ARMY AND ISSUES

Closure of Kashmir extrajudicial  illings case signals impunity shall prevail

Army’s decision to ‘close’ the infamous Pathribal case involving alleged extrajudicial killing of five innocent Kashmiri civilians in 2000 is yet another confirmation of how blatantly impunity thrives in Jammu& Kashmir (J&K). It comes despite compelling evidence of the brutality involved. Justice S R Pandian, who inquired into killings of seven people demanding a probe into the case, noted this when he concluded the ‘security forces had deliberately obliterated’ evidence of the Pathirabal operation by completely charring three of the five bodies. The head of one of the bodies was missing along with the entire upper portion above the chest. This, he said, was done with a malafide ‘intention of getting rid of even the last traces of physical identity’ before the disfigured bodies were eventually buried at various places within a radius of over two-km from the encounter scene.

The mutilation worked initially. The killings were declared a ‘major breakthrough’ and the five dubbed as foreign terrorists, who had 'killed' 35 Sikhs on the eve of US president Bill Clinton’s visit to India in March 2000. As usual, the story was reproduced verbatim in the media and the ‘encounter’ was sought to be painted an end to the story. But it was only the beginning. The story turned on its head within days. The complacency with five accused Rashtriya Rifles soldiers allegedly went about the ‘encounter’ underlined the sense of invincibility sweeping powers gave them. They had not even bothered to cover their tracks properly. The Army unit allegedly coerced villages into burying the five before leaving the scene without ensuring their belongings set alight were fully burnt. The belongings proved to be the first major breakthrough in unravelling the plot.

More lives had to be sacrificed before the government agreed to exhume the bodies of the five civilians. The paramilitary CRPF fired and killed seven people demanding a probe into the ‘encounter’.The slain included the one, who had identified his father’s belonging among those of the five killed and exposed the encounter drama. This mounted pressure on the government, forcing it to order a probe into it. Initial DNA testing to establish the identities of the five was sabotaged before it was established the five they were indeed innocent civilians -- Zahoor Ahmad Dalal (22), Bashir Ahmad Bhat (26), Mohammad Yousuf Malik (38) Juma Khan (50) and Juma Khan (38). Their corpses were found dressed up in Army fatigues. The nose and the chin of one of them were found in separate graves. Another was initially identified by his trouser as his head was missing. Zahoor’s body was completely charred without any bullet injuries. A portion of his charred sweater was all that was left of a handsome youth.

The CBI, which later probed the case, eventually indicted Brig Ajay Saxena, Lt Col Brijinder Pratap Singh, Maj Saurabh Sharma, Maj Amit Sharma and Subedar Idrees Khan for killing the five in 2007. It described the killings as ‘cold blooded murder’ and presented a chargesheet against the five soldiers before a Srinagar’s court. The Army unsuccessfully challenged the move before the J&K high court before moving the Supreme Court (SC). It challenged the CBI’s jurisdiction to file the charges. The Army argued its men cannot be charged without the Centre’s permission under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA). It cited the draconian law’s immunity clause knowingly as the Centre has never granted permission for trying armed forces in J&K including in rape and murder cases in the last two decades despite all its protestations about ‘zero tolerance to rights abuses.

The SC presented the last hope at least in the Pathribal case. But that too was dashed when it upheld the Army’s contention and allowed it to decide whether to try the five in a civil court or have them court-martialled in April 2012. It came surprisingly two months after the apex court questioned the extent to which the Army can claim immunity under the AFSPA. It had noted that rape and murder should not be considered as ‘normal crime’ and ‘there should be no question of sanction’ from the government to prosecute soldiers in such cases. The Court noted AFSPA gave ‘very limited protection’ in the ‘discharge of duty’ while hearing a CBI petition challenging the Army’s invocation of the draconian law to ‘bury the case’.

The five were not killed in the line of duty, but were abducted and murdered in cold blood as the CBI established. The option given to the Army to subject the Patribal accused to in-house proceedings reversed the unprecedented gains that had been made in the case. It reinforced the cynicism in the average Kashmiri Muslim that no arm of the Indian state could be trusted to be just to his/her community.

