Home Ministry took three days to request Army for deployment, according to information collected under Right to Information Act
The riots that raged in Assam in mid-2012, claiming more than 70 lives and displacing lakhs of people, might not have escalated had the Centre reacted on time to the State’s plea for immediate deployment of the Army in Kokrajhar and Chirang districts, according to information gathered under the Right to Information Act.
Official records show that the State government sought help from the Army within 24 hours of the outbreak of violence, but it took the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) three days to request the Army to deploy its personnel, according to the information collected by the Delhi-based Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI).
“Reports say major incidents of violence erupted on July 20 and the State government wrote to the MHA on July 21. The order for deployment of armed forces went out to the DGMO (Director-General Military Operations) by fax on July 24 at 9:22 p.m. There seems to be a gap of three days between the request for assistance and the order issued for deployment,” says CHRI programme coordinator (access to information programme) Venkatesh Nayak.
Mr. Nayak said he had to appeal to the appellate authorities to get the information that the government initially refused to give.
In an e-mail statement, he said the local administration had the powers to seek the assistance of the locally stationed armed forces for dispersing unlawful assemblies. “Even an executive magistrate has the power to requisition the assistance of armed forces without waiting for orders from their superiors. The local head of the armed forces has a duty to assist the local administration to keep the peace under such circumstances…None of these provisions seems to have worked in the violence-affected areas of Assam.
Mr. Nayak quoted The Hindu, which reported how after the Assam violence, the MHA wrote to the Defence Ministry asking it to avoid delay in deployment of the Army in future if requested by the local administration to contain violence. “Early warning signals could have been used to take preventive action…Three days was too long a wait for the dead, the injured and the displaced [in Assam],” he said.
Referring to the 2002 Gujarat riots, he said that when violence broke out, a similar controversy arose about deployment of armed forces. “A similar three-day delay in the deployment of armed forces in the violence-affected parts… was noticeable then as well.”
Keywords: RTI query, Assam violence
Mere deployment of the army is not enough. What is just as important, is that the army gets the full cooperation of the police and other law-enforcement agencies.
During the ANTI-SIKH RIOTS of 1984 after Indira Gandhi died on the morning of 31 October, the army was deployed as late as 2 November, but ONLY IN NAME-SAKE. It was a name-sake deployment because the police of Delhi, which was (and is) under the control of the Central Government (the Congress-INDIRA party in 1984) did not cooperate with the army, which needed the permission of senor police officials in order to open fire at the murderous anti-Sikh rioter. Therefore, the curfew that was in place could not be enforced, and the rioting continued unabated.
By the time the riots were finally subdued, more than THREE THOUSAND Sikhs had been mercilessly slaughtered.
Needless to say, the army must be deployed as soon as things get out of the control of the police, and FULL COOPERATION must be extended to the army.
It is very similar to Gujarat 2002. It took then Home Minister LK Advani
7 days to even authorize deployment of Army for a "flag March". Global
consensus is that delay was planned and deliberate so that pogrom of
Muslims could continue on. It has become a pattern. For some reason GOI
wants riots, violence to continue.
Things in the country have deteriorated over the years. My
experience of things 40 years ago in Axom was as follows. When a
serious situation arose that you could not control with the civil
police you spoke to the local army unit. That unit immediately made
the required troops ready. As district magistrate you then spoke to
the home Department of the state government who communicated the
request called aid to civil to 101 Communications Zone Area at
Shillong who in turn ordered the local unit to go in to aid the
civilian administration. In my experience all this took about six
hours. There was no question of going to the Home Ministry in Delhi.
Whoever has put in that system in place must be stupid.
Let's look back even further and say that none of this would have happened had the immigration issue been tackled by the state or the central government. Decades ago.
Great job done by Mr.Nayak.Please keep it up to wake up the mediocre and an insensitive community working for the government that means for the citizens of this country.unless we do carry such a kind of fabulous works,we can not make this country to reach the level where we want it to be.
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