Irregular Warfare Podcast - Misguided Citizens: India’s Approach to Counterinsurgency

Episode Date: January 13, 2023

Subscribe to the IWI monthly newsletter by going to www.irregularwarfare.org! What lessons can be found in India’s experience with counterinsurgency? Are there elements of India’s philosophical approach to counterinsurgency and its tactical innovations that can be applied by the United States in expeditionary counterinsurgency operations? In this episode, we’re joined by Sumit Ganguly, distinguished professor of political science at Indiana University Bloomington, and Sajid Shapoo, a decorated senior Indian Police Service officer and PhD candidate at Princeton University. Together, they tackle these questions and more as they assess the Indian approach to counterinsurgency. Intro music: "Unsilenced" by Ketsa Outro music: "Launch" by Ketsa CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

At one point, Nehru is on record, the first prime minister of India, Jalal al-Nehru, is on record saying that these are not our enemies, they are misguided citizenry, and we have to bring them back into the fold. That's a paraphrase of what Nehru said, but that's the essence of what he said. The U.S. experience of counterinsurgency, which the U.S. academicians and the policymakers also have studied, is a very different kind of counterinsurgency. It's the expeditionary counterinsurgency. U.S. has never fought counterinsurgency in its homeland, in the continental America. So U.S. has never fought a counterinsurgency. So that's a very different

experience that U.S. counterinsurgency has always been expeditionary. Welcome to episode 70 of the Irregular Warfare podcast. I am your host, Jeff Vanoff, and my co-host today is Adam Darnley-Stewart. Today's episode explores India's experience with counterinsurgency and the lessons that can and cannot be applied more broadly to insurgent conflict. Our guests begin by outlining the evolution of India's counterinsurgency strategy since 1947 and the varied approaches the Indian government has taken towards internal adversaries. They go on to explain how the Noruvian approach to counterinsurgency, considering insurgent forces as misguided citizens instead of sworn enemies, has influenced Indian doctrine, but

how this style cannot be easily transferred to expeditionary insurgencies like the US often fights. Shumit Ganguly is a distinguished professor of political science and holds the Tagore Chair in Indian Cultures and Civilizations at Indiana University Bloomington. A specialist on the contemporary politics of South Asia, he has written extensively on the region. His forthcoming edited book with Larry Diamond and Dinsha Mistry,

The Troubling State of India's Democracy, will be published later this year by the University of Michigan Press. Sajid Shapur is a PhD candidate at Princeton University. He is a highly decorated Indian police service officer, a two-star general with 22 years of progressively senior experience in high-profile counter-terror assignments. He has in-depth experience in counter-terror investigations and intelligence-driven operations. He was the first officer chosen to serve in the National Investigation Agency, India's federal counter-terror agency, created in the aftermath of Mumbai attacks in 2008.

He's among the rare officers who have been twice conferred with the Gallantry Medal, the highest police bravery medal by the President of India. You are listening to the Irregular Warfare Podcast, a joint production of the Princeton Empirical Studies of Conflict Project and the Modern War Institute at West Point, dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare professionals. Here's our conversation with Professor Shumit Ganguly and Sajid Shapu. Shumit, Sajid, welcome to the Irregular Warfare podcast.

Thank you very much. It's a delight to join this podcast. Thank you, Jeff. Thank you, Adam. It's an absolute pleasure to be with you guys here today. Thank you for being here. For our audience who may be less familiar with Indian history, what have been the critical junctures in India's experience with counterinsurgency? I would argue that this really started shortly after 1947, after India's independence, with the rise of the Naga insurgency in India's northeast. The Nagas constitute a tribal group whom the British had mostly kept at a distance, and in large part it's because of British anthropology that this had happened, the whole idea was to let the tribal groups maintain their culture, their history, their distinctive ways of life, and not intrude upon them. And also,

these tribal groups really did not want to be integrated into the mainstream of British colonial rule. So it was a kind of a live and let live strategy. And shortly after independence, the Nagas declared independence of their own for a separate state. Obviously, the Indian state was not going to tolerate this and responded with some vigor against the Nagas and sought to suppress them. And therein begins India's engagement with the entire Northeast in terms of counterinsurgency. I think what Sumit said is broadly correct, and she's right that right after the independence, I think 1954 was the year when the Naga insurgency started. But historically, we tend to miss a very critical part right after the 1947, though it was not categorized as an insurgency.