The Army predictably chose the easier path. As it is clear now, the brutal killings and mutilation of the bodies was too serious an offence to be left for the opaque military tribunal to adjudicate. 

It would have been a potential game changer had the justice been allowed to prevail in the Pathribal case for it was perhaps the first time that a case, the one among thousands, was allowed to be investigated freely. But the way even institutions, otherwise the last hope for helpless masses, have acted in this case would make Kashmiris more real about their actual place in the world’s largest democracy.

Army's credibility takes a big hit in J&K with closure of Pathribal case

With its decision to close the case against five Rashtriya Rifles officers accused of killing five civilians in a fake encounter in Pathribal in March 2000, the army has all but squandered the goodwill it had earned in Jammu & Kashmir following its move to initiate court martial proceedings against six of its men charged with the murder of three youth in the Machil area of Kupwara district on April 20, 2013. This newspaper had lauded the move as a potential game-changer to restore harmonious relations between the army and people of the Valley. But we had also urged it to take similar steps regarding other cases of fake encounters to win their hearts and minds.

The closure of the Pathribal case has dashed these hopes, if only because the army has been inexplicably coy about the reasons that led it to conclude that the evidence it had gathered wasn't robust enough to charge the accused. The conclusion flies in the face of the Central Bureau of Investigation's findings that the RR men had engaged in 'cold-blooded murder' of local residents, who they had described as foreign militants responsible for the killing of 35 Sikhs in Chattisingpora just hours before US President Bill Clinton began his visit to India.

The army's clean chit to the Pathribal accused is bound to raise more disturbing questions about the immunity it gets under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, besides adding to the alienation of the people of the Valley. The Centre must step in to ask the army to revisit its utterly baffling decision. Let it, at the very least, disclose the process it followed to examine the evidence.

Victory of Institutional Injustice

Army’s Pathribal Closure

The army's closure of the Pathribal fake encounter case exemplifies the institutionalisation of injustice in Kashmir. This article retraces the events to remind us of the exceptional miscarriage of justice and how compromised each and every institution of the Indian state has become in denying basic rights to its citizens in Kashmir. Yet, Pathribal also provides an opportunity for the State to make amends and start walking that long road to justice.

Anuradha Bhasin Jamwal (anusaba@gmail.com) is executive editor, Kashmir Times and a human rights activist.

Fourteen years ago, five innocent civilians were picked up and killed by soldiers of the Indian Army in a staged encounter in south Kashmir’s Pathribal area. Over these years several probes have indicted the army men with clinching evidence, yet the army court gave a clean chit to all its indicted men including senior officers and announced a closure, simply stating that evidence ­collected by it did not establish a prima facie case against any of the accused. No explanations were offered about how such a conclusion was arrived at in the face of detailed evidence available. After 14 years the Indian Army’s actions highlight one simple reality – in the case of Kashmir, India’s legal justice system ­allows itself to be dissolved in the opaque waters of a misplaced “national interest”. The Pathribal case is a blot on Indian ­democracy; it is a symbol of the crude nature of human rights abuse in Kashmir and the culture of impunity exercised through legal instruments. A quick recap into the case is instructive of the systemic regime that is followed.

A Series of Massacres

In 2000, a few months after the Pathribal fake encounter, S Pandian, a retired ­Supreme Court judge, who was tasked to investigate the Barakpora firing of 3 April 2000 in which seven people were killed and several injured, filed his report and raised the vital question of the limitations of treating the Barakpora incident in isolation. It was intrinsically linked to the two preceding incidents, his report maintained, while indicting seven men of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) and of the Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) Police’s special operations group (SOG) for opening unprovoked firing on a group of marching protestors. The ­report referred in detail to the Chittisinghpora massacre of 20 March 2000, where 35 Sikhs were butchered by gunmen (who remain unidentified) during the India visit of the United States’ President Bill Clinton, as well as the Pathribal fake encounter of 25 March, in which five ­villagers were gunned down by a joint team of the army and the SOG and celebrated as a prize catch of “foreign terro­rists responsible for the Chittisinghpora massacre”.

