India news --- CRPF India

May the force be with you

Josy Joseph, TNN, Oct 10, 2010, 01.14am IST
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If anyone represents India's policy paralysis on the streets of Kashmir, in the jungles of central India and the mountains of the Northeast, it is the middle-aged jawans of the Central Reserve Police Force. Posted in "disturbed areas" for more than three years at a stretch, they spend their time in bunkers in a hostile environment. Every day is a challenge as they struggle to keep their sanity and guard democratic principles. 

Everyone who approaches them is a potential adversary. It could be a stone thrower in the Valley, an armed Maoist in Chhattisgarh. Nameless shadows chase them during the night; armed insurgents stalk them through the day.

For CRPF jawans, life has become almost a continuous engagement with India's mutinies, with New Delhi choosing to tackle multiple crises at the last minute. In the meanwhile, the jawans are hostage to multiple problems: own inadequate training; absent intelligence; determined adversaries; the failures of the political class. On a really bad day, the jawans get caught in the kind of massacre an appalled India saw in Dantewada in April, when 76 of them were slaughtered by the Maoists. At other times, they are battling massed stone throwers in Kashmir, forced to open fire, often unwarranted.

From a motley force called the Crown Representatives Police whose job it was in British times to protect VIPs, the force has now come to symbolize India's struggle with a million mutinies. The situation is unprecedented for the force. It is extensively deployed in all three major theatres of internal struggle in India — the valley, the Red Corridor and the Northeast.

The CRPF was given its new name by constitutional sanction in 1949. It came into the limelight in Ladakh in 1959 when 10 of its personnel were killed and an equal number taken prisoner by the Chinese. Every year, police forces observe the day — October 21 — as Martyr's Day. But the CRPF is no longer a police force. It has become India's main counter-insurgency force.

By its original mandate, the CRPF was meant to be a reserve force. It was meant to assist states and union territories in police operations and to contain insurgency. Over the years, the CRPF has taken on riot control, crowd control and election duty. And lots more. Meanwhile, it has become India's primary counter-insurgency force, except in areas where the army and other paramilitary forces are deployed.

Many within and without the force express concern. Is the CRPF, which consists of just over 200 battalions, up to the challenge? 2010 may go down as one of the CRPF's worst years. All the challenges it faced were rendered worse by the lacklustre leadership of Vikram Srivastava. He has been replaced by K Vijay Kumar.

But is this enough? Can a dynamic leader wave a magic wand and solve all the CRPF's problems? The force faces many challenges that simply cannot be resolved by its DG but must be dealt with by the political leadership.

A senior CRPF officer admitted to TOI that the force needs another 200 battalions if its men are to be rested enough to be fit for purpose. This would bring the CRPF more in line with the Indian army. After a posting lasting just under three years, an army unit gets to spend the same amount of time in a peace station. But the majority of CRPF personnel move constantly from one theatre of action to another; they are rested only briefly and only a minority of jawans gets a peace station posting.

In the Valley, it is hardly rare to find CRPF jawans who admit they have been there for up to five years. Even so, hardly anyone complains. "This is better than Chhattisgarh and Manipur," said one constable outside the Hazratbal mosque during a recent week of intense street violence.

But the pressures of such long deployment do begin to tell on the men. In Jammu and Kashmir, for the first time since the insurgency began, more civilians — nearly 70— have been killed by security forces, mostly CRPF and J&K police, than terrorists. The numbers are a stark warning. This awful statistic and this year have revealed the reality of the CRPF — it is engaged in a one-handed fight because it is deployed to counter fast-changing insurgencies and is unable to shed its basic sensibility as a police force.

J&K's civilian casualties at the hands of the security forces tell a different, more troubling story as well. The CRPF and state police are unable to control street protests without resorting to unwanted force and fire power. In many cases, CRPF constables in Kashmir admit they are unfamiliar with the terrain and they fear the unknown. "We don't have many options," says a CRPF official in the valley.

A senior army officer, who has spent considerable time in counter-insurgency operations, says the CRPF has many other shortcomings. "They should have a robust intelligence set-up of their own, without which they are left at the mercy of the state polices in operations. The result is Dantewada-like embarrassments". He says the CRPF needs a "leading-from-the-front" culture, as in the army. "Their duties are not very different from what our Rashtriya Rifles units. But there is a significant quality difference in leadership," he says.

These are troubled times for the CRPF and it is now that it gets its new chief, an IPS officer with a larger-than-life image. K Vijay Kumar, 58, shot to fame in 2004 when he hunted down the notorious bandit Veerappan.

Many within the security establishment believe his appointment to the CRPF's top job would bring very real and badly needed change. A day after he took over as DG, Kumar signalled his intentions by flying down to Chhattisgarh for his first field visit. But does the CRPF need more than a brave police officer famous for felling a forest brigand? The Valley and the tribal belt are not the limited confines of a forest. Nor are his adversaries mere bandits.
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Read more: May the force be with you - The Times of India http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/sunday-toi/special-report/May-the-force-be-with-you/articleshow/6721382.cms#ixzz11vlRP2RD