But it had this one movement which had elements of what today we see as some sort of a Maoist insurgency. In the Telangana region, there was this Tebaga movement, which Tibhaga means the three part. You know, this was about the crop distribution. And this was supported by one of the factions of the Communist Party of India. They had their charter was similar to the Mao's charter. And this insurgency, because it was kind of, you know, it was kind of bequeathed from the colonial British empire to the Indian state. So this was fought as a peasant. This was seen as a peasant rebellions because the way British looked at all these peasant rebellions was as civil unrest.

And there starts, I think, our initial counterinsurgency kind of in campaign, which was because this was seen as a civilian unrest, and we dealt with it in a typical manner, the way British used to deal with it. So that was kind of a legacy which we inherited from the British. In some sense, the Hyderabad and Janagadh, which were the two states, they did not merge with India. And well, we do not call it a kind of a counterinsurgency, but it also had some elements of, well, you had state actors there because the states were independent. As in princely states, they had their own armies, but there were some, you know, non-state actors which were also

involved in that. But largely, I agree with Sumit that the classical insurgency started with the Naga Rebellion, which started in 1954. And then it continued in the sense we had the Maoist insurgency, which started in West Bengal, the Naxalbari. And in the 70s, the Khalistan Movement 6, which is a different ethnic group in India, they demanded their own separate independent state. In the state of Punjab, there was the Khalistan movement in the late 70s, 80s till 90s. And then the Kashmir insurgency started in 1989 and is still continuing with that. And then we still have an ongoing Maoist insurgency in the central and eastern part of the country. Were there any legacy issues from colonialism post-1947 that either affected the insurgencies

that India had to deal with moving forward, and also the responses over time over the next 50 or so years from an Indian response through coin strategy perspective? Oh, absolutely, and I think that's a very pertinent question. There is ample evidence that Indian counterinsurgency strategy in the initial years after independence was profoundly influenced by the experience of the British in colonial Malaya and the whole notion of hearts and minds that's attributed to Sir Gerald Templer. And that considerable part influenced Prime Minister Nehru's thinking in terms of how to deal with insurgents. And at one point, Nehru is on record, the first Prime Minister of India, Jalal al-Nehru, is on record saying that these are not our enemies. They are misguided citizenry, and we have to bring them back into the fold. That's a paraphrase of what Nehru said, but that's the essence of what he said. And in large part, this is derivative of the British colonial experience in Malaya. The irony, of the British colonial experience in Malaya. The irony, of course, is the British, while talking about hearts and minds in Malaya, in Kenya, proved to be utterly brutal and cruel and used

extraordinary force. As Caroline Elkins, who's this professor at Harvard, this historian at Harvard, has shown in a book which uses British colonial declassified documents to demonstrate the extraordinary harshness of counterinsurgency strategy in Kenya, as opposed to Malaya. And that's something that's quite intriguing. But to return to my point, yes, there's no question about it that there's a colonial imprint, largely derived from Malaya in the initial years of Indian counterinsurgency. declassified. There are letters instructing the governor of Assam saying that, look, obviously, we are not going to tolerate secessionist movements. But at the same time, we simply cannot rely on kinetic means to deal with the insurgents. Yeah, I think Shumit is correct. And this is the Indian counterinsurgency was heavily influenced by the British experience. And there was a legacy issue also in that the hearts and minds approach, though British did, you know, talk about that in Malay.

