This story first appeared in awaazsouthasia.com
Three civilians who were among several picked up by the Army in Bufliaz village in the Poonch district of Jammu & Kashmir on Friday evening died in custody, officials and local sources told AwaazSouthAsia.
A day earlier, four soldiers were killed when militants ambushed two army vehicles in the area.
Late in the night, local sources said the bodies of the three men were found near the site of the ambush. People living in the area said they heard the sound of shots being fired from near the site.
A large crowd, mainly comprising members of the Gujar community, gathered outside the army camp where the 10 to 12 men were allegedly held after they were picked up and transported there late in the afternoon. About 7 pm news filtered out that three of the men had died and two others were in serious condition.
The men were identifed as Mohammed Safeer, 50, Riyaz Hussain, 30 and Shokat Hussain, 26.
As tensions mounted in the area, the District Commissioner of Poonch arrived in the area late in the night, and the Jammu divisional commissioner was also headed to Bufliaz. The administration has cut off internet services in the area.
Sources said that the bodies of at least two of the soldiers killed in the ambush, which took place near Ziyarat Topa Peer, were mutilated in a horrific way recalling an incident at the LoC 20 years ago that saw a BJP-led outcry in Parliament against the Manmohan Singh government, and the breakdown of trade talks between India and Pakistan.
A defence spokesperson in Jammu said he was unaware of the alleged custody deaths and would find out. This report will be updated with the Indian Army’s response, when it comes. He also said he had “no confirmation or inputs” about the mutilation of the bodies of two soldiers.
In an interview with AwaazSouthAsia, Lt. General D S Hooda, former GOC-in-C of the Indian Army’s Northern Command said the Indian army had to review its standard operating procedures in the area, and strengthen engagement with the local community that had helped defeat militancy and terorrism in the area 20 years ago.
It is learnt that in the area where the ambush took place, the customary road opening party whose task it is to ensure that vehicles do not come under attack, should have carried out its sweep of the area just minutes before the ambush as per routine, raising questions about whether and how effectively this had been done.
“The Army needs to revise and review its standard operating procedures for its operations in the area, the security agencies, including the civilian intelligence agencies, they need to gear up so that we are getting better intelligence and information about these [militants], are they residing [in these places], if so where, and if they are coming from the Kashmir Valley, carrying out these attacks and going back, then we need to strengthen our deployment along the Pir Panjal also to ensure there is no movement (of militants) between these two regions,” Lt Gen Hooda, who also headed the Nagorta based 16 corps in Jammu, said. He added that if more troops were required to replace the division-strength re-dployment from Jammu to Eastern Ladakh to beef up troop presence at the Line of Actual Control, that should be done too.
Further, he said the outreach to the tribal Muslim Gujar community was a must. “It has to be at all levels, starting from the government, the local army units, the local company commanders, both strength and outreach to the local community, so that intelligence flows in, local support dries up. When local support dries up, there is no way these people (the militants) can stay in these areas and carry out actions like this,” Lt. Gen Hooda said.
Unfortunately, exactly the opposite of local outreach and engagement seems to have taken place on Friday. Local people who spoke to AwaazSouthAsia about the custody deaths were terrified of being picked up themselves, and wanted to remain unidentified.
Disturbing videos purportedly of several men being tortured in Army custody are in circulation. Awaaz has viewed the videos and top officials have confirmed their veracity . In one video, soldiers are seen herding a group of men along a dusty road, and pushing the visibly reluctant men into a white vehicle.
Local sources said the men were driven to an army camp in Bufliaz for questioning about the ambush.
At senior levels of the Army, there is disquiet at the spate of incidents in the area since October 2021 and the apparent absence of accountability for what is being seen as an unconscionably high number of casualties, and a high troops to militants casualty ratio in the two districts over three years.
This year alone, there have been five incidents in which 20 soldiers were killed, including two Captains. Members of the highly trained Special Forces were among those killed in two of the incidents. After a gap of over 17 years, the area remerged as a terror hotspot in October 2021, when five soldiers were killed in an encounter in Chamrer forests in Poonch district’s Surankote area, and four more were killed as they tried to track down the perpetrators.
In all these incidents, the soldiers have either been ambushed on the road, or were picked out after they went looking for militants in the thickly forested mountainous terrain on information that militants were sighted. In no incident have the security forces been able to pinpoint the numbers of attackers or what they looked like.
