Killing fields:

militant attacks on Adivasi villages and retaliatory violence in Assam claim more
than 80 lives, displace thousands of Bodos and Adivasis, and revive the longpending demand for Scheduled Tribe status to Adivasi forest dwellers.
Bodos are the largest plains tribe of Assam. Adivasis are demanding S.T. status.
Koch-Rajbangshis, Morans, Mataks, Tai-Ahoms and Chutias are the other five
communities that have been agitating for inclusion on the States S.T. list.
The violence that occurred in the last week of December and the consequent
displacement of village residents brought two pertinent issues to the forethe
recognition of Adivasis, including the tea-tribe and ex-tea-tribe communities in
Assam as S.Ts and granting land rights under the S.T. and Other Traditional Forest
Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act to Adivasi and Bodo forest dwellers in
denuded forest areas.
Recognising Adivasis as a Scheduled Tribe will have wider political ramifications in
the BTAD than anywhere else in the State. The Bodoland Territorial Council (BTC),
which runs the administration in the four BTAD districts of Kokrajhar, Chirang, Baksa
and Udalguri, was constituted under the amended provisions of the Sixth Schedule
of the Constitution, and, as such, political rights such as reservation of the council
seats are enjoyed exclusively by the S.Ts.
Bodo leaders are concerned that granting S.T. status to Adivasis and KochRajbangshis will offset the political equilibrium in the BTC and take away the
political rights Bodos have enjoyed following the creation of the autonomous
territorial tribal council in lieu of a separate State.
Thirty-four of the 40 seats in the BTC are reserved for S.Ts and five seats for nonS.Ts, and one seat is unreserved. In addition to the elected members, the State
government nominates six members. In the BTAD, Bodos form the largest S.T. group
and, therefore, have been ruling the tribal council since its inception in 2003. With
elections to the BTC due in April 2015, and elections to the State Assembly
scheduled for 2016, these issues are likely to dominate politics in the BTAD areas.
Militants of the NDFB (Songbijit) are suspected to frequent the Ultapani reserved
forest and flee to their transit bases inside the Bhutanese jungles taking advantage
of the porosity.
As most of the remote settlements of Adivasis, Bodos and other communities inside
the reserved forest areas are treated as illegal encroachments by the State Forest
Department, these communities have remained downtrodden even after 11 years of
autonomous rule by the BTC. Except in a few recognised forest villages, there are no
government schools and health care institutions. Bodo and Adivasi forest dwellers
were evicted thrice from these settlements by the Forest Department. However,
some families possess ration cards.

India's insurgencies:

Naxalites, often referred to by the state as a virus, are engaged in fighting for
social and political inclusion, justice, minimum wages, the right to land and the
eviction of multinational corporations. Anger and alienation have divorced them
completely from the Indian state.