But in the Indian context, apart from the hearts, hearts and minds, I think there was another thing which was going on was this, you know, as India got independence, we inherited institutions from British. So we had a British army, which became an Indian army. Then we had certain paramilitary forces, different princely states had different paramilitary forces. And the way we dealt with these peasant rebellions, there was a lot of kinetic aspect in that. So at the same time, we had, you know, our counterinsurgency was, you know, we were in the infancy stage, but we did use a lot of force in these peasant rebellions. But when it came to the states like Lagaland, and in the next decade only there was insurgency in other northeastern states. So the Indian experience of, you know, the creation of India as a union of

states where states kind of acceded into the union of India. So that also played a big part because at no cost, as Mr. Nehru said, we're not going to let them secede from Union of India because that was a very hard fought task, which Indian politicians at that time had achieved, you know, states acceding to India. And then there was some kind of like, we almost fought a mini war with the state of Hyderabad. So at the same time, you know, keeping them within the Indian state. So very soon we see narrow government starting political engagement with the Nagas and also with other northeastern states. How has that philosophy of conceiving of insurgents as misguided citizenry,

as opposed to perhaps enemies of the state, continued to inform more recent involvement with counterinsurgent fighting? I've heard senior military officers and senior police officers, some of whom Sajid no doubt knows, and intelligence officers have told me that, look, ultimately, these on a number of occasions has been quite brutal and quite kinetic. I'll give you one example about which I have personal experience growing up as a teenager in West Bengal at the height of the Naxalite insurgency, the Maoist insurgency. Now, in fairness to the police forces, to the paramilitary forces in Bengal, I will say this, that the Maoists were not exactly playing with kid gloves. They were extraordinarily brutal. They killed university professors. They shot a vice chancellor of a university when he was out on a morning walk. They shot hapless policemen at street crossings who were just directing traffic, so much for their love of the proletariat. I mean, these policemen

are amongst the least paid, the most overworked, under dire conditions, and they shot these policemen in cold blood. So I want to be abundantly clear that these Maoists, for all their professed love of humanity, were incredibly cruel, brutal, and callous. cruel, brutal, and callous. But the Indian state also responded with extraordinary brutality. There was the use of torture to extract information from the Maoists who had been picked up in police raids. There were cordon and search operations throughout the city of Calcutta. And the fascinating thing is the Maoists lost out because of their sheer brutality. The middle class ultimately said, wait a minute, why is killing a university professor part of the class struggle that these people are engaged in. But to return to my central point, that there was a degree of police brutality and state-sanctioned brutality in the course of suppressing the Maoist insurgency in Bengal. We cannot elide this fact. This is a tragic fact that one has to address. And if I may be so

self-referential for a moment, my father was a senior prison official in the Home Ministry in West Bengal, and I am quite proud of the fact that he would not allow torture in presidency jail. He said, you may torture people in a police lockup, but as far as I am concerned, these men, whom I consider to be the scum of the earth, nevertheless have rights as Indian citizens, and they are under trial prisoners. as Indian citizens, and they are under trial prisoners. You may not torture them. What you do in the context of a police lockup is between you and your maker, but I will not permit torture in this prison. And he stood up, and for all his troubles, by the way, his life was threatened by the Naxalites. If we can zoom in on the treating insurgents like misguided citizens, maybe we could unpack how tacticians attempted to not demonize the insurgents

based on the violence that they were seeing in line with treating them as misguided citizens. You know, it's very important to see how the West has seen the coin campaigns all over the world. So the U.S. experience of counterins the world. So the U.S. experience of counterinsurgency, which the U.S. academicians and the policymakers also have studied, is a very different kind of counterinsurgency. It's the expeditionary counterinsurgency. U.S. has never fought counterinsurgency in its homeland, in the continental America. So U.S. has never fought a counterinsurgency. So that's a very different experience that U.S. counterinsurgency has always been expeditionary. You have been, you know, the projection of force, whether it was in Vietnam or whether it was during the Cold War,

supporting Pakistan and Saudi Arabian intelligence agencies in Afghanistan during the Soviet war in Afghanistan or in Iraq recently and Afghanistan. So the thing with India is that the counter insurgency is, you know, we're fighting insurgency within our political and geographical borders. You know, son of the soil, this narrative of misguided youth. It's not just a hollow rhetoric, but many policymakers and politicians actually believed, believe in it without discounting the fact that there have been brutalities, as Professor Ganguly mentioned. But at the same time, this narrative has played a part in policymaking also, and in also tacticians at the tactical level also. So taking a cue from Sumit, I grew up in Kashmir. And, you know, I grew up during the militancy days. Many of my distant relatives

