Genesis
The last decade of the 20th century was particularly bloody for Kashmir. By May 1990 it was clear that Kashmir valley was in the grip of an insurgency of intensity not seen before. It started out in the urban areas and then spread to the countryside. The army which till then was the guardian of the international border (IB) and the line of control (LOC) was called in to assist in Counter Insurgency (CI) ops. Based on its experience with low intensity conflicts in Nagaland, Sri Lanka and Punjab, the Indian Army was quite wary of trying to replicate strategy and tactics successfully used elsewhere. By 1993 the army had got together a doctrine for the low intensity conflict in Kashmir. In Nagaland for example, the army had learnt that physical domination of each and every village was one way to combat insurgency. Long experience had taught the army the value of the grid system. In this system the whole terrain was divided into a grid. Each node at any given time would have a platoon worth of ready to move soldiers, the so called quick reaction team which would mutually reinforce other nodes. All would be covered with heavier fire support and have adequate logistics.
However the grid often looked better on paper than on the ground. The obvious reason for this was the terrain. In the Wanni jungles of Sri Lanka where the grid had been successfully applied, civilians and villages were few and far between, and so attack helicopters and artillery could be used. This enabled heavy firepower to be brought in to support troops in the grid in minutes. Now the Kashmir valley is very densely populated and there is fear of collateral damage from using heavy fire support. So troops fighting CI had to do without it. To makeup for that the grid had to be more densely packed. This is where the army saw the need for additional forces such as the Rashtriya Rifles (RR).
The army got the go-ahead to create the RR from the Vishwanath Pratap Singh government in 1990. The initial sanction was for two sectors Head Quarters (HQs) each of three battalions. When General B.C. Joshi became Army Chief, the promise his predecessor - General Sunith F. Rodrigues - made about making the Pathankot-based 39 Division and the Bareilly-based 6 Mountain Division available for Kashmir was pending. He pushed a long-held army view, that India was involved in an extended counter-insurgency akin to the Naga problem in the North-East. Hence a new force - like the Assam Rifles - was needed which could be permanently located in the area to counter the insurgents. And that using these divisions for CI would be playing into Pakistani hands. He instead pushed for setting up 10 more RR sector HQs - 30 battalions or the equivalent of three divisions. It was also felt that in the bargain the Army would have three additional battle-hardened divisions, ready for rear guard action during war. In 1994, the Narasimha Rao government gave a conditional go-ahead for a period of three years.
Read more about this topic: Rashtriya Rifles
Famous quotes containing the word genesis:
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A too, too human god, self-pity’s kin
And uncourageous genesis . . .”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“Power is, in nature, the essential measure of right. Nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdoms which cannot help itself. The genesis and maturation of a planet, its poise and orbit, the bended tree recovering itself from the strong wind, the vital resources of every animal and vegetable, are demonstrations of the self-sufficing and therefore self-relying soul.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Behold I have given you every herb bearing seed which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.”
—Bible: Hebrew Genesis 1:29.
But in a later context, God told the disgraced Adam, “and thou shalt eat the herb of the field” (Genesis 3:18)