Gruelling guerilla lives

(This article was published in "The Sunday Indian", 11 August-17 August 2008)

ARMED FORCES SPECIAL: THREE CANNONS OF FAITH
Gruelling guerilla lives
Pankaj barthakur narrates the hard training that moulds fighting hands that dare terrorism, insurgency and worst of all, a life we cannot even contemplate sitting in cities

 

The New Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary defines 'guerilla' as "a member of a small group of soldiers who are not part of an official army and who fight against official soldiers, usually to try to change the government". It is a definition that cannot be applied strictly to Naik Santos Kumar of the Bihar Regiment, currently under training at the Counter Insurgency and Jungle Warfare School (CIJWS) of the Indian Army located in Vairengte, the northern trip of 'highland' Mizoram. For the hardies who come here, the slogan 'to fight the guerilla like a guerilla' underlines the spirit, mood and the deadly stickiness of jungle warfare.

Colonel RK Chhikara of the CIJWS, tells TSI their "job is to prepare all our students for combat. The training module prepared by our think tank is non-conventional. Once a soldier undergoes training here, he can face all types of situations in an insurgency environment," which is just as well because a majority of operations carried out by the Indian Military these days have less to do with conventional warfare and more to deal with battling counter-insurgency.

The School is organised into various sections, the Battalion Training Wing (BTW), Faculty of Studies in Doctrine and Concept Development (FOS) D and the CD cell and the Courses Wing. While the BTW conducts 'pre-induction training' (PIT) of Infantry Battalions before their introduction to counter insurgency areas, the FOSs with their D and CD cell act as a think-tank for the changes and improvements in training methodology, techniques and tactics for counter insurgency operations.

The school has indigenously developed and designed infrastructure that facilitate quality training. Standing in a counter terrorist range of CIJWS amidst the thick hilly forest of Vairengte, Colonel Chhikara – also Editor of a coffee table book titled 'Glimpses of Counter Insurgency and Jungle Warfare School' – tells TSI: "On a regular basis, to constantly improve the quality of training based on evolving techniques and the modus operandi adopted by terrorists, infrastructural development is undertaken by the school."

Apart from these, the school prides itself in having designed different types of reflex firing ranges, where at a time many kinds of firing takes place: ambidextrous firing, cross firing, room intervention firings, the works.

 

More and more foreign countries are sending their cadets for training to this school. Colonel Chhikara tells TSI that approximately 400 foreign soldiers from the neighbouring friendly countries have been trained and a total of 27 countries have made use of this school for training. This year too, proposals from the US army, Mongolian Armed Forces and Kazakhstan Army have been submitted.

Do officers of foreign armies, who undergo the same training in the CIJWS, enjoy equal training facilities? On the face of it, there is no difference between the training for foreign and Indian students. But in an interaction with TSI, senior officer of FOS, Colonel Bikram Singh admits that "keeping in mind national security, we have to maintain some secrecy while we train foreigners."

For officers, it is a matter of great pride and honour to be working in the School. At the Pratap Hall of CIJWS, instructor S Kaushik delivers his lecture to hundreds of students on the topic of military tracking. And young commandos in the hall cling on to every word. Major Rohit Naynital of 8 Gorkha Rifles tells TSI: "I completed my training here a few years ago and am now serving as an instructor. This makes me feel proud." Nayak Santosh Kumar of Bihar Regiment expresses similar sentiments. Interestingly, Kumar has been witness to some deadly encounters tackling insurgency in Jammu & Kashmir and Assam. 

Fighting jungle battles acquired a new urgency after the 1962 Chinese operations, and an entire combat philosophy has sprung from it. Lt Colonel Gautam Rampal took us to the Guerilla Library on a breezy June evening. This library is used extensively by teachers and students of the CIJWS. Insurgency – which was a major issue in the North East in the 1960s and 1970s – is chronicled well here with related news clippings, articles, research papers and myriad maps. All these are designed to understand the insurgents and their activities, specific to North-Eastern India.

Lieutenant Colonel Rampal informs us that the library adds solid value to the think-tank of CIJWS. What else does it need? A well defined project on North East insurgent groups ­– reportedly struggling for a greater Bangladesh – for the students and teachers is yet to be completed. But it is part of our improvement programme," Rampal says.

In BTW's special training programme, students are trained for jungle survival where the Darwinian theory of `survival of the fittest' is at the back of the mind of every student in training.

The name of their game is laying traps and ambushes. They are taught to make a hen trap, porcupine trap, snake trap, wild bear trap, fish trap along with many other tricks of entangling wild animals in the remote and thick jungles of the North East. Explains Major AA Foning of the Gorkha Rifles Regiment (he asked us not to call him Foning without his designation): "This practice of trapping and eating wild animals in the thick jungle is part of our eight week jungle warfare training at the CIJWS."

The school has transformed the gateway to Mizoram into a much sought-after place by foreign armies wanting to train their cadets. But for those who make and earn their living fighting insurgents either in the remote North East forests or the troubled Kashmir valley, it is always difficult to predict who will have the last laugh. Insurgents, after all, do not come easy.