ended up, you know, picking up guns and becoming militant. But at the same time, on one hand, there was, you know, these kind of operations by the so-called special forces. So another thing is India does not have any counterinsurgency special forces. We kind of, you know, evolved over a period of time. In Kashmir, what we did was different army units were brought together and a special force was created, which was called Rashtriya Rifles, means the nationalist rifles. And they did not initially have any irregular warfare kind of a particular training. So they were from the different regiments who were all trained for conventional warfare. But over a period of time, when they fought insurgency, the training happened. It was kind of a practical training for them. But at the same time, this

son of the soil aspect always played a part. But the Punjab insurgency is a classical example. We had paramilitary and army doing counterinsurgency in Punjab, but it was only when the Punjab police took the mantle of counterinsurgency in their own hand. It was when the Punjab police started dealing with counterinsurgencies that Punjab had success. So any terrorist or a militant who killed a local policeman, not only that local policeman's family and his relatives, but the entire village will turn against the terrorists. And that is what happened in Punjab. And suddenly, the space for terrorists in Punjab got more limited. We talk about son of soil movement in Iraq, but decades

ago, there was a similar kind of a son of a soil movement in Punjab, where the local police, they got up and handled the insurgency very effectively. Again, there were allegations of human rights violations, there were brutalities, that's a part of it, but then the insurgency was contained. Shamit, some of your research follows tactical and strategic innovations that the Indian government has accomplished in fighting counterinsurgency since 1947. Could you unpack some specific examples of how that strategy or the tactics have evolved over time? Absolutely. Take, for example, the creation of the Rashriya rifles. The Rashriya rifles, as Sajid referred to, was created primarily because, as both of you know, Adam and Jeff, as military officers, that the conventional military has a long tail, a long logistical tail, and has considerable teeth,

whereas you needed a much more nimble force that did not have this conventional teeth-to-tail ratio, which could be deployed swiftly and placed in situations of insurgency. And over time, the Rashtriya rifles were trained in counterinsurgency, though they had difficulty initially because they were drawn from disparate units and consequently didn't have the kind of normal unit cohesion that characterizes a military force. And not only the creation of the Russia rifles as a more nimble force with a low teeth-to-tail ratio, but also the creation of counterinsurgency schools. I'm proud of the fact that I was one of the first people allowed, a foreigner, since I'm an American citizen, to be allowed to go to Kru, which is just outside the capital city of Srinagar,

where there is a dedicated counterinsurgency school with a model village, a model village of Kashmir, and which resembles a typical village in Kashmir with mud huts, with water tanks, and with carpets inside the rooms. And it is absolutely fascinating. For example, the young liaison officer who was showing me around in crew, he said, Professor, why should I not lift that carpet from that floor? I said, I don't know why you shouldn't lift that carpet. He said, let me lift that carpet and show you? He lifts that carpet and there is a entire bomb rigged to it. Of course, the real bomb had been removed, but all the paraphernalia was there. And he said, we've learned the hard way. Initially, we would go in and one of the first things we would do to see if there was a trap door under the carpet, we lifted it up. And lo and behold,

that was the end of the poor officer who lifted the carpet, because there was an IED there. And then we're walking outside in the village. He points to a water tank. He said, why shouldn't I go near the water tank? I have no idea. It's a conventional water tank. You see that all over in Indian villages. So there could be someone hiding in there because the water is not so high and the man has water up to his neck and he's there with the submachine gun. And again, we've learned the hard way. So it's this fascinating way of acclimatizing people to the expectations of what they might encounter in a village. I've also been out to the Jungle Warfare and Counterinsurgency School in Virante in Mizoram, which parts the Burmese border, the Myanmar border. There, they take me on a long hike into the jungle. And we finally come to a

spot where he says, this is where Laldenga, who was a prominent Meso leader, had a hideout. And I said, okay, it makes sense. The foliage is so thick here, even a helicopter hovering above wouldn't be able to see anything. So it made sense that in this remote spot, he was hiding out. He said, yes, all that's very good, Professor, but you're missing something. What am I missing? I told you, this dense foliage, you know, this pathway is something you guys have carved out. This trail leading here is not something that existed. Yeah, oh, that's very good. But you're missing something and you're staring at it. He said, look down in that ravine and look down there.

