Homeland Security

Counter-Insurgency Operations in Northeast - I
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Issue Book Excerpt: Lost Opportunities | Date : 05 Jun , 2011

Media Policy

In the 1950s when insurgency broke out in Nagaland, there was hardly any interaction between the army and the media. There were many constraints. The means of communication were very limited; the existing network of road and railways passed through the then East Pakistan, which became inoperative after partition. The Brahmaputra was bridged only in 1961. The radio and telegraph links were primitive. The existing government policy permitted the army interaction with the media, mainly print and radio (there was no television or multi media then), through the government’s public relation officers, who were very few and not at all trained to handle news or analyse them. All that they did was to give news of ambushes and the encounters with the hostiles. Even these were reported in the national newspapers much after the events.

The insurgents made better use of the opportunities to interact with the media.

The army itself depended on BBC for the latest news and political developments and their analysis. Mark Tully and Subir Bhaumik, the BBC correspondents who covered, (Subir Bhaunik still does) the happenings in the North-east from their base at Calcutta, became known names for radio listeners and enjoyed huge popularity even as some of their reporting was biased against the army. In the absence of news from the official channels, BBC Hindi service became extremely popular and also credible. The situation was redeemed later by reporters of some of the national and local newspapers, who went on to write excellent accounts of their reporting days in the North-east.27

The insurgents made better use of the opportunities to interact with the media. Fortuitously their access to BBC reporters helped them to freely project their views not only within the country, but more importantly to the western public, who had not yet got over the bias against their erstwhile colonial subjects. Some foreign journalists and newspaper correspondents were allowed to visit the principal towns of Naga Hills in December 1960 to see things for themselves, but the insurgent leaders described the visit as stage-managed.28 Almost a year later Gavin Young, a British journalist, who was granted entry into Naga Hills wrote a one-sided perverted account of the situation in Naga Hills on his return to England.

As communications improved and North-east opened to the outside world and travel restrictions were relaxed, army’s interaction with the media also became more frequent. But the old restriction of interacting through public relation officers continued. The army has felt circumscribed by the restriction on interaction with the media even for legitimate reasons to explain its viewpoint on issues for which the best spokesman would be the army itself.

Book_Lost_OpportunitiesTo get over the hurdle the army got around the existing orders and delegated responsibility for direct on-the-spot interaction with the media down to command and corps headquarters in respect of their own theatres and sectors on matters of internal security. Command headquarters, at their discretion, could delegate this responsibility down the line. This was not to the liking of the MoD, ‘who had launched a sort of in-house guerrilla warfare with the army headquarters.’ 29

To be continued…

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Brig (Dr) SP Sinha

Brigadier (Dr) SP Sinha, VSM (Retd)

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