| |
BOOKS
AUTHORSPEAK
ANJALI AND NIRMAL ASTHANA
Police
Polemics
Nirmal
Asthana is a police officer, physicist and polemicist rolled into one.
Like most of his uniformed brethren, the senior IPS officer has a passion
for arms. But unlike most of them, this doctorate in physics also has
a keen eye for weapons. He can dismantle and reassemble blindfolded a
Kalashnikov in five minutes flat. And as a polemicist he speaks without
restraint on India's failure in checking insurgency. Says Asthana in Terrorism,
Insurgency and Counterinsurgency Operations (Pointer Books), which he
co-wrote with his wife Anjali Nirmal, a PhD in police administration:
"Had one of us not been a senior IPS officer, we would have filled
the pages with such fiery material that would have been spewing showers
of sparks at every sentence."
 The
499-page tome (the couple's eighth) is a comprehensive work on insurgency
and counter-insurgency operations in India and dwells at length on the
elaborate weapon systems used by terrorist groups. The book is remarkable
for another aspect: it is the most veritable indictment by one security
agency of the other-the Indian Police against the Indian Army-in the context
of counter-insurgency operations. And it appears to have a stamp of approval
from the country's police establishment with forewords by J.F. Ribeiro
and K.P.S. Gill.
Asthana, a 1986 batch officer currently posted
in Kerala who served in Kashmir during 1994-96, says India's counter-insurgency
operations have been a miserable failure for India is yet to evolve a
comprehensive strategy. "In 10 years of combating insurgency in Kashmir,
we have killed about 10,000 terrorists, arrested more than three times
this number and recovered over 20,000 AK rifles, 1,000 machine guns ...
Yet we have not been able to purge our system of insurgency," he
says.
Citing the 1994 Charar-e-Sharif operation as
illustrative of the bungling the army is capable of, Asthana writes: "Fighting
insurgency is a job that cannot be accomplished properly by an agency
which is still seeped in an archaic subculture of its own dating back
to the last century both in form and content." Now we'll wait for
an armyman's view on the police.
-M.G. Radhakrishnan
|
|
METRO TODAY
Web
Exclusives
