Column | India Managed a Hundred Mutinies; More Are Around The Corner: GK Pillai

India did not begin in 1947 as a country. It began as a wager. A motley grouping of British Indian provinces and 526 princely states stitched together by Instruments of Accession, a literacy rate of 12 per cent, life expectancy of about 32 years, an industrial base that produced almost no capital goods, 10 million refugees walking across a freshly drawn border, communal riots and a war in Kashmir. The Constitution was still more than two years away, being argued into existence by a Constituent Assembly.

The question in 1947 was never whether there would be mutinies. Given how India was made, most of them were inevitable. The question was whether a state that weak could survive without holding itself together by force alone.

It survived, and the reason has never been written down as policy. Territorial integrity was not negotiable. Almost everything else was. The doctrine was arrived at by instinct rather than design, and it is now under strain.

Much of the accommodation was written into the Constitution itself: Article 370 and the Fifth and Sixth Schedules gave an outlet to regional and tribal identity. There was even a provision for a state within a state, tried in Assam, though it did not succeed.

The accommodative reflex was at its most generous with the Nagas: a nine-point agreement signed by the governor of Assam, then a 16-point agreement creating a state for a population of just 3.65 lakh, then the Shillong Accord of 1975, then the ceasefire of 1997 that holds to this day. Tripura’s tribal agitation, driven by the influx of Bengali Hindus from erstwhile East Pakistan and later Bangladesh, was settled through Sixth Schedule status. So were the Bodos in Assam.

It is time to relearn the lessons of history. What worries me today is different. It is the rise of Hindutva, the move towards a Hindu rashtra and the decline in the fundamental democratic values of tolerance and understanding. The doctrine that carried India through its first 70 years depended on the state being willing to accommodate identity—to let people be different inside the Union rather than demanding that they be the same. If we cannot take all our citizens forward, we will face greater threats to internal security in the years ahead.

To say we always knew what we were doing would be overstating it. There were serious deficiencies in knowledge, and in understanding the grievances that were fuelling the violence. The most revealing deficiency was administrative: the Naga insurgency was handled by the ministry of external affairs until the late 1960s. It took two decades for the government to realise that a foreign secretary handling an internal security problem was sending the wrong signal—to the world, and more damagingly, to the Nagas themselves.

It was a category error, not a clerical one, and it was repeated in subtler forms. Central forces were deployed into the Northeast with no knowledge of the language, the terrain or the people. They committed excesses that alienated the population further, and took years to acquire the skills for fighting in the jungle.

State vs. Centre

There was also confusion about the level of government at which an insurgency should be handled at all. Insurgency falls under law and order, which the Constitution makes a state subject. However, putting down an insurgency or a separatist movement required funds and expertise that state governments rarely had. The Centre, which treated it as an existential question, had no constitutional locus to act directly. The mismatch has never been resolved.

Indeed, most states could not finance a modern, trained police force. So they leaned on central forces. However, in more cases than is comfortable to admit, segments of the local population and the state government itself informally supported the movement.

For example, a chief minister of Bihar, prioritising development, would not commit state police to blocking the ingress of Maoist guerrillas being chased out of the neighbouring states. A working arrangement took administrative finesse, the loyalty of the Indian Police Service cadre to the national effort and financial incentives for modernising the state police. Only then did the border districts of Bihar stop serving as sanctuary whenever operations were mounted next door. There was also a tacit understanding: the Maoists would not cause trouble in Bihar so long as they had sanctuary in Bihar.

However, amid all this, we did learn how to deal with insurgencies and separatism, and the following are the key lessons to take away.

Not Just Law and Order

It was only in the 1990s that the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) came to accept that internal security was not merely a matter of law and order but of good governance and the proper implementation of laws already on the books. The prime minister’s packages for economic development in Kashmir and the Northeastern states were one consequence.

In the Northeast, those packages did two things. They put a figure on the development deficit of the previous half century, and they forced every central ministry to attend to a region it had been able to ignore. Ten per cent of the funding of every central ministry was earmarked for the Northeast and placed in a non-lapsable pool. Major schemes were monitored by the MHA and the prime minister’s office. Between 1996 and 2000, three prime ministers visited every Northeastern state, announcing schemes and major projects.

Even within the Government of India, the line ministries—power, telecommunications, road transport, railways and rural development—did not understand that they had a role in internal security. The neglect was striking and its logic was banal: it was easier to spend a budget allocation in a peaceful district than a disturbed one. So, the road, the tower, the transformer and the rail line all went where they were least needed and the areas that most required a visible, functioning state got the least of it.