As the authors put it: The Maoist ideology is based on their simplified interpretation
of Marxism and Maoism that argues that the Indian state is capitalist and
exploitative; it is led by a comprador bourgeoisie and semi-feudal landlord class; is
an agent of American imperialism and should be overthrown by a people's
revolution, where only Maoists can lead. The Maoists do not believe in the
Constitution, which to them seems partial and biased; they are increasingly upset
about globalisation in the form of memorandums of understanding, extensive
mining, and depletion of forest land . Jal, jungle and zameen are their primary
aspirations. But contrary to expectation, it turns out that the Maoists are not
popular. It is argued that their levels of wages are even more paltry than those
offered by the state. Caught between Maowadi and Khaowadi (corrupt police),
the people have no option but to bank on the former.
The Kashmiri insurgency, on the other hand, arose immediately after Partition in
1947, exacerbated by the state's rejection of the demand for a plebiscite. The
hanging of Maqbool Butt of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) in 1984
and the rigging of the elections in 1987 against certain Muslim candidates escalated
the militancy in the area. As militancy in the Valley increased, the traditional
identity of Kashmiriyat' was gradually reconstructed.... [T]he conflict and demands
for separatism gradually challenged the secular traditions of the valley. The schism
between the Muslims and the Kashmiri Pandits became greater than ever. When
Jagmohan, the former Governor of Jammu and Kashmir, declared that every Muslim
in Kashmir is a militant today and that the bullet is the only solution for Kashmir,
secularism was thoroughly undermined and replaced by militancy, abetted as it was
by Pakistani aid.
In Punjab, the insurgency of the 1980s is traced to the 1973 Anandpur Sahib
Resolution, which was about sanctioning greater autonomy to Punjab, the issue of
Chandigarh as the capital, and the fair and equitable distribution of river waters.
This led to a full-blown demand for a separate State, Khalistan, with Jarnail Singh
Bhindranwale at the helm. Bhindranwale used terrorist methods and had a
militarist ideology and organisation, and attempted to create communal tension.
The agenda was to drive Hindus from Punjab and create a communal situation that
would bring Sikhs living outside Punjab back to the home' state.
Thereafter, President's Rule was imposed upon Punjab. This culminated in Operation
Blue Star in 1984, which sought to flush out all the terrorists from the Golden
Temple complex in Amritsar. Bhindranwale was killed, and the backlash led to the
assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in that same year. Communal assaults
on Sikhs followed, mainly in Delhi, and many of them were killed. And though
militancy was wiped out from the State, Punjab still bears the wounds of the 1980s,
chief among them being encounter killings and secret cremations of the innocent.
As opposed to Punjab, the conflict in the north-eastern States has lasted for
decades. Calling it a national liberation struggle, the cadre of the movements in
these States regard themselves as freedom fighters. These are revolts by
indigenous peoples who do not accept the homogenising Indian nation.
Such is the story of the Naga movement, which has been pressing for sovereignty
for all Naga peoples since the British were engaged in settling India's future. In
response, the Assam Rifles, a special army, was in 1954 marched into what is
Nagaland today, and the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act was exercised
thereafter. The government exercised its own muscle through the use of the
Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act, 1987 (TADA), and the Prevention

of Terrorism Act, 2001 (POTA), which ruthlessly suppressed civil liberties, leading to
even more militarisation among the people. Similar atrocities upon civilians, such as
the formation of Salwa Judum, a vigilante group in Dantewada in Chhattisgarh, have
been evolved to counter Maoist forces.
The sub-nationalisms in Manipur, Assam, Tripura and Mizoram are also about
resisting the pan-Indian ideology of the nation. Their struggle for self-determination
arises mainly from an animosity to the outsider, identified as Biharis and
especially Bengalis: The insurgencies of the Northeast... are built around ethnic or
tribal identities that exalt their collective identity and build stereotypes against
other communities that are then demonised and constructed as the enemy other'.

Almost exactly 100 years before 9/11, the first wave of modern terrorism struck
at the very heart of American democracy. On September 6, 1901, a terrorist named
Leon Czolgosz assassinated US President William McKinley. After McKinley's
assassination, Vice-President Theodore Roosevelt assumed the office of the
Presidency and immediately called for crusade to a exterminate terrorism
everywhere. But back then, the terrorists were not Islamic Jihadis; 100 years ago
the terrorists were Anarchists.
The parallels between contemporary Jihadism and the Anarchist movement are
striking. Leon Czolgosz's biography could easily be used as the profile for a typical
Jihadi suicide bomber:
For some individuals with little or no formal education, few skills, and no hope of
improvement, anarchism offered a natural outlet for their frustration. Cleveland
resident Leon Czolgosz fit the profile perfectly. Poor, reclusive, and often
unemployed
This profile of the typical terrorist/suicide bomber leads us to the two conditions that
produce modern terror waves.
1. Extreme discontent with the current social order.
2. A trigger event which inspires hope that terror will successfully overthrow the
current social order.
The use of asymmetrical warfare is nothing new. Modern terrorism is the use of
asymmetrical warfare in a political movement that extends beyond the boundaries
of a single nation-state. The modern terror wave is generated when an ideology
emerges that can drive such a global movement. The global nature of modern
terrorism is the primary characteristic that distinguishes it from the more "archaic"
forms.
Anarchists were the extreme malcontents driving the first wave of modern
terrorism. Russian Czar Alexander II'spolitical reform program was the trigger
event inspiring the Anarchists' hope for success.
The Anarchists used political assassination as their asymmetrical weapon of terror.
After wounding a brutally oppressive Russian Police Commander in 1878, Vera
Zasulich proclaimed that she was a "terrorist, not a killer". The Anarchists believed

