NEW DELHI, Feb 1 (2005): India’s army, which has been hit by a barrage of complaints about alleged rights abuses in Kashmir, will focus on winning the hearts and minds of people in the Himalayan region, the new army chief said on Tuesday.
Hundreds of thousands of troops are deployed in Kashmir to quell a 15-year-old separatist revolt against New Delhi’s rule which has killed more than 45,000 people.
“If you don’t harm innocents, you are winning hearts and minds,” General Joginder Jaswant Singh, India’s first army chief from the Sikh community, told reporters a day after he took over the world’s third largest army.
“We need to use minimum force and ensure minimum collateral damage so innocents are not harmed,” he said. “If people have a positive image of soldiers, it is more important than the number of terrorists killed.”
Singh, who was wounded during anti-guerrilla operations in Kashmir in the 1990s, said the army would seek feedback from local people and officials in insurgency-hit areas about the behaviour of troops.
Singh was replying to questions about allegations of abuses by troops, including the molestation of a 10-year-old girl and her mother by a major last October in Jammu and Kashmir, Hindu-majority India’s only Muslim-majority state.
On Monday, the army dismissed the major, who was found guilty of sexually assaulting the girl and her mother.
Kashmir is the cause of two of three India-Pakistan wars, and rights groups blame Indian forces and rebels for widespread rights abuses.
The army says violations by troops are isolated incidents and that offenders are punished.
Singh also said he wanted a current truce between Indian and Pakistani troops on the Line of Control, a military boundary dividing Kashmir, to be encouraged by both sides.
“Both countries have a lesser number of widows and wounded soldiers because of the ceasefire. Seeing the ceasefire take effect, people are reassured.”
The truce came into effect in Nov. 2003 as part of an ongoing India-Pakistan peace process and has mostly held.
