I have been noticing a debate in newspapers and television channels about the need to call in the army to tackle the Maoists and wonder whether it is indeed time to turn towards them before the movement spirals out of control.

Last week, hundreds of Maoists, who are expanding their influence in India, chased away police from a tribal area based around the town of Lalgarh about 170 km (100 miles) from Kolkata, capital of West Bengal state.

By attacking Lalgarh and then keeping the police at bay for four days, the Maoists demonstrated their growing influence over poor villagers and their capability to strike close to a big city like Kolkata.

(For Analysis on how Maoist insurgency can hurt industry in India, click here )

Thousands of villagers caught in the crossfire have left their homes in panic and have been put up in makeshift government camps. They are clearly shaken by the siege and the subsequent police campaign to sanitise Lalgarh.

Indian states have time and again asked the central government that it might need the army to fight the Maoist movement, which is rapidly spreading in the country.

But for the moment, India is banking on the police to tackle the Maoists and equipping its forces with modern weapons and training to fight the Maoists in their own den.

Experts say it is clear that the strategy of the rebels with their 22,000 plus combatants is to encircle bigger towns and cities and could hit industry.

Maybe Indian authorities should also rework their strategy as the police with their limited prowess have always been soft targets in rural areas and have failed to gain confidence of poor villagers.

Will India look to deploy the army at some stage?

(Reuters photo of a paramilitary soldier keeping watch from a tree in Jhitka near Lalgarh June 21, 2009)

The peacetime activities of an armed force have a bearing on its wartime capabilities and its relations with the civil society.

Although it has been the stated government policy for at least a decade to use the defence forces as sparingly as possible the Indian army has been continually engaged in counter-insurgency operations in Jammu and Kashmir and the northeast.

“Excessive and continuous involvement of the Army for internal security is not good, neither for the Army nor for the nation,” former army chief Ved Prakash Malik said four years ago.

“Most of the states have neglected their armed police,” he said.

When the al Qaeda recently threatened India with more Mumbai-like attacks, the first response came from Defence Minister A.K. Antony.

“Our army is ready to face any threat from anywhere,” he said.

Internal security is the responsibility of the Home ministry and the police force.

“There is an increasing trend to rely on the army for internal security,” strategic affairs expert Jasjeet Singh told Reuters.

“We have got into the habit that the moment there is the slightest disturbance the administrator picks up the phone and calls for the army.”

Defence analyst Gurmeet Kanwal said “such operations undoubtedly stretch the army’s budget and affect its modernisation programme.”

They also interfere with the training of the armed forces for conventional warfare, he said.

Was it then the defence minister’s remit to respond to that threat?

The army’s apolitical stance makes it something of an exception in South Asia.

However, concerns had been raised after the Malegaon blasts case where a serving army officer has been charge sheeted.

Does the army’s involvement in internal security duties make it vulnerable to politicisation?

Singh thinks that Malegaon is an aberration but “what is aberration today in twenty years will be regular.”

He suggests reforming the training and recruitment of police so it can tackle internal security challenges on its own.

Police being a state subject under the Indian constitution, personnel are recruited locally and therefore are more sensitive to local sentiments.  This makes the police more conducive to handling internal security duties provided it has the capacity.

Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah favours the strategy of letting the local police maintain law and order in the state.

Should that be a nationwide initiative?

Two images have seared themselves into my mind. The first is the brutal treatment meted out to a young girl working as a domestic maid in Gurgaon. I didn’t really know what beaten black-and-blue meant. Until I saw her photograph.

The other image was even more nauseating by virtue of being captured on video. Students armed with sticks rained blows on other students in Tamil Nadu as the police merely looked on.

Violence in domestic and student life is not something new. But what hit me was the nonchalance of the police — it was so in contrast with my own wincing reaction I could not shrug the image off.

Over the years, we have learned to settle personal scores with violence. It is almost a rite of passage. In almost every family, there is someone who has earned bragging rights for having beaten up somebody.

Is violence so much a part of Indian life? Our epics are full of violence in the service of a ‘just’ cause. But is being violent part of our cultural DNA? Probably not.

The woman charged with beating up the young girl tried to justify it — she had lost patience trying to cope with the pressures of family and urban living.

But the excuse is unacceptable in civilised society.

The police were being blasé about the bloodshed probably because they have been known to reduce crime rates by the simple expedient of not noticing it. Moreover, they are desensitised to violence since they see and participate in so much of it.

These two incidents could be seen as senseless acts of cruelty by a few people stooping low. As such they are just titillating. But they could also be seen as part of a larger pattern.

In fact, I wonder if the policemen and the woman can be considered victims in a sense.

Police in India are understaffed, overworked and underpaid. And the judiciary is bogged down by the weight of almost 350 million cases pending countrywide.

If people believe they can’t get their due by going to the police or to courts, it could lead to a state of endemic violence in society and a consequent deadening of senses to it.

Further, this logic could also be used to justify terror attacks.

It is safe to say with John Donne that no man is an island nor are our society’s predicaments ranging from a callous police force or bombings or more mundane manifestations of violence.