Isn't this a trickle of water? He said, this is why his hideout was here. You can forage for anything in a forest, but unless you have water, you're not going to live very long. This is why he was here. that they have sensitized these counterinsurgency forces to, so that they are immediately alert to these possibilities. I just want to add to this, the challenging thing about India and also, you know, the complexity of the situation can be gauged by the fact that the lessons learned in Kashmir cannot be applied in Jyotisgarh. India is so diverse. So we have a counterinsurgency school like Varangte we have in Kanker in Chhattisgarh.

So there the lessons learned would be completely different. And again, in India, you cannot have this one size fit all kind of office strategy because there's so much of cultural and religious and geographical complexity. There's so many cultural kind of nuances, how the forces and the police forces have to react to a certain situation in a village in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh is completely different from how they would do in Kashmir. And in India, the states, the insurgency is mostly seen as a public order problem. So these are the state forces which are leading the consular insurgency is mostly seen as a public order problem. So these are the state forces which are leading the consul-insurgency campaigns, of course, aided by the central paramilitary

forces. So one of the, you know, tactical lessons learned has been, it's been a hard way because there were central forces which are coming from different states and they don't have any idea about the topography and the terrain of a particular area. So we saw that we were losing whenever there were like big parties going on for coordinates or going on for routine patrol. They were getting ambushed and we were losing a lot of men. In one of the ambushes, we lost 73 CRPF men in Chhattisgarh. So then we learned was these small teams, intelligence-based operations, you know, pinpointed a high-value target, have intelligence about him, and then send small teams to, they may be good when you have to dominate the area, but when you have to kind of neutralize the opponent and its leadership, these big coordinate and search and area domination campaigns do not work.

You have to have these small teams, int-based operations take out a high-value target. So that's the learning which is going on, and it will continue as we deal with more challenges. How has the Indian military paired the military response to insurgency alongside civilian or institutional efforts to address the grievances of disaffected populations? Again, this has varied enormously depending on where the military has been deployed. Initially in Kashmir, about which I have written quite extensively,

there was really a kind of a male-to-fist strategy because the Indian state was completely caught flat-footed by the insurgency. In 1990, when the insurgency really came to the fore, Sajid has correctly said it started in December 1989, but by the spring of 1990, things were really so dire that I recall being on a panel with a former CIA analyst in Washington, D.C., and her view was that India has lost Kashmir. And I said, Madam, with all due respect, let's meet again in a decade. I liken the Indian state to an elephant. It's quite soft when you touch it, but when it sits on you, it can be incredibly painful. And its weight is considerably greater than yours. She smiled skeptically. A decade later, Kashmir still

remained as Indian territory, and it still remains Indian territory. So the initial response of the army was incredibly harsh and kinetic, in large part because there was this fear that the state was about to spin out of control. And the civilian leadership in the state really was in a state of panic. There was a man called Jatmohan Malhotra, who was the governor of the state because the state assembly had been dissolved because of the insurgency, and the state was being directly ruled by the central government under a provision called president's rule in India, when the central government for up to a period of three months, which can be extended, can be ruled, six months, can be ruled directly by the central government, after which either the President's Rule has to be extended

or elections have to be held. Jagmohan Malhotra panicked and just wanted to contain the insurgency, suppress the insurgency at all costs. But very quickly, within the next couple of intelligence, the ham-handedness of tactics. nuanced strategy involving the creation of a coordinating group, a unified command, involving civilians, military, paramilitary forces under the governor, with much greater intelligence collection and a much more nuanced strategy of not simply suspecting every Kashmiri male of a certain age to be an insurgent and hauling them in on the basis of mere fears and anxieties, but a much more calibrated strategy involving civil-military coordination. And this probably reached its apogee under former chief of the Research and Intelligence Wing, India's principal espionage and counterintelligence agency, a man called Girish Chandra Saxena. And Girish Saxena evolved a highly successful and sophisticated

counterinsurgency strategy, which brought together multiple strands, civilian, military, paramilitary, and in many ways, turned the tide in Kashmir. That was a critical turning point. And I had the privilege of interviewing Saxena multiple times after he had retired from government, and he was remarkably candid. Now, focusing on great power competition in the Indo-Pacific, under the Quad framework between the US, Australia, Japan, India, how do you see India applying coin and wider IW experiences or irregular warfare experiences to support Quad irregular warfare efforts in the Indo-Pacific moving forward? I think we need to step back here and take a look at the Quad. It's a very new forum. It's just in its infancy. And when we talk about Quad's irregular warfare, what are we insinuating here?