This is perhaps the most under-appreciated finding in the whole record. The state’s absence was not primarily a security failure. It was an accounting convenience. Where there were no roads and no electricity there were also no schools, no teachers, no health services and no water supply, and into that vacuum the Maoists moved. Parts of the Northeast were in the same condition as late as in the 1990s, and in places into the first decade of this century.

The Force that Learned

On the execution side, the restructuring of the Central Armed Police Forces (CAPFs), with the introduction of jungle-warfare training and rapid modernisation, was a genuine game changer. Today, the CAPFs can handle any militant problem in India. The modernisation and upgradation of the state police forces is ongoing and incomplete, but it is the state police who will have to be the first responders in every situation. The Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), along with the police forces of Tripura, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh and Odisha, have shown what is possible when the training and the support are there.

After 2004, the CRPF’s counter-insurgency role was spelt out and the force was equipped for it: modern weapons and communication equipment, jungle-warfare training, drones and satellite phones, dog squads, more battalions—and army subedars from the sappers embedded in every company. By 2012, the CRPF and its CoBRA battalions were ready to take on the Maoists.

The state police forces were trained and modernised alongside. Tripura brought its insurgency under control with its own police and a Communist Party of India (Marxist)-led state government that backed them without reservation. Nagaland, Manipur and Jammu & Kashmir (J&K) remain weak.

The ministry also moved to put a national-security policy in place, and the creation of the national security adviser and the national security advisory board (NSAB), cutting across silos, was a step in the right direction. The NSAB drafted a comprehensive policy and presented it to the prime minister but it was never approved. Once a policy is spelt out, the government can be held to it and be answerable for every deviation from it. The draft remains in cold storage.

Underlying Grievances

The whole-of-government approach has had striking success against Left-wing extremism. The movement’s backbone is broken. But the causes that produced it— exploitation, land and forest rights, the absence of development—have not gone anywhere, and the deficiencies in implementing Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act [Pesa], the Forest Rights Act and the Panchayati Raj institutions remain a matter of concern.

Underneath these lie older failures. The abolition of zamindari in the 1950s was right. Land reform was another matter. Outside J&K, West Bengal and Kerala it was honoured more in the breach, and the results were the impoverishment of small and marginal farmers and the landless, migration out of rural India and the slums that migration built. The Telangana uprising of the late 1940s, Naxalbari in 1967 and the Maoist spread into the heartland all grew from the same neglected root.

Overdue Reforms

Two questions remain open. Both need a review from first principles if internal security is to hold over the long term.

The first is the long-term deployment of the armed forces. Their extended use in J& K, Nagaland and Manipur has been counter-productive. Deployment in an insurgency should be for a limited period, with a defined exit. The whole logic of building up the CAPFs and the state police is that the army should not be the instrument of first or of permanent resort.

The second is the Intelligence Bureau. Its functioning needs a far stricter review by the MHA than it now gets, and parliamentary oversight would help.

Among the other agencies and programmes that need tighter monitoring are the implementation of the Fifth and Sixth Schedules, of Pesa, of the Forest Rights Act and of the Panchayati Raj institutions. Similarly, governors in Fifth Schedule areas are supposed to review how they are working and submit reports to the state assembly and to Parliament. Hardly any governor has done this in 75 years.

The fundamental objective of every counter-insurgency operation is to win the hearts and minds of the people. Without that focus there will be tactical successes and little strategic or long-term gain.

Be a Model in Uncertain Times

One could argue that most of the agitations India faced were inevitable, given the manner in which the country was created. Partition and its fallout are still with us. J& K, and illegal migration into West Bengal and the Northeast remain questions of high internal security and of politics to this day.

The lingering, festering situation in Manipur is a sign of what that future looks like. It is a warning that further mutinies are around the corner and that we do not appear to have learnt the lessons. India is a multiethnic, multicultural, multilingual country, unique in the world. We have to preserve it and be a model in these uncertain times.

(Views expressed are personal)

Gopal Krishna Pillai Indian Administrative Service officer and former Home Secretary of India

(This story appeared in Outlook magazine’s August 31 issue, 'Whose Idea of India?', in which India’s noted public intellectuals, policymakers, cultural practitioners, political leaders, scholars and economists write in detail about the idea of India they believe can best secure the nation’s future as we celebrate 80 years of independence.)