Justice Pandian’s probe on Barakpora had pointed out several flaws in the official narrative on Chittisinghpora and Pathribal cases but his request to enlarge the scope of his investigation had been turned down by the state government.

A day after the Barakpora firing, the bodies of the five slain men in Pathribal encounter were exhumed, identified by their families, and their DNA samples taken. The government appointed a special investigation team of police to inquire into the Pathribal incident, which approached the Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics (CDFD), Hydera­bad, and the Central Forensic Science Laboratory, Kolkata, with medical samples of the relatives to match with those of the slain men. Two years later, The Times of India reported that the samples from the relatives had been substituted with some others, a fact that both forensic centres had conveyed to the state ­police more than a year ago. In three cases, the samples of women relatives were found to have come from men.

Even after the report, senior state government officials continued to maintain that they had not received any communication from the forensic centres. The lie of the then state government, headed by Farooq Abdullah, had been nailed when the head of CDFD confirmed these reports, and in a fit of embarrassment, it sought to make amends. Fresh samples were collected in April 2002, which, upon testing, conclusively proved that the victims were innocent local civilians, and not foreign militants as the Indian government had been claiming for the previous two years. An inquiry under Justice G N Kuchay was also ordered in the DNA fudging case but its report was not made public by the Farooq Abdullah government but media reports suggested that senior superintendent of police (SSP) Farooq Khan was implicated. Under Mufti Mohammed Sayeed a ministerial committee was set up to study the report but all that came of it was the suspension of the SSP for a short while.

Exposing the Lies

Earlier in 2001, Anantnag deputy commissioner, quoting the report submitted by the police’s special investigating team, admitted that the five men were innocent and ordered Rs 1 lakh ­ex-gratia relief to their relatives. It was later, during the tenure of Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, that struggle and campaigns for justice by family members and civil rights activists forced the government to hand over the investigations to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). The CBI investigated and filed a charge sheet in May 2006, before the chief judicial magistrate cum special magistrate (CJM), alleging it was a fake encounter; the outcome of a criminal conspiracy hatched by Colonel Ajay Saxena, Major Brajendra Pratap Singh, Major Sourabh Sharma, Subedar Idrees Khan and some members of the troops of seven Rashtriya Rifles to kill innocent persons and termed them “cold-blooded murders”. Major Amit Saxena (Adjutant) had prepared a false seizure memo and also gave a false complaint to the police station for registration of the case against the five civilians showing some of them as foreign militants, and offered false information to the senior officers, the CBI report said.

The report of the CBI imbued some hope for justice in the case, even though the institution, with its poor track record of being used by central governments for cover-ups, does not enjoy much credibility in Kashmir. The report did indict some army personnel including these four officers. However, it completely skirted the role of the SOG, the counter-insurgency wing of the J&K Police, in the fake encounter. Following the Pathribal killings, it was the SSP that was first quoted by television news channels as claiming to have killed the men behind the Chittisinghpora massacre. ­Justice Pandian in his report has raised pertinent questions about the ambiguous role and depositions of the SOG. The then Anantnag SSP, Farooq Khan, in his statement before this one man commission of inquiry has maintained that while technically it was a joint operation by army’s Rashtriya Rifles and the SOG, the latter had not been party to the shoot-out.

The Pandian Commission Report has also pointed out the inaccuracies in ­police versions about the accountability and control of the SOG in the Barakpora firing. The SSP chose to shun responsibility by maintaining that the SOG did not come under him, quoting a government order that the SOG of the state police will function under the administrative control of the concerned district’s superintendent of police. However, the order No Home 224 ISA of 2000 is dated 23 May 2000, which is more than a month after the Pathribal killings and the Barakpora firing. Interestingly, the SSP, who was among the personnel suspended after both these incidents, was reinstated about the time the government was facing the heat of DNA fudging samples. The CBI, in all probabi­lity, may have been brought in to save the skin of the SOG by putting blame only on the army, an institution which could easily bail itself out through the legalised impunity offered by the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA). The prolonged litigations and the final culmination in the army’s court martial proceedings are suggestive of this.

