Special: Dangerous liaisons

Army chiefs in India tend not to be political figures, unlike those in Pakistan, but it appears that we are now in danger of becoming a little more like our neighbours. Former Army chief General V.K. Singh, who retired last year, has been at the centre of a string of highly political controversies in recent times. The battle has become vicious especially after Gen. Singh shared a dais with BJP leader Narendra Modi, and charges have flown thick and fast on all sides. Gen. Singh, who now faces an Army inquiry for allegedly using a secret unit called the Technical Services Division to destablise the Jammu and Kashmir government, himself issued a stinging rebuttal in which he described the charges as “false and motivated.” He went on to describe the leak of information about the top secret TSD as “treasonous” and said, “Despite repeated requests to the PMO to institute an inquiry to trace the source of the leaks, this has been ignored and left to simmer endlessly.” In a letter published via Twitter on September 28, he named his suspects as well: the current Comptroller and Auditor General, who was earlier defence secretary, and the National Security Adviser, among others. It is for the first time in the history of India as a modern country that our key institutions and those who hold or recently held key positions in them are so bitterly and openly at war with each other. The politicisation of the Army was started by the BJP during the A.B. Vajpayee government’s tenure when Brajesh Mishra was National Security Adviser, according to Pravin Sawhney, a former Army officer and defence expert who edits the defence journal Force. Retired servicemen who had been drawn into a BJP foreign policy cell that had been headed by Mishra became influential. “The ties between servicemen does not snap immediately on retirement,” Sawhney says. The servicemen also vote, he points out, and in the Army, there are 14 lakh of them. Politics naturally enters the forces. Sawhney says he has nothing against it at the moment because he wants importance to be given to national security. “The problem is, they will end up getting more than they bargained for.” The BJP, which is championing the cause of national security, is “not a secular party”, says Sawhney. “At some point, the fissures will start to show.” These are the potential fissures on religious lines that exist within Indian society, and are reflected in the Army, which draws its members from the same society. So far the Army has been strictly secular in the Indian sense of the term, but as generals and former generals daubed in political colours mix with one another, some of this may rub off on the Army. “The military the world over sees things in black and white,” says Sawhney. They think in terms of friends and foes. His concern is that they may “get tainted by the non-secular thinking of BJP”. The rest of the country’s security establishment is already pretty much politicised. The worst of this has been on view in the battles between various agencies in at least one infamous case. Former BSF director general Prakash Singh says, “Take the example of the Ishrat Jahan fake encounter case. The CBI, which was described a ‘caged parrot’ by the Supreme Court, has suddenly become a vulture. For the first time in India, we are witnessing a triangular controversy, if not fight, between the CBI, the IB and the NIA. This kind of over-enthusiasm by the CBI at the instance of partisan political leadership can hardly be appreciated. This is a very disturbing state of affairs. Today, we are forced to think that the CBI deserves autonomy.” Former CBI director Joginder Singh admits that “almost all central investigative agencies are indirectly used or misused by the ruling party at the Centre”. Former CBI chief Trinath Mishra, says that “in a democratic set up, no institution can remain immune from politics.” The CBI, Singh says, “is the common whipping boy of the politicians, whenever it probes, the powerful and mighty”. The government does not openly say anything to the CBI director, he adds. “The use of the CBI is manipulated through legal channels, because it is the government which decides whether the case is fit for going for appeal to a higher court and who will represent the case, and what fee will be paid.”One institution that has not been following the laws is the police. In many infamous cases grave injustice has been meted out by the police state after state. As a result, the battle against terrorism has become mired in the same dangerous secular vs communal politics. The most recent episode in this story was a letter from Union home minister Sushilkumar Shinde demanding “strict and prompt action against erring police officers where there is mala fide arrest of any member of the minority community.” “Wrongful detention is certainly not limited to Muslim victims,” says Ajai Sahni, executive director of the Institute for Conflict Management in Delhi. “The rough and ready methods used by the police in India are hardly a secret, but they are used more or less indiscriminately against all communities. More than anything else, it is the poor and powerless, rather than particular communities, who are victims,” he says. According to Sahni, “In many parts of the country, vote bank politics tends to ensure that the political pressure on the police not to act against Muslims — often including those who are likely to be guilty of crimes — is overwhelming. This is certainly the case in UP today, and is likely to be extended to other parts of the country after the Union home minister’s gratuitous, if not mischievous, directive.” But again, the Muslim community is not unique in its victimhood. The Sikhs suffered even greater violence in the face of police complicity and inaction in 1984, Sahni, who works with former Punjab DGP K.P.S. Gill, points out. “If you look at broad trends, you will find that the police tends to be more or less neutral, if left to its tasks, though there will be individual exceptions. This neutrality is perverted principally by political interference in the day to day law enforcement,” he says. The politicisation of the police has been on going for a long time, according to Maja Daruwala, director of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative. “You can see it at every turn from the changing pace of CBI investigations, to the way riots are handled, mishandled, permitted, and prosecuted. Everyone knows the dreadful effect politicisation is having internally on the police’s ability to do their job and on public safety. Wicked people know they can get away with evil deeds; desperate people go for outside help and vigilante justice is depriving women for instance of any hope of fair justice; good people keep their heads down and don’t want to get involved with an organisation they dont trust and feel is dangerous,” she says. Political patronage has hollowed out the police command structure so that there is virtually no chain of command and no chain of responsibility, according to Daruwala.