There is an opportunistic quality to the demand currently being made by the opposition that Defence Minister Sarat Singh Bhandari be forced to resign. There is a deliberate attempt to obfuscate the substance of the comments that he made. The minister, contrary to what is being claimed by the Nepali Congress, the UML and the hardline Maoist faction, did not threaten immediate secession by the Madhes. What he said was that the state should make efforts to rectify the historical discrimination faced by Madhesis; that if this did not happen, the 22 districts of the plains could even decide that there was no point to remaining part of Nepal. His comments were made in the context of the four-point agreement signed between the Maoist and the Madhesi parties. In particular, he was referring to that clause in the agreement that states that Madhesis would be recruited into the Nepal Army.
It can broadly be said that he was pointing to a need to “democratise” the Nepal Army—a commitment made by all parties in the Comprehensive Peace Agreement of 2006.
That the Army is in need of serious reform has almost been forgotten in the years since the end of the war. The Nepali Congress and the UML have, for the most part, sought to protect the Army’s position and privileges, in the hope that they can gain the institution’s political support. Even those parties that have been demanding reform in the Army—primarily the Maoists and the Madhesi parties—have begun to look at the matter through the narrow prism of their own interests. Both the Maoists and the Madhesis, it now appears, do not envisage much change to the Army beyond the integration of some of their constituents into it.
This is unfortunate. The behaviour of the army during its five-year operation against the Maoists made starkly clear that it has deep structural problems and serious changes need to be made to it if it is to truly address the security needs of the Nepali population. As the political class has almost entirely forgotten this, it is worth recounting how the Army acted during the war and how it acted as a force that exacerbated the conflict rather than one than contained it.
When the Army was deployed against the Maoists in 2001, it rapidly established outposts in district headquarters across the country and secured them. From these places, troops went out to patrol peripheral areas with the intention of flushing out Maoists and destroying their organisational structure. This was done in an exceptionally crude way. The Army made no distinction between civilians who had been forced to provide food, lodging and other support to the rebels and the rebels themselves. Military personnel were aloof and distant from civilians and made no efforts to win them over to their side. Instead of feeling protected by the state forces against the rebels, the vast majority of Nepal’s population felt more terrorised by the Army than the Maoists. As a result, civilians felt it was best to lay low and were reluctant to provide much information to the military personnel they encountered.
Army officers have repeatedly claimed that the reason why they lacked proper intelligence during the conflict was because the Nepali Congress and other parliamentary parties demolished the capabilities of the National Investigation Department (NID) during the 1990s. What has been ignored is the reason why the Army could not procure adequate and reliable information from the populations they were working amongst. While it is true that the Maoists intimidated the population into keeping quiet, it cannot be denied that the Army’s failure to provide security to the population and instead to actively terrorise it also played a large part in its inability to acquire reliable information.
Almost everywhere it went, the Army picked up individuals charged of being Maoists, often on the flimsiest pretext. While the exact numbers are not known, widespread anecdotal evidence suggests that a large proportion of those detained were civilians who had no affiliation with the rebels beyond providing them with some basic support. As human rights organisations have reported, extrajudicial killings and severe torture in custody were common. The fact that such events were so widespread suggests that military personnel were instructed to round up and detain as many individuals as possible; that success was measured in terms of how many casualties the security forces were able to accumulate.
Further, there is also evidence that the Army was most brutal when dealing with members of historically marginalised groups. This has been most clearly demonstrated in OHCHR’s report on enforced disappearances in Bardiya district between December 2001 and January 2003. By far the largest number of individuals who were detained and later “disappeared” by military personnel in that district were Tharus; a group that is among the most dispossessed of Nepal’s various communities. The OHCHR report reveals that the Army in Bardiya automatically suspected Tharus of being Maoist and targeted them for persecution. This created a situation of widespread terror among the Tharus of Bardiya. It can readily be imagined how, confronted by brutal state forces, many of them would feel that their only option was to join the rebels.
The Army acted in the way it did, because, for one, trained in conventional warfare, it did not understand how to conduct itself in a situation of irregular war, where in order to flush out insurgents it is first necessary to gain the trust of the local population. Second, the brutality against the marginalised was rooted in the upper-caste, “feudal” ethos of its officer corps, which was traditionally accustomed to treating groups such as Tharus and Dalits as inferior.
In recent years, some quarters within the Army have been claiming that they succeeded in their campaign against the Maoists as the rebels were prevented from taking over state power. This is not untrue. Through their heavily fortified presence in district headquarters and other urban areas, the Army made it impossible for the rebels to capture the important sites of state power. On the other hand, however, widespread evidence from across the country indicates that through its actions, the Army antagonised large sections of the population and added fuel to the Maoist fire.
The Army’s “democratisation” is necessary to ensure that the Army does not act in the same way if a situation arises where it once again has to be deployed against an internal insurgency. As it is necessary for it to cultivate links with the broader population and to eliminate its feudal ethos, it is desirable that efforts are made to ensure greater inclusion within military ranks. It can be said that it was this issue that was at the core of Defence Minister Sarat Singh Bhandari’s comments and it is unfortunate that his opponents have ignored this, choosing only to attack a distorted version of his comments to achieve short-term political gain.