assassinating government officials, industrialists and heads of state would create

chaos, which would lead to the end of social institutions and oppression.
[Prior to McKinley's assassination], anarchists had assassinated four European
leaders -- President Sadi Carnot of France, Empress Elizabeth of Austria, King
Humbert of Italy, and Spanish statesman Cnovas del Castillo. In the United States,
an anarchist had attacked industrialist Henry Clay Frick, in part for his role in the
failed Homestead strike.
BUT THEIR ATTEMPTS TO OVERTHROW THE WORLD ORDER ONLY DESTABILIZED IT AND
LED TO THE OUTBREAK OF THE F IRST W ORLD W AR . The conspiracy to assassinate
Archduke Franz Ferdinand was a mixture of Serbian nationalism with some minor
Anarchistic elements: it was the last significant "ripple" of the First Wave and
caused a chain reaction of events culminating in the first shots of World War I.
The end of the First World War leads us to the trigger for the Second Wave of
modern terror. The settlement at the end of the war included the destruction of
the empires belonging to the vanquished Central Powers. Their empires were
dismembered and they were forced to relinquish control of their various colonies.
This forced decolonization was the trigger event inspiring a subsequent wave
of anti-colonial terror that was directed at the victors of WWI: the British and French
empires.
The Second Wave gave birth to anti-colonial organizations like
the IRA, Irgun and Algeria's FLN. The anti-colonial Second Wave lasted nearly
40 years and it only receded when the colonial empires dissolved. A DIRECT
CONNECTION BETWEEN THE DISSOLUTION OF THE O TTOMAN EMPIRE AND THE CURRENT
WAVE OF JIHADI TERROR .
The Second Wave diverged from the First in both methods and objectives. The First
Wave used political assassination in a failed attempt to dissolve the state.
In their pursuit of self-determination, the Second Wave terrorists attacked
the local institutions and representatives of colonial power. Paradoxically,
these localizednationalist doctrines were the driving force for an emerging global
movement.
In spite of the fact that the collapse of de-facto colonialism coincided with the
Second Wave, the effectiveness of this wave remains to be seen. Mahatma Gandhi
demonstrated that non-violent civil disobedience was an effective weapon against
colonial rule. The cause of anti-colonialism made very little headway until after the
conclusion of the Second World War, when an international consensus to end
colonialism emerged and culminated with the UN Declaration on the Granting of
Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples.
The Third Wave of modern terrorism was the Communist/Left-wing
terrorism of the 1960s and 1970s. The trigger event for this wave was the Viet
Cong's successful resistance against the French and then the US Military in Vietnam.
The Third Wave terrorist organizations included the American Weather
Underground, the Italian Red Brigades, the West German Red Army Faction (BaaderMeinhof Group) and the Japanese Red Army.
The PLO was also part of this Third Wave and it must be emphasized that the PLO
was driven by a politicaldoctrine, not a religious one like the current Jihadi wave.
This distinction is one of the keys to understanding why the Iraq War is a self
inflicted wound in the War on Jihadi Terror.
The current wave of Jihadi terrorism is the Fourth Wave of modern terror. It was
triggered by the success of the Iranian Islamic Revolution in 1979.
Remember, discontent by itself is not sufficient cause for a terrorist wave.

There must also be hope for success and the Iranian revolution provided
that hope. The successful resistance to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan further
reinforced that hope and gave birth to The Taliban and Al Queda.
The Fourth Wave attacks started during the Reagan Administration. In 1983, a
suicide truck bomb with over 10,000lbs of TNT destroyed the US Marine barracks in
Beirut, killing 220 Marines, 18 Naval servicemen and 3 members of the Army. It
was during this time that the Reagan Administration allied itself with
Saddam Hussein. The secular nature of Saddam's Arab Nationalist
ambitions and his enmity towards Iran were a counterweight against the
spread of the Islamic Revolution.
But, less than two years later, the Reagan Administration agreed to sell 1500 TOW
missiles to the Islamic Republic of Iran. The proceeds of that sale were used by the
Reagan Administration to circumvent the Boland Amendment. The Boland
Amendment was an exercise of Congress's Constitutional mandate to control the
allocation of funds belonging to the US Treasury.

