the lack of investigative skills among Indian journalists. “I attended multiple of these surrender ceremonies of insurgents that the Army would organise. It was much later that someone pointed me towards the serial number of the weapons – the weapons in many of these surrender ceremonies’ would have the same serial numbers, which means the same guns are recycled year after year,” he explained. A good investigative journalist, Bhattacharjee admitted, would have seen through such discrepancies.

So, are journalists also guilty in some measure for not telling these stories often enough? Bal said there was almost a social sanction of encounters like these and the media was part of the same social structure. “In conflict areas, often the sense is that the person should have been killed and there is very little questioning of circumstances by journalists,” he said. Bal’s answer was a categorical no when asked if he thought the national media would report on the book’s findings.

Bhattacharjee, when asked why journalists don’t question the Army enough, said most conflict-affected areas don’t come high enough in the priority list of national newsrooms. “There is also an issue of logistics.  For instance, when an encounter takes place in the Indo-Bhutan border, it takes one at least three hours to reach there and by the time everything’s finished,” he said.

When the Army carried out the “covert” operation with “surgical accuracy” in Myanmar last June, almost no one in the mainstream media questioned its authenticity, in spite of it being abundantly clear that there was something amiss in the official version.  It was anti-national to do.  The Army, we were told, should not be questioned.

Bal pointed out that journalists, especially the ones we refer to as “senior journalists”, have not provided enough insights to the younger crop on how you question and deal with official versions in conflict areas. The results of not questioning the Army for so long and taking dictations from the force’s PR officials are for all to read in Blood On My Hands.

The book is a result of one intrepid journalist talking to one conscientious army officer. “I know my patriotism will be questioned but I thought the world should know these stories because the practice has become institutionalised,” said Bhattacharhee. Imagine if more journalists started telling these stories from the many conflict-ridden areas of the country.  The Indian Army would, in all probability, come out looking very “anti-national”.

Audio interview: Abhinandan Sekhri