After the CBI report was filed in court, the CJM granted an opportunity to the army to exercise the option of a court-martial. Showing contempt for the CJM, the army refused to face any trial, maintaining that in light of Section 7 of the AFSPA 1990, the charge­ sheet could not have been produced before the CJM without obtaining sanction for prosecution from the central government. The matter was litigated up to the Supreme Court.

Pervasive Impunity

In its judgment of 1 May 2012 the apex court, unfortunately altered the very meaning of justice and right to life by endorsing a blanket impunity for armed forces personnel. It offered the army the choice of being tried either in a civil or military court, equating the two institutions – one a symbol of fair play and the latter a farcical lopsided exercise where the guilty judge themselves. Worse, the court placed implicit faith in AFSPA’s rider of killings “in the line of duty” and those carried out in “good faith” without even going into the circumstances of this particular case, where five men were picked up without any pretext, killed and passed off as “terrorists” to earn awards and promotions. The court, however, maintained that as per Section 7 of the AFSPA, while a charge sheet may be presented before a court, no cognisance may be taken. Even more shockingly, the apex court observed that “an act which may appear to be wrong or a decision which may appear to be incorrect is not necessarily a malicious act or decision”. Maintaining that military court-martials, for which no central sanction was required for prosecuting armed forces personnel, were akin to civil court proceedings, the court gave army the option of choosing between the two. There were no surprises in the army’s final choice.

Even if the final conclusion of the ­army’s court martial on Pathribal was not unexpected but the mocking arrogance of the brazen manner in which all the evidence presented in the last 14 years has been set aside with a simple one-page briefing and the manner in which accused soldiers are exonerated, is shocking even by Kashmir’s cynical standards. There is little to be expected when the accused begin acting as both the investigator and the judge. As it is, the history of court martial proceedings in allegations of human rights violations reveals the inadequacy of this mechanism – reflected through inadequate punishments, lack of transparency about court proceedings and above all the unresolved ethical issue of whether the accused can judge their own case. This is especially in the backdrop of the fact that the AFSPA has been excessively used to stonewall justice in cases of human rights abuse.

This impunity needs to be understood in the larger context of the central ­government’s handling of allegations of human rights violations. The reality of this impunity is spelled by responses to a ­series of right to information (RTI) applications by the Srinagar-based Coalition of Civil Societies. The Government of Jammu and Kashmir, on 23 February 2012, stated in writing that no sanction for prosecutions had ever been granted in J&K between 1990 and 2011. The Ministry of Defence, on 18 April 2012, stated in writing that out of a total of 44 cases received for the purpose of grant of sanction, 35 have been denied, and nine are under consideration. It further stated that of these cases only one case was processed by the court-martial proceedings.

Institutionalised justice in respect of Kashmir moves in a vicious circle – from a pack of lies to fudged evidence, from botched up investigations to incapacitated courts or worse, kangaroo courts. And so it has been in this case; one long tale of concealed truths, DNA fudging, lopsided reports, prolonged litigations handicapped by regressive laws and a ­final burial of justice with a facade of transparency, like spokes in a wheel all moving endlessly to create illusions and confusions till half-truths and untruths can be told with greater conviction.

The Significant and the Trivial

In the Valley, where this culture of impunity is the norm, what effect does it have on people and politics? The official closure of the Pathribal case in January 2014 was responded to by angry statements and sporadic protests, many of them perhaps nothing more than hopeless rituals, some as part of political ­expediency – the vital issue of human rights abuse having for long been a tool in the hands of both separatist and mainstream politicians. As for the general public, the official finality of the case is both significant and trivial, depending upon perceptions.