Are we trying to say Quad countries initiating or somehow trying to, you know, create an environment where there's some sort of irregular warfare first against the China? Because here we're talking about the China. The Quad is China-centric. So I think India has been very pragmatic in that in the last three, four decades. India would always want to, you know, deal with China on a more bilateral manner. And India's counterinsurgency learnings and how can it help Quad's irregular warfare efforts, I think we need to kind of, you know, look at the question more carefully. Are we talking about stoking something in China or China's kind of satellite states in the Indo-Pacific?

So I think India has been pragmatic in this and India would be more inclined to dealing with the Chinese problem bilaterally. They will use Quad in the economic sector and also kind of forging a military alliance. But in terms of cross-border kind of tensions between India and China, I don't see Quad having a major role there. But I would definitely want to hear Shumit's ideas on this. I basically happen to agree with what Sajid said. I think he's quite correct. what Sajid said, I think he's quite correct. And if I might add just a wrinkle to it, India's one experience of an expeditionary force was an absolute disaster. There was a lack of civil

military coordination. There was a lack of the intelligence agencies cooperating with their masters, factionalism, bureaucratic politics, organizational routines, which were inappropriate for the context. And I'm referring to the tragic IPKF, the Indian Peacekeeping Force, which became a peace enforcement force, which was sent to Sri Lanka in 1987 to implement an accord between the LTT, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the principal Tamil organization belonging to the Tamil minority in Sri Lanka, which was fighting for the creation of a separate state. and India brokered an accord which the LTTE really didn't care for, and the Indian forces were there to separate the Sri Lankan armed forces from the LTTE, and the LTTE would lay down their arms. Within weeks thereof, the LTTE was back in the battlefield. LTTE was back in the battlefield. Indian intelligence was limited. Indian intelligence was flawed. Military intelligence was at odds with civilian intelligence. The embassy, the

High Commission in Colombo had its own ideas about how to best implement the accord. the whole thing is a case study of what you should not do. And the sad part is maybe Sajid will do this for us now that his dissertation is about to be done. Someone really needs to write a book that fully explains that tragedy. There are accounts, but they're mostly self-serving from generals who said, you know, the blame really lies with the intelligence agencies. There are accounts by intelligence agents who say, no, it's really the military that was at fault. They didn't listen to us. These are essentially self-serving accounts. What one needs is a dispassionate account of how this came about, how was it implemented, why did it not work. Anyway, the central point of all of this is because of the tragedy of Sri Lanka,

Indian policymakers have become extremely loathe about deploying Indian forces abroad in counterinsurgency operations. There was considerable discussion under the government of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Bajpai to send an Indian force to Iraq because the U.S. was requesting assistance. Ultimately, Parliament decided against it. And I interviewed the former National Security Advisor, Rajesh Mishra, who sadly is no longer with us. And I asked him, I said, did the Sri Lankan experience have any impact on your decision? He said it was always in the back of our minds. There were other considerations, of course, but the Sri Lankan experience is almost emblematic of policy failure,

and hence the reluctance to get involved in expeditionary operations, even under the aegis of the Quad. Throughout the decades of counterinsurgency that we've been discussing, India has also had to counterbalance that with handling external threats. What lessons learned have you seen about the ability to both train for conventional warfare with external threats and also be able to conduct counterinsurgency operations at the same time? So I think that's a great question. India's counterinsurgency, most, I think, the ruthless counterinsurgency campaigns, which insurgency in Kashmir, Punjab, and Northeast, there was from some to a considerable element of foreign support. Insurgency in Kashmir, there's enough evidence was completely or is still completely supported

by Pakistan. So was the insurgency in Punjab. And we do have evidence when I was working with National Investigation Agency for almost seven years, we had unimpeachable evidence against China's involvement in NSC and the Naga and the Mizo insurgency there. And if I just go back a little bit to the previous question that why initially the Indian response has been ruthless. One is because in Kashmir, we did not know what was going on. It took us time. The second was this narrative that these were foreign supported. So that narrative also kind of gave us a go ahead that you can use forces, you can use tremendous kinetic kind of force against the foreign militants. Because remember, in 1989 and 1990, you know, the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan. And most of the Pakistani fighters