So far, only two militants have been killed, in the incident of November 22-23, in which five soldiers including the two captains laid down their lives. The Army identified one as an LeT commander named Qari.
“How is it that even after so many casualties, we do not have anyone standing up to say that these disasters are my responsibility. Is there a leadership crisis that accountability cannot be fixed? When the Army is deployed [in to deal with domestic civilian situations], it comes as the last resort, but if your last resort fails, then what is left?” asked one officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, and said it seemed as if high casaulties were “being accepted as normal”.
After the November incident, Northern Army commander Lt .Gen Upendra Dwivedi said an estimated 25 militants were present in the area, and that they were most certainly from across the LoC. Security officials have noted that they were extremely well trained, equipped with high grade weapons and ammunition and other explosives, and cameras of the kind Vloggers use to record their attacks.
In sections of the Army, there is frustration that even the knowledge that militants were present in the area had not spurred the leadership at the command level, or the topmost echelons , to devise a proactive strategy to neutralise them, instead of reacting each time, giving the advantage to the enemy.
The two LoC-hugging areas have a heavy army presence. The spot of Thursday’s ambush is bound by the 16 RR Hq in Bufliaz, and the 48 RR Hq in Thanmandi. “If the terrorists are dominating us even in an area where we have so much presence, we have clearly failed,” said the officer.
Rashtriya Rifles are a specially raised counter-insurgency force, and within the army, postings to RR are highly coveted as they allow soldiers and officers build their careers, plus also carry additional pay and perks.
The mutilation of two bodies is being talked about only in whispers, unlike in 2013, when an incident of mutilation of the body of Lance Naik Hemraj inaugurated the BJP’s pre-election campaign, with the late Sushma Swaraj and Arun Jaitely leading the charge in Parliament.
As to how the men managed to infiltrate the Line of Control, Hooda said they may have crossed over at points in Kashmir where the fence usually sinks under the snow. A serving officer who did not wish to be identified had a different theory.
It was possible, he said, that the infiltrators were using a nondescript, ordinary way to enter unarmed – perhaps over an international border, with the open border with Nepal offering the easiest access – as drones were now being used to drop the weapons in areas close to the LoC, and all that had to be done was to pick them up on arrival “perhaps via a national highway”. Locally, people describe this method as the “silk route”.
Senior security officials said the failure to plug the intelligence gap had clearly failed. Elders in the Gujar community have told this reporter that the Army and intelligence agencies had become complacent after clearing the area of militants in 2005 in Operation Sarpvinash, and were reluctant to trust local informants as they used to in the past.
In June this year, in a conversation with this reporter at his home in village Kulali, in the heights above Bufliaz, Tahir Fazal Hussain, the Gujar who led the 2003 local turnaround against various terrorist groups, even recruiting local men into a voluntary fighting force called Pir Panjal Scouts to help the Army in Sarpvinash, rued the current approach of the security forces.
The government, intelligence agencies, and the forces , he said, were not reaching out to locals the way officials had done two decades ago. “Fighting is just two per cent of the job. Information is everything. And the (intelligence) agencies are not getting the right information because they are not making the effort to tap the right sources, and their approach to people is all wrong,” Hussain said.
The Gujar is a “loyal Indian”, Hussain said, but some members of the community were vulnerable to being exploited by the enemy for several reasons. He listed the “anti-Muslim” sentiment in Jammu and the rest of the country, the proposed inclusion of a group of “social castes” clubbed together as Paharis in the J&K Scheduled Tribes category, which would cut into the benefits that accrue to the Gujar-Bakerwal communtity and thirdly, the money that the enemy was paying.
“If we want to earn money now, these guys can send us to Paris. That’s how much they are offering. They are paying by the hour,” he said.
Significantly, the Bill to amend the ST category for J&K was listed for the winter session of Parliament but was not taken up. The Gujar-Bakerwal community held protests in the days leading up to the session against the Bill, threatening a wider agitation involving the Gujar community in other states, as well as tribal communities across the country.
Overall, it has been a terrible week for the Indian Army. Before the attack in Jammu, former Army chief General (retired) M M Naravane raised a furore with his memoirs — pre-release excerpts were published by major newspapers – saying that the Army, Navy and Air Force were not consulted by the government ahead of the Agniveer-Agnipath recruitment scheme. Questions are being asked as to why Naravane did not say this when he was in service, and why the chiefs went out of their way to defend the scheme. The government said quickly it had not given permission for the book to be published, giving rise to concerns that it might never see the light of day.