It is significant because of extensive documentary evidence of a systemic institutional injustice, layer after layer, revealing the obnoxious arrogance of the state in the face of sufferings and abuse. It is this which lies at the core of the anger against the Indian government and its agencies operating in J&K. The outcome of the court martial proceedings were not expected to be path-­breaking and yet they evoke shock and anger. More than just the “normal”, “expected” trivialisation of the Pathribal crime and the non-punishment of the army personnel through regulation ­suspensions, the ruling has completely exonerated them of any charge, because of, what army says, “lack of evidence”. Consider the situation: the army claimed that it had killed five men and celebrated it as a major achievement 14 years ago. Yet, even as the slain men have been proved to be innocent, the soldiers involved in the killing are not held responsible. What more evidence does one need to establish the guilt of the men involved in the kidnapping of these men and then shooting them dead. What could be a worse form of such lack of accountability and complete arrogance?

At the same time, the official closure is insignificant for two reasons. The army courts are never expected to be more sympathetic than the Indian judiciary, which through its verdict of 2012 had already set the terms of reference with its “good faith” and “in the line of duty” (of the soldiers) arguments. Secondly, Kashmir is witnessing excessive levels of despair, scepticism and cynicism regarding the Indian state, especially after killings of 2010 and the hanging of Afzal Guru in 2013. After the ­“legitimised killings” of 2010, again without a mechanism to address or redress the wounds through a judicial process, and Guru’s execution, construed in public perception as judicial murder, the Valley has already reached a point where hopes for justice and expectations from the institutions of the Indian state, always low, have totally eroded. Writing about the closure report on Pathribal, Kashmiri journalist and author Mirza Waheed (2014) draws a link between the Afzal Guru and Pathribal cases and main­tains that the Indian state’s institutions and agencies treat the Kashmiris like “expendable commodities”;

For Kashmiris, the military, the judiciary, and the government of India are one and the same thing, different faces of the same aggressor. Pathribal – and other such incidences of extra judicial killings of Kashmiris – constitute an act of brutal aggression.

This brutal aggression and the notional of institutional injustice is deeply entrenched and its physical and psychological impact inescapable. Beyond Afzal Guru’s hanging, that struck the final blow for this psyche, little else matters except in acting as further catalyst in ­increasing the ferocity of a volcano simmering beneath the surface before it ­finally bursts – activated by any trigger like a Pathribal incident or its instutionalised cover-up. One can only speculate when that explosion will come to pass but what is a foregone conclusion is that the damage has already been done, much before the army brought its lopsided closure report on Pathribal – and this damage is irreversible. We can only hope that there is perhaps some door left open within this irreversibility!

The Way Forward?

The only way forward lies in dealing with the enormous human rights question both with sincerity and by making it the foundation and the pathway to a resolution of the basic political dispute. Pathribal instead of being a closed case could perhaps become a beginning, if only this case is reopened, challenged in court and the perpetrators punished. The state government has ­already expressed willingness to do so. But, given how this has played out so many times in the past, this may simply be a political ploy. How much can one expect from a government that has stonewalled all forms of institutional justice with regard to the Shopian rapes and murders and the 2010 killings, where political patronage and not the AFSPA was used as a shield of impunity, or from a government that silently ­became a collaborator as Afzal Guru was sent to the gallows, out of his turn, ­without giving him chance of a judicial review?

The credibility of the successive state governments on the Pathribal case itself has been severely compromised. Not only was evidence, including DNA samples, fudged, but the Chittisinghpora massacre of 35 Sikh men and the Barakpora firing on peaceful protestors against the staged Pathribal encounter have been ignored. Justice Pandian’s report on Barakpora in 2000 rightly links up the three cases and emphasised on the need for linking up the probes. The guilt in Barakpora firing has been established beyond a shadow of doubt but the tainted security personnel have yet to be tried. As for the Chittisinghpora massacre, with the multiple layers of lies ­invoked from time to time, it has only added to the Valley’s long list of cases that have become an eternal whodunnit puzzle. The remedy for the wrongs in Pathribal and perhaps for opening a window in Kashmir lies in what Justice Pandian observed in his report, regarding these three successive incidents:

“Let the curtain be completely raised;

Let the veil be removed; and

Let the truth be unearthed, leaving no wire un-pulled and no stone unturned and brought to the surface without allowing the truth to remain in the graves”

Is prior sanction always required to prosecute army officers under AFSPA?

