Warnings will not lift morale of soldiers

Arun Joshi

tribune news service

These are not the best of the times for the Army in Jammu and Kashmir in terms of the pressure it is facing from all quarters.

The new Army Chief, Gen Bipin Rawat, has listed yet another challenge before the soldiers —- to be prepared to strike Pakistan if it disrupts peace on borders. Obviously, he has hinted at the repeat of the September 29 surgical strikes, which are read as a counter to the September 18 attack on the Uri Army base that left 20 soldiers dead last year.

Jammu and Kashmir comes in the picture because a majority of the Indian troops are stationed here, facing Pakistan, Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and China besides fighting militancy in the state.

General Rawat in his address on Army Day on Sunday sent out two sets of messages. One, Pakistan should not take its misadventures for granted on borders. It is a clear reference to the borders in J&K, for a number of ceasefire violations took place along the Line of Control and International Border in this sensitive state in 2016.

His second message was for the soldiers, who have recently aired their complaints on the social media and got widespread attention. The Army is known for its discipline and the Chief obviously thought that was a breach of discipline.

General Rawat’s warning to Pakistan against any mischief on the borders should be seen as a military necessity, for somehow it has become important in the military narrative of India and Pakistan to underline the respective supremacy of their military strength.

But peace on borders in Kashmir is incumbent upon the internal situation. The calm borders and normalcy in the Valley are interlinked as a single image in the mirror. On May 3, 1993, after the Army had disarmed the police mutineers in Kashmir, the Unified Headquarters was set up in which the Army was given control of all anti-terrorist operations across the Valley barring Srinagar district, which was placed under the BSF. The idea was to decimate terrorism. But the problem persists.

The root cause was infiltration as 2,000 to 3,000 intruders were sneaking every year in the early 1990s. Most of them were unchallenged and undetected. The terrain was tough and the Army did not have sufficient equipment to quell the menace. Internally, there was massive support for militants because they were local boys returning after having received training in handling arms and ammunition. That kind of infiltration is not there, but it is there nevertheless.

Now, the training camps have come up in jungles of Kashmir. Now, the militancy is ingrained in the psychology that all militants are “our own” and they “need to be protected.” The challenge is to find ways to change all this with soft power, not military might.

General Rawat could have avoided his reference to the use of social media by aggrieved soldiers in his address. The soldiers are working in unimaginably hard conditions. They guard not only the frontiers in the most inhospitable terrain but also risk their lives in counter-terrorism operations.

It doesn’t come to mind as to when last there was a “bada khana” with jawans.

All Army Chiefs visit the Siachen glacier, the highest battleground of the world, but the complaints about the low quality of food, clothing, and shoes go unheeded. There have been cases where officers have sold special food and clothing meant for troops on the black market in Leh. The need is to create responsive channels.

Warnings will not lift the morale of the soldiers.