Insensitive to basic norms

THE UNPROVOKED AND brazen aggression reflecting in the attack by Border Security Force personnel in Jammu and Kashmir on a group of journalists, while on duty, betrays an utter lack of sensitivity not just to the democratic freedoms as that of the Press but to basic human rights as well. The paramilitary personnel just went berserk and let themselves go on an assaulting spree, beating up the mediamen and smashing their cameras and other equipment; the victims of their highhanded action included representatives of foreign media agencies and two Srinagar-based staff members of this newspaper. Consider the sequential facts: On Wednesday evening, 11 persons, including eight civilians and a BSF officer, are reported killed in a bomb blast triggered allegedly by a suicide squad of the Lashkar-e- Taiba at Magam, about 30 km from Srinagar. The next day, fulfilling their professional obligations, journalists land there for a spot report on the incident and related follow-up stories. As they watch the funeral procession of some civilian victims of the blast, there is an altercation between some local persons and BSF personnel in a passing convoy. And then follows the mindless attack on those around, the media squad and their cameras coming in for `special' attention.

What stands out from all this is the palpable imperviousness of the BSF personnel - and generally of the security forces engaged in anti-insurgency operations - to the delicate human sensibilities, not to speak of their cultivated aversion to such fundamental democratic values as transparency and accountability. And this perception is only reinforced by the haughty intervention of a high-ranking, far-from-repentant BSF official who over-ruled a considerate police officer's offer to help retrieve the cameras and video equipment that had been thrown into a rivulet by the men in uniform. For its part, however, the Union Home Ministry has formally expressed regret over the incident and offered its ``sympathies'' to those affected by the BSF action, even while ordering an enquiry to ascertain the ``exact sequence of events'' and the ``provocation'' for what it called an ``altercation'' between the BSF and members of the media. Even if on predictable lines, the response has been prompt and is, to that extent, welcome. The exercise should help in identifying those responsible for highhanded action and bringing them to book. But the point is that the Magam episode is by no means an aberration. It fits into what appears to have emerged as a behavioural pattern of the security forces charged with the responsibility of combating insurgency, particularly in the highly sensitive border State of Jammu and Kashmir.

More often than not, the response of security personnel to episodes of dastardly killings perpetrated by terrorist groups in pursuit of their devious designs has been such as to compound their own original faults or failure. A classic example was their reaction to the Chattisinghpora massacre by militants which occurred on the eve of the then U.S. President, Mr. Bill Clinton's visit to India last year. The brazenness with which some innocent civilians were branded as `terrorists', held responsible for the killings, shot in an `encounter' and buried post haste (as established subsequently, thanks to a judicial intervention) is a sure way of causing disaffection among the people. In fact, there can be no running away from the stark reality that an important contributory factor for the growth of insurgency is the sense of alienation that `excesses' by the security forces - such as fake encounters and coercive measures against innocents in the name of search and seizure operations - generate in the local population. The Magam incident, if anything, makes it obvious that the powers that be have not learnt the right lessons from such episodes in the past and that they have failed to appreciate fully the imperative of sensitising the security forces to human rights, and the blame for this lies as much with the Centre as with the State Government.

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Section  : Opinion
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