who were fighting in Afghanistan, they came back to Pakistan. And Pakistan ISI did not know what to do with them. And most of them, I think the rough estimate would be 5,000 to 10,000 of them were sent to Kashmir. And they were the leaders of the major militant movements at that time. And so this narrative of fighting Pakistani-trained militants also had a bearing on Indian response, which were like, we are killing Pakistanis. And then, like the rest of India, there was a public acceptance of this. You know, if you say, oh, local Kashmiris are being killed, but at the same time, if 10 local Kashmiri militants were being killed, there were 15 Pakistanis were also being killed. So that narrative gave a kind

of a green signal to the forces to kind of really go hard against the terrorists. The second part of the question is, what are the lessons learned? I think the lessons learned have been, one is address the root cause. If you don't address the root cause, things are going to be dormant for some time, then again, become active. The second is, which we have learned over a period of time, is one approach would not work, have a comprehensive approach. So in the counter Maoist operations, Andhra Pradesh, which is a state in southern India, it is kind of seen as a model state which dealt with nexolites or the Maoist insurgency with complete success. And focus is actually put on the Greyhounds, which was a kind of a special force of Andhra Pradesh police. But at the same time, there's been some research done, and I did some of my own research

on this. So at the same time, there were a lot of, you know, small targeted developmental programs, which targeted the tribal areas of those states. They also helped in turning the tide against the Maoists. And before I, you know, leave the floor for Professor Ganguly, one personal I think I've learned in the last two decades is do not create auxiliary forces. This is one thing, you know, counterinsurgents all over the world have resorted to. We got hold of tribals in 1947 to 50 in Tebaga, and we created a counterinsurgent force and they started doing excesses and they started settling their own scores on their own familial animosities with their neighbors and other villagers. The same thing we did in Chhattisgarh. There was a counterinsurgent force, civilian force, which is called Salwa Jiddam. It was banned by the Supreme Court. And we did the same mistake in Kashmir. We created a counterinsurgency force, which was local Kashmiri militants

who surrendered to the government. And then we created a force out of them. They went on settling their own personal scores. And the entire police forces and the army got a very bad name. I would say no to creating these auxiliary forces. And then again, intelligence based operations. Another story in India is the story of lack of resources. For the last five decades, we were a developing economy. There was a lot of asymmetry between what was needed and what was available in terms of hardware, in terms of military hardware. But we are now bridging that gap. It's much less now. But these are my lessons learned from the last 50, 60 years. I could not agree with Sajid more on the reliance on these irregular forces.

You create these entities and they become Frankensteins. entities, and they become Frankensteins. And this was particularly in the case in Kashmir, when you had these former militants who were brought into the fold, but they were not under any formal command. They were sort of informally attached to the intelligence agencies and to the army. And you could not really control. This became a principal agent problem. And the agents often had their own goals, as Sajid has correctly pointed out, and often settled local land disputes with someone by the force of a gun, which could not be adjudicated in court. And if there's one lesson that the Indian security establishment has learned is the inadvisability of raising these kinds of irregular forces and relying on them for counterinsurgency as an adjunct to counterinsurgency operations.

insurgency as an adjunct to counterinsurgency operations. What implications do you see from the last several decades of Indian counterinsurgency, both for academics who study this issue and also for policymakers and practitioners who are practicing counterinsurgency in other nations? So I think I would start this by again paraphrasing what Professor Ganguly said some time back was, there have been Indian counterinsurgency, the entire saga of like last seven decades has been seen with different lenses. Some have called it an utter failure. Some have, you know, called it a grand success because India actually has never lost a counterinsurgency campaign. We still have Kashmir with us. The violence levels have gone down. The Northeast is in a much, much better state. The violence level in the central part of India, which has been repeatedly termed as the

biggest internal security threat, the most insurgency. The violence is at the all-time low. You know, India is one country, but it's many countries in one country also. So that's why it takes time to understand the complexity of an issue. But once, you know, the root causes are understood or kind of deciphered, then India has done pretty well in negotiating them and also done pretty well in kind of containing the insurgency. also done pretty well in kind of containing the insurgency. So I think the lessons for practitioners abroad is, again, at the cost of repeating is, expeditionary counterinsurgencies will not be able to understand the root cause so easily. You cannot apply the lessons learned in Vietnam or Malay in Afghanistan.

