The following is an excerpt from ‘From Where the Orders Came’ published on The Caravan.
Late into the night between 21 and 22 December 2023, five officers rushed into a room at the Echo Company Base of the 48 Rashtriya Rifles, at the small ridge of Dera Ki Gali. The base overlooks the stretch of the Mughal Road between the towns of Thanamandi and Bafliaz, in Jammu and Kashmir’s border district of Poonch. The officers—in order of rank, Lieutenant General Sandeep Jain, Major General Maneesh Gupta, Brigadier Padmasambhava Acharya, Colonel Mithilesh Ojha and Major Rajkumar—were about to organise what they internally called Operation Pangai. While, officially, it was meant to be an intelligence-gathering operation to catch a group of militants, it would turn out to be one of the most well-documented incidents of mass torture in the dark history of army violence in Jammu and Kashmir.
The evening before, the army had suffered a major strategic failure. Militants had crossed the porous border and ambushed a military convoy about fifteen kilometres from the base. The losses were severe: three wounded, four dead, two of whom had been beheaded. To further sap morale, a video of the beheading had been shared online. The army also lost four rifles, along with several magazines. All of this took place in a region teeming with army posts—nearly one for every hamlet along the valley. “The army does not live with the people here, the people live with the army,” is a frequent saying among local residents.
The chamber at Dera Ki Gali was quickly transformed into a control room for the army operation that was to follow. An officer who had been in the room told me that the five men stood in front of a whiteboard, noting on it the names of individuals they had picked up. They called out updates they were receiving on WhatsApp from junior officers in the field and coordinated troop movements along the sector. For Operation Pangai, named after the village where the initial militant attack had taken place, the officers had a wide army apparatus under their command. WhatsApp messages between the officers, accessed by The Caravan, indicate that Operation Pangai had 76 operational teams – which usually have about ten troops each – shared between the Rashtriya Rifles units 48, 43, 49, 16, 37 and 39.
Despite this, the operation was, for all intents and purposes, a major failure. A senior commander who took part in the operation told me that the militants responsible for the attack on the convoy were never caught. The messages shared between the officers suggest that the recovery of the weapons and the severed heads of the dead soldiers were among the operation’s top priorities. One head was recovered much later, while the other was not.
Operation Pangai soon became infamous for another reason, the details of which were reported extensively in The Caravan’s February 2024 issue. On 22 December 2023, 26 men, from the predominantly Muslim Gujjar community, were picked up from several villages in Rajouri and Poonch districts, and taken to three different army posts—Mastandra company operated base, Dera Ki Gali COB and Bafliaz COB—where they were severely tortured. From witness accounts, I had found that the army mercilessly beat them with wooden rods, lathis and metal pipes, with chilli powder put into their eyes and buttocks, while others were drowned and electrocuted. Three of them died as a result. A video of the torture at Dera Ki Gali, within the same compound where the five senior officers had set up their control room, was soon leaked to social media. Our investigation from last year indicated that, given that orders were sent to three different companies to commit these atrocities in three different army camps, this was not merely rogue soldiers venting their frustration after losing comrades, but a coordinated, directed, large-scale operation of torture.
The Caravan has accessed new material, which clarifies the command structure that was in place during the torture and murders. This includes WhatsApp chats between the officers, confidential documents from a court of inquiry held by the army about the incident and documents from subsequent Armed Forces Tribunal hearings moved by Acharya. A court of inquiry is the army’s investigative body, instituted by the Army Rules, and is made up of officers mandated to collect evidence on military affairs, including when there has been wrongdoing. The AFT is a quasi-judicial body that hears and decides matters related to the army, navy and air force. The documents from these inquiries and chats strongly indicate that the operation was led by two officers, Lieutenant General Sandeep Jain, the general officer commanding the 16 Corps, and Major General Maneesh Gupta, the GOC of Counter Insurgency Force Romeo, which oversees the Rajouri sector.
According to the documents from the court of inquiry, Gupta was sending lists of individuals to be picked up for interrogation, many of whom were tortured at the three army posts. They also indicate that the two generals received updates about the deaths of those in custody, and that orders were sent to move the bodies. The chats show, for instance, that Gupta had sent the videos of the torture in Dera Ki Gali to another officer in the command chain, and yet neither acted to stop it, though it was occurring within the same army post they were in. Gupta and Jain have not yet been called in front of the court of inquiry, nor were they pulled up by the AFT, suggesting they have been completely let off the hook. Instead, a few lower-rung officers have been given mild censures, affecting their promotions, while the court of inquiry continues against the soldiers who were involved. None have yet been court-martialled.
More than a year after the incident, the civilian-justice system has also not moved. A first-information report registered against the three deaths states the men were killed by “unknown person 1,” even though the FIR itself mentions that the army picked them up. None of the names of the 22 injured were mentioned in the FIR, and not a single person from the families of the deceased has been called by the police as witnesses. Instead, as I had reported last year, the families of those killed and injured were given blood money by the army—between Rs 1.5 lakh and Rs 10 lakh—pointing to its role in attempting to derail the criminal-justice system. The Jammu and Kashmir government gave land to the three widows and jobs to three members of their families. Most locals I spoke to had entirely given up hope of justice for the dead and the injured. They had grown far more wary of the media, fearing that even this small compensation would be taken away.
Documents from the AFT and the court of inquiry—which began just two days after the incident of torture—show that the army leadership was aware, in intimate detail, of which individuals conducted the torture, on whose orders and under whose monitoring. The army leadership also appears to have been aware that most individuals who were picked up were civilians who had no links to militancy. Despite this, on 12 February 2024, the union ministry of information and broadcasting ordered The Caravan to take down my article, claiming that it wrongfully “portrayed the alleged actions of the security forces as a pre-planned operation.” This order is being challenged by The Caravan in court.
It is also now amply clear that the army was aware of the torture and deaths from the very start of the court of inquiry—even before The Caravan published the investigation. Most worryingly, if the army is able to, and does, conduct such detailed inquiries into custodial killings in Jammu and Kashmir, which have happened with regularity for decades, it raises a serious question: why has there been no serious action against uniformed officers who commit these crimes?
Jatinder Kaur Tur is a senior journalist with more than 25 years of experience with various national English-language dailies, including the Indian Express, the Times of India, the Hindustan Times and Deccan Chronicle. She is now a contributing writer for The Caravan.