The Supreme Court passed its  judgment in General Officer Commanding (Army) vs. CBI on May 01, 2012.  The case addressed the issue of need for sanction to prosecute Army officers under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA).

The case dealt with two instances of alleged fake encounters.  Five people were killed by the Army in Assam in a counter insurgency operation in 1994.  Another five people were killed in Jammu and Kashmir in March, 2000 in an encounter.

In both cases, it was alleged that the Army officers had staged fake encounters.  In both instances, the CBI was directed to investigate the matter.  CBI claimed that the people who were killed were indeed victims of fake encounters.  The CBI moved the court to initiate prosecution against the accused Army officers.

The officers claimed that they could only be prosecuted with the prior sanction (permission) of the central government.  The officers relied on provisions of the AFSPA,1958 and the Armed Forces J & K (Special Powers) Act, 1990 to support their claim.  (See Notes for the relevant clauses)  These provide that legal proceedings cannot be instituted against an officer unless sanction is granted by the central government.

It must be noted that Army officers can be tried either before criminal courts or through court-martial (as prescribed under Sections 125 of the Army Act, 1950).  The Army officers had appealed that both procedures require prior sanction of the government.

The judgment touches upon various issues.  Some of these have been discussed in more detail below:

• Is prior sanction required to prosecute Army officers for ‘any’ act committed in the line of duty?
• At what stage is sanction required?
• Is sanction required for court-martial?

Is prior sanction required to prosecute army officers for ‘any’ act committed in the line of duty?

The judgment reiterated an earlier ruling.  It held that sanction would not be required in ‘all’ cases to prosecute an official.  The officer only enjoys immunity from prosecution in cases when he has ‘acted in exercise of powers conferred under the Act’.  There should be ‘reasonable nexus’ between the action and the duties of the official.

The Court cited the following example to highlight this point:  If in a raid, an officer is attacked and he retaliates, his actions can be linked to a ‘lawful discharge of duty’.  Even if there were some miscalculations in the retaliation, his actions cannot be labeled to have some personal motive.

The Court held that the AFSPA, or the Armed Forces (J&K) Special Powers Act, empowers the central government to ascertain if an action is ‘reasonably connected with the discharge of official duty’ and is not a misuse of authority.  The courts have no jurisdiction in the matter.  In making a decision, the government must make an objective assessment of the exigencies leading to the officer’s actions.

At what stage is sanction required?

The Court ruled that under the AFSPA, or the Armed Forces (J&K) Special Powers Act, sanction is mandatory.  But, the need to seek sanction would only arise at the time of cognizance of the offence.  Cognizance is the stage when the prosecution begins.  Sanction is therefore not required during investigation.

Is sanction required for court-martial?

The Court ruled that there is no requirement of sanction under the Army Act, 1950.  Hence, if the Army chooses, it can prosecute the accused through court-martial instead of going through the criminal court.

The Court noted that the case had been delayed for over a decade and prescribed a time bound course of action.  It asked the Army to decide on either of the two options – court martial or criminal court – within the next eight weeks.  If the Army decides on proceedings before the criminal court, the government will have three months to determine to grant or withhold sanction.

Notes

Section 6 of the AFSPA, 1958:

“6. Protection to persons acting under Act – No prosecution, suit or other legal proceeding shall be instituted, except with the previous sanction of the Central Government, against any person in respect of anything done or purported to be done in exercise of the powers conferred by this Act.”

Section 7 of the Armed Forces (J&K) Special Powers Act, 1990:

“7. Protection of persons acting in good faith under this Act. No prosecution, suit or other legal proceeding shall be instituted, except with the previous sanction of the Central Government, against any person in respect of anything done or purported to be done in exercise of the powers conferred by this Act.”