You cannot apply the lessons learned in Vietnam or Malaya in Afghanistan. You cannot apply the lessons learned in Iraq, in Afghanistan. So I think it's very important to understand the social and the cultural narratives, the social and the cultural aspects. And it's also very important to deal with the political issue head on. So India did that in Northeast. It was in the form of negotiations with the militants. You know, it's a loathsome idea to sit across the table with terrorists who have been responsible for killing hundreds of your army men, your soldiers, and also your countrymen, your fellow citizens. But history has told us, and then there is enough research also on this, civil wars, which have been dealt with negotiations. I think there is some evidence that if you have a complete victory or a complete loss, then it's fine if one side loses. But negotiations have tended to

kind of create a more peaceful environment in insurgencies. And Indian experience has been the mix of military measures and non-military measures, the mix of political engagement and continuing the kinetic operations also. I think that has worked very well for India. Thanks, Nate. Could we please just grab your final closing comments in regards to the implications for the future for policymakers and academics? I broadly agree with Sajid's characterization. One of the most critical things that India has learned is to somehow cleave insurgents off from sanctuaries. In the case of the Kashmir insurgency, it has dragged on for so long, not because of Indian incompetence, but because of the presence of

sanctuaries in Pakistan. The ability to go across a porous border, to be able to sleep, to be able to eat, to be able to rearm oneself, to be able to regroup, this has been a central problem. able to regroup, this has been a central problem. The insurgencies in the northeast ended mostly after the Maoist era in China. Why? Because China gave up on its global revolutionary strategy and stopped supplying the insurgents. And thereby, the insurgencies in large measure tapered off because they couldn't go across the porous Himalayan border and take refuge in China. In Kashmir, in large part, people objected to this vehemently, particularly Indian civil society. But fencing played an important role. Expensive, difficult, at high altitudes, but to a large degree, it limited infiltration.

Same thing in the Punjab. I remember a Pakistani military officer once telling me that the Indians have fenced the border so closely that not even a rabbit can get through in the Punjab. And that played a critical role in undermining the insurgency both in Punjab and in Kashmir. I would also highlight the critical role of reliable intelligence. One of the things that played a critical role in Punjab was the ability to gather intelligence on the insurgents in the Punjab. And this was largely done by a rather flamboyant military police officer, KPS Gill, who stiffened the resolve of the Punjab police while simultaneously improving the whole apparatus of intelligence gathering. And finally, and it's odd that a professor should be saying this rather than someone in the service, we cannot discount

the role of the use of force. In Punjab, ultimate force proved to be utilitarian. Ultimately, force proved to be utilitarian. Ultimately, Gill came up with this rather brutal formulation. He said, I will fight these people bullet for bullet. And he took a take-no-prisoners attitude in the Punjab. Were there human rights violations in the process? Probably. Almost for a certainty there were. And the calibrated use of force played a vital role. And, you know, civilians are squeamish about this, but all three of you have had to use force. And, you know, I don't have this squeamishness, even though I'm a professor. Under certain circumstances, there is no other alternative but a resort to force. Sometimes you have to crush the enemy. Gentlemen, this has been an incredible conversation and certainly my favorite,

one of these that I've recorded so far. So I want to thank you both so much for taking the time to have this conversation and to share so much of your experience and your stories. Adam, Jeff, I cannot thank you enough. And Sajid, it was an honor to be on this same platform with you. Thank you, Adam. Thank you, Jeff. It was absolutely an honor for me, Professor Ganguly. I've read some of your works, but now I've got hold of your book on Indian counterinsurgency lessons learned. I just read the first chapter. I'm going to finish it in next one week. It was an absolute honor to be with you on this podcast. Thank you, gentlemen. Thank you again for joining us for Episode 70 of the Irregular Warfare podcast.

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