AoA v/s OaO: Have Governor’s remarks just bailed Mehbooba or made things worse

JAMMU: Governor Satya Pal Malik has said that there exists nothing like ‘Operation All Out’. While this operation is very much a part of the emerging political and security lexicon in Kashmir, the Governor’s statement in negative could bail the embattled Mehbooba Mufti out or may make things more complicated for her.

Navigating through a political environment of anger and uncertainty, when Mehbooba Mufti and Farooq Abdullah, the rivals on the turf of a painful grass, rush to south of Kashmir, the ‘Operation All Out’ appears to be one the factors shaping out campaign for the forthcoming elections.

After months of relative hibernation following fall of her government in June last year and in immediate wake of mass desertions from her party, Peoples Democratic Party leader Mehbooba is now taking drives down south of Kashmir, meeting families of militants, sympathizing with them and criticizing the administration of Governor Malik for allegedly tough operations. Despite a difficult background of heading regime which most cyclic killings taking place since 2010, Mehbooba has recently taken her advocacy a step further when she said action on mourners at funerals of militants is a violation of human rights and interference in religious affairs.

PDP’s rival National Conference would rather not allow Mehbooba to go back to her original politics –soft separatism. Mehbooba was recently locked in a bitter spat with Omar Abdullah on the twitter when the latter questioned her moral authority of visiting militants’ families. “You sanctioned these killings to please BJP”, Omar said while referring to the so called ‘Operation All Out’ launched under Mehbooba government in April 2017.

While addressing a workers’ convention and later speaking to the media in Anantnag late last week, Farooq Abdullah focused on the ‘Operation All Out’ and promised to scrap it “when National Conference returns to power”. This sounded akin to POTA (Prevention of Terrorism Act), implemented by Farooq Abdullah’s regime in its last days by scrapped by Mufti Sayeed government in its first cabinet meeting.

The POTA, a central law introduced in Jammu and Kashmir through cabinet order, had set the tone for election campaign in 2001-2002.

Since PDP’s alliance with the BJP would always challenge the former with inconvenient questions, the handy reply would be Agenda of Alliance –the PDP-BJP government’s common minimum programme.

The PDP would say that Agenda of Alliance, or the AoA, is tailored in a manner to suit its political agenda –like making anti-dialogue giant of BJP to agree on dialogue with Hurriyat and Pakistan. PDP presented it as historic political victory.

In the meanwhile, the Army Chief Gen Bipin Rawat coined the term ‘Operation All Out’ in February 2017.

This terminology was coined in a background of anger when four soldiers died fighting militants in a single day. At their wreath laying ceremony on February 14, 2017, Gen Rawat said, “Those who obstruct our ops (operations) during encounters and are not supportive will be treated as overground workers of terrorists… We would now request the local population that people who have picked up arms, and they are the local boys, if they want to continue with the acts of terrorism displaying flags of ISIS and Pakistan, then we will treat them as anti-national elements and go helter-skelter for them.”

With this, the renewed security strategy for the Kashmir Valley came to be known as “Operation All Out” which entailed a major shift in the counter-insurgency tactics that sought to toughen the rules of engagement with the Army fanning out into the hinterland in the Valley and operate in a “seeking and engagement” mode. It was, therefore, under Mehbooba Mufti’s government that the Cordon and Search Operations (CASO), abandoned by Mufti Mohammad Sayeed government in 2002 due to public outcry of human rights violations, were also started.

When Chief Minister Mehbooba counted her political victory by referring to ‘AoA’, the Agenda of Alliance, the Opposition would put her claims down by attributing to her the ‘OaO’, Operation All Out.

So, the Army was not the only one talking about the OaO. Chief Minister Mehbooba’s own force, the Jammu and Kashmir Police were also at the forefront of OaO credits though in a politically appeasing language. On the last day of year 2017, the then DGP, SP Vaid asserted that OaO will continue even as he further said, “I want to make it clear that this operation is not only about killing militants, but also to bring them back into the mainstream. This year, while we killed 206 militants, we brought 75 youth back, who had either joined or were about to join the militancy”.

Irrespective of whatever the Army and Police said, the Operation All Out was never an officially sanctioned security strategy or formal name of any operation approved by the government, the cabinet or the legislature as was the case with POTA or other laws like AFSPA.

Now when Mehbooba is being criticized for this particular security strategy under her regime and Farooq Abdullah says the government of his party will scrap it, Governor Malik has on Monday that there exists nothing like Operation All Out. He said the security forces are following normal standard operating procedures and they merely retaliate when attacked by the militants.

At a time when parties are looking for new narratives ahead of elections, the Governor’s statement could potentially mean two things: the OaO was never an official policy, of whether Mehbooba’s regime or the Centre, as it was a mere macho-ism or his own administration has done away with an allegedly bad practice of the so called popular government. A perception that Malik’s administration has done away with OaO could further lower the image of already maligned government in the public eye.