Why Army men kill colleagues, selves: Militancy down but stress still high

Ranveer Singh, 34, who turned the barrel of his service rifle towards his fellow soldiers, killing five of them on Thursday morning before taking his own life was a resident of Haryana and the father of two children. A loner of sorts, Singh didn’t socialize much with his colleagues, said friends in the Army’s 13 Rashtriya Riflles unit in Safapora in central Kashmir’s Ganderbal district. Nobody now knows just what led the usually quiet Singh to snap. But his seniors are willing to admit one thing – alongside the stress of a high-pressure posting in a region where the threat of militancy and civil strife were never really quelled, the men in uniform are now more wary then ever of another fratricidal attack amid a spate of suicides.  [caption id=“attachment_141204” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] An ambulance leaves the RR unit in Safapora, Ganderbal, on Thursday. AFP[/caption] Singh spoke to nobody before walking into two rooms of a barrack around 2 am on Thursday, opening fire at random on his sleeping colleagues, before fatally shooting himself, a police official said. “After killing five soldiers he killed himself. An inquiry has been ordered into the tragic incident,” Lt Col N N Joshi, a spokesperson at the Army’s Srinagar-based 15 Corps told Firstpost. The inquiry will follow the expected course, to see if the soldier was under any kind of stress. The testimony of the one solder who survived the attack and is under treatment for his injuries at the 92 Base Hospital at the 15 Corps Headquarters will be crucial. Thursday’s tragic killing is the first such incident in the armed forces in Jammu and Kashmir in 2014. It is also the biggest one since June 16, 1997, when a soldier of 2 RR shot dead five soldiers in South Kashmir’s Shopian district. But it is not a rare one any more. Since 1997, at least 12  incidents of fratricidal killing have been reported among the armed forces in Jammu and Kashmir alone. Experts attribute multiple reasons for fratricidal killing and for the continuing suicides among members of the armed forces deployed in conflict zones. These include low morale among soldiers leading to stress, poor service conditions, inadequacy of leave to go home and communication gap with superiors. Merely being deployed in a counter-insurgency environment itself leads to stress and anxiety among the soldiers, some experts concede. Ensuring that the men have adequate help in tackling that kind of stress is something experts have long advised. D Suba Chandran, Director of the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies, a think thank based in New Delhi, says the reasons may be multiple but the top hierarchy of the Army should take some hard-earned lessons from incidents such as this one. “I think there is a combination of factors responsible for it. Paramount among them are three – work pressure, respect from officers and, third and the most important, family support. Land disputes, tensions within the family, things like these reach a soldier wherever he is posted in the age of technology. Family issues keep dragging away the attention of a soldier, and I have encountered many cases wherein a soldier did something terribly wrong after coming back from a visit home,” he told Firstpost on phone from New Delhi. Singh bucks that trend probably. According to sources, he had been home last November, which means he was able to avail his leave, and  he had also not behaved differently since his return. What’s more, his unit too is posted in a comparatively peaceful area of Kashmir. The Army and Paramilitary Forces have taken several measures to control the growing number of suicide and fratricide among troops deployed in Kashmir and in the North East. Regular yoga and meditation classes are being organized to de-stress soldiers. Counselling by psychologists is provided to check stress levels and, to some extent, this appears to have had good results. The last time an incident of this nature happened was on 25 October, 2013 when a Junior Commissioned Officer of RR was shot dead by a subordinate in the Kokernag area in South Kashmir. An inquiry was ordered into that incident too. After the two incidents of killing in 2013, the authorities had adopted many remedial measures to check such incidents in future. Militancy is on the wane in the Kashmir Valley, analysts say, so operational stress level had come down, but stress most of the times is related to domestic problems. “Suicide particularly is a major issue confronting the army, and we take every possible measure to contain it, but we can handle only operational stress, domestic stress being personal in nature is very difficult to handle,” said a high-ranking Indian Army official. According to data from the Ministry of Defence, in 2003, 96 army men committed suicide. In 2004 the number went to 100, in 2005 it stood at 92 and in 2006 as many as 131 army personnel committed suicide. In 2007 and 2008, the recorded figures were 142 and 150, respectively. Since then, the numbers have come down but still remain over 100. In 2009 it was 111; in 2010 it was 130; and in 2011 it was 102. In May 2012, soldiers of the Ladakh-based 226 Field Regiment staged a revolt against officers they said were responsible for the brutal beating of an soldier. In that year alone there were three cases of showdown between men and officers. Dr Arshad Hussain, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychiatry at the Government Medical College in Srinagar, says although there are not many studies done in Kashmir on the issue they have found that in almost 90 percent of the cases, the cause is mental illness. “The immediate reasons could be domestic problems, family pressure and a soldier not getting leave on time. Earlier fratricidal killings used to be accidental but in cases that are being reported now they are deliberate which was the not the case earlier. It is serious and the counseling is must apart from regular distressing sessions,” he says. Hussain says even in regular interactions, soldiers complained about adverse working conditions.