The Gill Doctrine

A Model for 21st Century Counter-terrorism ?
At the core of the Gill Doctrine lies the view that terrorism has mutated from being merely a tactic of
political rebellion, as it was in the 1970s, to an entirely new way of waging warfare. Counter-terrorism in
the closing decades of the 20 th century and the early decades of the 21 st cannot be denigrated as a mere
law and order issue. Instead, it is the major challenge to the security of individual nation-states, precisely
because it is still being mistaken as an appendage to popular insurgency.15
Gill argues that extensive foreign sponsorship of terrorism by rogue states has dramatically increased the
striking power of terrorist groups. Consequently, the traditional Police doctrine of minimal use of
force can no longer be blindly applied. Instead, the use of force should be proportional to the threat
posed by each particular terrorist movement.

When fighting terrorists armed with military-issue hardware, the definition of what constitutes minimal
force requires recalibration. If terrorism is after all a new way of warfare, then the Government must be
prepared to combat it on a war-footing. At the same time, there remains an overwhelming need to insulate
the local population from suffering disproportionate collateral damage. For this reason, the use of area
weapons and airpower is to be avoided, even if the result is heightened casualties on ones own side. 16
To do full justice to the Gill Doctrine, it is necessary to appreciate the nuances of K.P.S Gills arguments.
He does not reject the proposition that misgovernance has a role to play in fostering political militancy.
Indeed, Gill has not spared the Indian bureaucracy for its corruption and general incompetence. He has
warned that chronically poor administration within Punjab since terrorism was quelled raises the
possibility of resurgent violence.17 Gill does, however, make a distinction between the root causes of
terrorism, and the dynamics that sustain it once violence actually erupts. His associate, Ajai Sahni, argues
that far more important for counter-terrorist policymakers than addressing root causes, is neutralizing the
sustaining dynamic of terrorism.18
This point needs to be understood by critics of Gills methods. At no point does he suggest that the
security forces, as the coercive arm of the Government, can act as a substitute for the
administrative wing. Nevertheless, the simple fact remains that one cannot develop areas one
does not physically control, hence the Gill Doctrines emphasis on kinetic counter-terrorist measures.

As John Paul Vann noted in the context of counter-insurgency in Vietnam, "you can argue
about whether security is 10 per cent of the problem or 90 per cent of the problem, but its the
first 10 per cent or the first 90 per cent."19
It has been suggested that the Gill Doctrine relies on coercion alone in order to succeed. Suggestions
have been made that as chief of Police, Gill neglected to win local support in the fight against
terrorism.20 In fact, he spent much of his time trying to mobilize Punjabs Sikhs against extremist
violence.21 Where he differed from his more politically-correct colleagues was in the depth of expectation
he placed upon such efforts. Whilst pacifists in the Police attempted to put the cart before the horse and
rally the population against terrorism before aspiring for operational dominance, Gill reversed these
priorities.
One of the Gill Doctrines most significant contributions to the study of low intensity conflicts has been the

concept of a societal Stockholm Syndrome .23 This concept holds that even in instances
where popular support for militancy appears high, it may not be so in reality. Rather, such support might
only amount to a survival tactic adopted by populations living continuously under the shadow of the gun.
Once this point is appreciated by counter-terrorist strategists, it becomes possible to develop a response
to terrorist violence that balances political sustainability with operational effectiveness.
Gill argues that the first objective of counter-terrorism is to break the collective mental paralysis that
terrorist violence imposes upon individuals living in its close proximity. To achieve this mass-psychological
transformation, it was necessary for the Police to engage terrorists operationally and physically isolate
them from the terrorized. Thereafter, mass contact programmes could impress upon local communities
the impossibility of maintaining an ambiguous moral position on terrorism. Once these measures are
taken, popular support for counter-terrorist operations shall appear, and in massive quantities. The
Doctrine refers to this outpouring of popular support as the pressure cooker effect, and holds that it is as
much a symptom of counter-terrorist success as a cause of it.