The big deal about the Army’s small arms

Shortly after taking over as the Chief of Army Staff in May 2012, General Bikram Singh had emphatically declared that upgrading the small arms profile of his force was his foremost priority.

Two years later, as Gen. Singh prepares to retire in end July, neither the 5.56mm close quarter battle (CQB) carbines nor the multi-calibre assault rifles he promised are anywhere in sight for the Army’s 359 infantry units and over 100 Special Forces and counter-insurgency battalions, including the Rashtriya Rifles and Assam Rifles.

The Army’s prevailing operational reality is that it does not own a carbine as the Ordnance Factory Board (OFB) ceased manufacture of all variants of the WWII 9mm carbines, including ammunition, around 2010.

And, two years later, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) finally endorsed the Army’s persistent complaints regarding the inefficiency of the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO)-designed INdian Small Arms System (INSAS) 5.56x39mm assault rifles. It agreed that they needed replacing.

The former Defence Minister, A.K. Antony, was forced into admitting in Parliament in late 2012 that the INSAS rifles had been overtaken by “technological development” — a euphemism for a poorly designed weapon system which the Army grudgingly began employing in the late 1990s and, unceasingly, had complained about ever since.

Among largest arms programmes

The Army’s immediate requirement is for around 1,60,080 CQB carbines and over 2,20,000 assault rifles that it aims on meeting through a combination of imports and licensed-manufacture by the OFB. Ultimately, the paramilitaries and special commando units of respective State police forces too will employ either or both weapon systems in what will possibly be one of the world’s largest small arms programmes worth $7-$8 billion.

Gen. Singh’s guarantees, however, remain delusional and, expectedly unaccountable. And, in time-honoured Indian Army tradition, they will now be transferred to his successor, the Army Chief-designate, Lieutenant Gen. Dalbir Singh Suhag, to vindicate.

An optimistic time frame in inking the import of 44,618 carbines, which have been undergoing an unending series of trials since August 2012, is another 12-18 months away if not beyond. The deadline to acquire assault rifles, trials for which are scheduled to begin in August, is even longer — certainly not before 2016-17, if not later.

Till then, the Army faces a fait accompli of making do without carbines, a basic infantry weapon. It will also have to make do with inefficient INSAS assault rifles, another indispensable small arm for the force’s largest fighting arm.

Currently, three overseas vendors are undergoing “confirmatory” trials at defence establishments and weapon testing facilities in Dehradun, Kanpur, Mhow and Pune with their CQB carbines. The November 2011 tender for CQB carbines also includes the import of 33.6 million rounds of ammunition.

Competing rivals include Italy’s Baretta, fielding its ARX-160 model, Israel Weapon Industries (IWI) with its Galil ACE carbine and the U.S. Colt featuring the M4. The U.S. subsidiary of Swiss gunmaker Sig Sauer, which was originally part of the tender with its 516 Patrol Rifle, has failed to turn up at the ongoing carbine trials.

Sig is under investigation by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on charges of alleged corruption in potentially supplying its wares to the Indian paramilitaries. Alleged arms dealer, Abhishek Verma and his Romanian wife, Anca Neacsu — both are in Tihar jail — once represented Sig’s operations in India.

Inefficiencies

The carbine trials, expected to conclude by mid-July, will be followed by a final report by the Army, grading the vendors on the performance of their systems. Thereafter, the MoD will open their respective commercial bids, submitted over two years earlier and begin price negotiations with the lowest qualified bidder — or L1 — before inking the deal.

According to insiders associated with the project, this intricate process is almost certain to be protracted, despite the inordinately high expectations of efficiency from the Narendra Modi government. They believe the carbine contract is unlikely to be sealed within the current financial year. However, once signed, weapon and ammunition deliveries are to be concluded within 18 months alongside the transfer of technology to the OFB to licence build the designated carbine.

In short, no Army unit will be equipped with a carbine till well into 2016.

The saga of the assault rifles is even starker.