A newspaper reported that Indian cricket team captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni has applied for a 9 mm pistol. The headline ran ‘Dhoni wants a gun’. It would be more accurate if it read ‘Dhoni needs a gun’.

Perhaps we can guess why.

Security was tight at the entrance to Gate No. 7 of the Jama Masjid in Old Delhi, a 17th century mosque built by Mughal kings, and the venue on Tuesday for a gathering of Muslim leaders from across the country to debate the persecution of Muslims.

Police shooed away fruit vendors and cycle rickshaws spilling over from the crowded market nearby, while others stood around the metal detectors at the entrance while their colleagues cased out the giant white shamiana inside with sniffer dogs under the slowly revolving ceiling fans.

 A full half hour after the scheduled time, when only the first few rows of seats were occupied, Maulana Naksh Bandi of the Jama Masjid began the proceedings, inviting various leaders to the dais, and declaring in Urdu: “there is no law, there is no justice for us. It is the rule of the jungle.”

Pausing to take a call on his mobile, and to recognise leaders who slowly filed in, some helped by their assistants, the Maulana said that staying silent would only lead to a more terrible future for Muslims in the country.

Bombings by suspected Islamist militants have killed hundreds of people in recent months, and Muslim leaders accuse the police of indiscriminate arrests of young Muslim men who have been labelled as terrorists and paraded before the media.

Next came Maulana Syed Ahmed Bukhari, influential leader of the Jama Masjid mosque, the largest in north India, who said Muslims needed to draw up a blueprint to deal with the circumstances, with even such practical solutions as legal help
for those being held by the police.

His speech, also in Urdu, was by turn fiery and angry, and at all times impassioned, its rhythym broken only by latecomers whom he acknowledged, and frequent shouts of “Allah-O-Akbar” (God is Great) among the audience who now filled all the seats.

I was struck by the anger felt among the listeners, the quieter ones of whom nodded in assent and said “beshak” (certainly); it was another sign of how communal politics was growing in India and of how Muslims are fighting to be heard.

As the sun travelled higher, glasses of cold water were passed around, but there was no cooling the Maulana, who accused the major political parties of trying to curry favour with the Muslims ahead of the 2009 election.

But Muslim leaders including the Maulana were equally political, said Seema Desai, an analyst at consultancy Eurasia Group in London: “Muslim leaders will be heard more than might have been the case in the run up to the national elections,” she said.

“But as long as Indian political parties think along communal lines its hard to see how long lasting solutions will be found.”   
     

One of the most striking things about the weekend’s bomb attacks in Gujarat was the mixture of savagery and sophistication.

Savagery because of the way a second wave of bombs were detonated at a hospital, apparently to target the crowds of concerned relatives who had gathered there. Had they been watching Contract, a recently released Bollywood film with a similar plotline?

Sophistication because of the way the coordinated attack was planned and executed without the intelligence agencies getting a sniff of it, even though dozens of people must have been involved.

It also looks as though the IP address of an American living in Mumbai was hacked to send an email just before the first blasts. Perhaps the perpetrators remembered how Daniel Pearl’s kidnappers were traced in 2002 from a email sent from a cybercafe in Karachi. This time the sender of the email will be harder to trace.

The bombers also stayed one step ahead of the police by not using mobile phones to detonate Saturday’s blast. That allowed the bombers to detonate the second set of bombs without having to worry about the mobile phone network being closed down (as police in Bangalore did on Friday). It could also will rob the police of some potentially valuable leads.

By reportedly using old, rented bicycles instead of newly bought ones, as they did in Jaipur, the bombers may also have covered their tracks more carefully.

The email from the Indian Mujahideen was professionally put together, even if its message was one of hatred. In it, the group insisted that “each and every Mujahid belongs to this very soil of India”, and mocked the “cunning ones who call themselves the ‘Intelligence Bureau’”.

So far the police seem to have few leads on the Indian Mujahideen, but this level of sophistication and planning will undoubtedly lead some people to suspect the presence of a foreign hand.

It already has made some people wonder if India’s intelligence agencies are well enough equipped and resourced to cope with this sort of threat.

But there is one thing I simply do not understand. The email says the attacks targeted Gujarati Hindus. But if that was the case, why were some of the bombs left in the Muslim-dominated old city? But I guess the working of a Mujahid’s mind are not always easy to understand.

Time and time again, India’s police react to riots by using live ammunition and protesters are killed. Occasionally there is a public outcry, as there was after deaths in Kalinganagar and Nandigram, yet seldom can I remember officers being dismissed or prosecuted.In Rajasthan over the past few days, the police appear to have shot and killed more than 30 rioting Gujjars . True, their provocation may have been extreme — one policeman lynched, another police station attacked.

But was the death of so many, apparently unarmed, people really necessary?

A judicial inquiry has been ordered and I look forward to its conclusions.

In the meantime, I wonder if it is time the Indian government spent some time and some money in training its own police in how to quell unruly mobs without having to kill people.