Gills aggressive views on counter-terrorism were not immediately accepted when he articulated them in
the context of Punjab. Tensions arose from the fact that his was a rationality-based view of counterterrorism, up against a sentimentality-based one held by the administration. To elaborate on this point: the
Gill Doctrine is grounded in hard-headed Clausewitzian principles . The very
ruthlessness of these principles brought them into inevitable conflict with the Gandhian idealism that to
this day, pockmarks Indian strategic thinking.24
Gill operated on the Clausewitzian dictum of first trying to understand what kind of conflict he was
engaged in, and then devising an appropriate strategy.25 Many Police officers in Punjab however, stuck
fast to the principle that force was only to be used when all other policy options were exhausted, not when
the situation most demanded it. They continued to see Punjab as an ethno-nationalist conflict of the kind
that had long troubled Indias northeastern region. In the process, they missed out on the qualitative
impact that the politicization of religion brought to the conflict.
Unlike the northeastern rebellions, violence in Punjab, according to its initiators, was legitimized by the
ultimate identity differentiator: religion. In the terrorists view, massacres of innocents were part of a larger
offensive conducted in the name of the Sikh community worldwide. Thus, the fact that the majority of
terrorisms victims in Punjab were Sikhs was explained away by a belief that other Sikhs supported the
killers.26
Gill recognized that the religious element of the Khalistan movement meant it was closer to being an
identity-driven struggle than one that was ideology-driven.
The difference is crucial. While ideologically motivated terrorists can be induced to defect through
intellectual persuasion, identity-driven terrorists create a psychological barrier between themselves
and members of the out-group. Surmounting this barrier by non-coercive means is nearimpossible, particularly when the differences between the terrorists and the out-group are clearly visible.
Racial and religious differences are two particularly potent dividers of identity. Political views are
not, because they can be moderated through dialogue and prolonged discussion. For example, in the
1950s, a communist terrorist in Malaya could be induced over a period of time to change sides and
become a capitalist. Today, a jihadi fighting in the name of his religion cannot change the fact that he is a
Muslim.
As a Sikh, Gill knew the tenets of his religion better than anyone else. He knew that
the Khalistaniterrorists had developed a perverted interpretation of Sikhism to resolve their own personal
identity crises. Aware that they had inured themselves against Government propaganda, he did not waste
time trying to engage them in theological debates. Instead he appealed directly to their natural instinct for
survival. Gill offered the terrorists a stark choice: they could either die for their idea of God, or live for
themselves. There was no third option. Many Khalistanis responded as per logical dictates and
surrendered. Those that did not, engaged in gun battles with the Police, and frequently ended up meeting
their Maker.
The uniqueness of the Gill Doctrine lies in the fact that it offers a template for counter-terrorism which is

All terrorist movements share a common

weakness: the need to constantly replace cadres lost to security forces
action.27 Failure to match recruitment rates to operational losses means that
terrorist groups start to experience a manpower deficit . If this goes on long enough, it can
potentially applicable across time and space.

lead to the terrorist movement simply withering away. In order to be effective therefore, counter-terrorism
needs to be conceived of as a war of attrition. The challenge for the Government is to develop an
operational capability for attrition levels which are intolerable for the terrorists but politically
sustainable for itself.28

politically sustainable

By
, what is meant is that counter-terrorism should make
every reasonable effort to avoid violations of human rights. Democracies by their very nature are
conscious of the need to preserve individual freedoms and curtail the power of the Governments coercive
apparatus. It is therefore essential for security forces to develop excellent intelligence and investigative
capabilities in order to ensure that only the guilty suffer.29
The Gill Doctrine provided a mechanism by which the rate of terrorist neutralization in Punjab could be
raised to exceed the rate of terrorist recruitment. It involved the targeted repression of terrorists and their
active supporters, based upon good local intelligence. Since the vast majority of the noncombatant
population was left unaffected by security forces action, sympathy for the terrorists did not automatically
increase. Furthermore, by carrying out synchronized operations, the security forces could create large
manpower deficits within the terrorist movement in a short space of time. These greatly hampered the
ability of terrorist groups to carry out diversionary attacks and thus helped in keeping the counter-terrorist
effort focused. Once the political establishment was prepared to acquiesce in the continuation of such an
attritional counter-terrorist policy, terrorism could be wiped out without any concessions having to be
made.