A multi-service internal review in 2012 of the INSAS assault rifles revealed that they were made from four different kinds of metal, an amalgam almost guaranteed to impair their functioning in the extreme climates of Siachen and Rajasthan.

Surprisingly, the Indian Air Force was the most vociferous in castigating the DRDO over as many as 53 operational inefficiencies in the rifle that the country’s prime weapons development agency took nearly two decades to develop and at great cost.

Inexplicably, the DRDO insisted on the OFB developing the SS-109 round, an extended variant of the SS-109 NATO-standard cartridge for 5.56x39mm rifles aimed at achieving marginally longer range, a capability unnecessary for such a weapon system. This operational superfluity delayed the INSAS programme as it required the import of specialised and expensive German machinery and necessitated the “stop gap” import of millions of ammunition rounds from Israel.

The DRDO-designed and OFB-built rifle also cost several times more than AK-47 assault rifles of which around 100,000 were imported from Bulgaria in the early 1990s for less than $100 each as an “interim” measure at a time when the Kashmiri insurgency was its most virulent and Islamist militants better armed than Army troopers.

The MoD issued the tender for 66,000 5.56mm multi-calibre assault rifles in November 2011 to 43 overseas vendors, five of who responded early the following year.

The competing rifles, required to weigh no more than 3.6kg and to convert readily from 5.56x45mm to 7.62x39mm merely by switching the barrel and magazine for employment in counter-insurgency or conventional roles, include the Czech Republic’s CZ 805 BREN model, IWI’s ACE 1, Baretta’s ARX 160, Colt’s Combat Rifle and Sig Sauer’s SG551. The latter’s participation, however, remains uncertain. A transfer of technology to the OFB to locally build the selected rifle is part of the tender.

Meanwhile, field trials for the rifles are scheduled for early August, nearly 30 months after bids were submitted, as that is the extended time period it surprisingly takes the Army to conduct a paper evaluation of five systems.

But these too have already run into easily avoidable problems.

On security grounds, the rifle vendors are objecting to the Army’s choice of its firing range at Kleeth in the Akhnoor sector hugging the Line of Control (LoC) as the venue for the initial round of trials. A final decision on this is awaited. Thereafter, other trials will follow in diverse weather conditions in Leh, Rajasthan and high humidity areas, all regions where the assault rifles will eventually be employed.

Transforming the soldier

Acquiring these modular, multi-calibre suite of small arms is just part of the Army’s long-delayed Future-Infantry Soldier As a System (F-INSAS) programme envisaged in 2005, but interminably delayed.

The F-INSAS aims at deploying a fully networked infantry in varied terrain and in all-weather conditions with enhanced firepower and mobility for the digitised battlefield. It seeks to transform the infantry soldier into a self-contained fighting machine to enable him to operate across the entire spectrum of war, including nuclear and low intensity conflict, in a network-centric environment.

But senior military officers concede this programme stands delayed by six to seven years almost exclusively because of the Army’s inability in formulating qualitative requirements (QR) to acquire many of these ambitious capabilities.

Even deciding on a multi-purpose tool, akin to a Swiss knife, for example, has been delayed despite trials in 2011 featuring European and American vendors. Officers associated with F-INSAS said this, like other equipment acquisitions, was due to the Army’s rigid procedures, inefficiencies and inability to take timely decisions.

The Army continually blames the MoD for creating bureaucratic hurdles in its modernisation efforts, but fails in acknowledging its own shortcomings in drawing up realistic QRs, conducting timely trials and, above all, realistically determining its operational needs and working towards them economically.

Senior officers privately concede that the “uniforms” are largely responsible for the lack of modernisation, but manage to successfully deflect their own limitations sideways onto the MoD.

Gen. Singh’s tenure, like several other chiefs before him, exemplifies this. It is highlighted by their collective inability to even incrementally upgrade the Army’s war waging capacity be it night fighting capability for its armour fleet, modern artillery, light utility and attack helicopters or infantry combat vehicles, among others.