Rashtriya Rifles

Initial Doctrine

The last decade of the 20th century was particularly bloody for Kashmir. By May 1990 it was clear that the Kashmir Valley was in the grip of an insurgency of an intensity not seen before. It started out in the urban areas and then spread to the countryside. The army, which till then was guarding the Line of Control (LoC), the de facto border between India and Pakistan in the state, was called in to assist in counter insurgency (CI) operations. Based on its experience with low intensity conflicts in Nagaland, Sri Lanka and Punjab, the Indian Army was quite wary of trying to replicate strategy and tactics successfully used elsewhere. In Nagaland for example, the army had learnt that physical domination of each and every village was one way to combat insurgency. Long experience had taught the army the value of the grid system. In this system all terrain in the affected area was divided into a grid. Each node at any given time would have a platoon worth of ready-to-move soldiers, the so-called quick reaction team, which would mutually reinforce other nodes. All would be covered with heavier fire support and have adequate logistics.

However the grid often looked better on paper than on the ground. The obvious reason for this was the terrain. In the Wanni jungles of Sri Lanka where the grid had been successfully applied, civilians and villages were few and far between, enabling heavy firepower like attack helicopters and artillery to be brought in to support troops in the grid in minutes. However, the Kashmir Valley is very densely populated and there is a risk of significant collateral damage from using heavy fire support. Therefore, troops on CI operations had to do without heavy weapons and to make up for that, the grid had to be more densely packed. This is where the army saw the need for additional forces in the form of the Rashtriya Rifles (RR).

Raising

The army got the go-ahead to create the RR from the Vishwanath Pratap Singh government in 1990. The initial sanction was for two sectors headquarters (HQs) each of three battalions. When General B.C. Joshi became Chief of Army Staff, the promise his predecessor, General Sunith Francis Rodrigues, made about making the Pathankot-based 39th Infantry Division and the Bareilly-based 6th Mountain Division available for Kashmir was pending. Joshi pushed a long-held army view, that India was involved in an extended counter-insurgency akin to the Naga problem in the northeast. Hence a new force, like the Assam Rifles, was needed which could be permanently located in the area to counter the insurgents. He was of the opinion that using the army divisions for CI would be playing into Pakistani hands. He instead pushed for setting up 10 more RR sector HQs consisting of 30 battalions, or the equivalent of three divisions. It was also felt that in the bargain the army would have three additional battle-hardened divisions, ready for rear guard action during war. In 1994, the P.V. Narasimha Rao government gave a conditional go-ahead for a period of three years. By 1994 the RR had 5,000 troops, all of whom served in Jammu and Kashmir.

After the government gave the go-ahead to set up the RR, the army decided to milk its existing units by 10–20% of their personnel to set it up quickly. The officers and men came on deputation from all branches of the army including the Infantry, Army Service Corps, Corps of Electronics and Mechanical Engineers, Artillery and Armoured Corps. The infantry provided 50% of the troops, services provided 10% and other arms provided 40%. In fact the army mothballed a few armoured regiments and transferred their manpower to the RR. In raising the RR to full strength, the army also had to dig into its war-wastage reserves, with the best available vehicles, weapons and radio sets going to the RR. In fact, RR units were the first to receive bulletproof jackets and specially designed Indian Army CI helmets known as patkas. With manpower drawn from all its arms and services, the army had to deal with serious shortages in many of its conventional units, as RR battalions are maintained at full authorised strength. However once the teething problems were overcome the RR proved it was worth the trouble.

Composition

The initial RR units performed well despite certain inherent weaknesses in their class and composition. They were raised on all India/all class basis with troops from all over the army, the logic being that since the units were going to fight an insurgency, there should be no scope for vested interests in accusing a battalion of bias based on class or regional attributes. Unfortunately, this setup created problems in the field. The initial RR units were like transit camps, with troops coming and going at regular intervals. There was little camaraderie and cohesion among troops. There were also numerous problems of administration and even of indiscipline. COs of infantry battalions who were asked to provide manpower generally used to use that as a chance to get rid of troublemakers. If the initial battalions performed well in hostile conditions, it was mainly due to the professional competence of officers who were asked to lead them.

Keeping this in mind, a decision was taken to alter the basic composition of the RR battalions. Instead of its units being composed of troops from all over the army, at least two RR battalions were made an integral part of each of the infantry regiments and other arms. The majority of troops in those RR battalions, along with the battalion's commanding officer, are from the same regiment. This ensures not only functional cohesion but also maintenance of regimental esprit de corps. Each regimental center was given the task of raising 1–2 battalions in one years' time. During this period, the units were raised and sent to Northern Command where they got another 4 to 6 weeks to consolidate. All of them went through a structured 8 week course in special CI schools. They were then given another month to stabilise and were then sent to the more dormant sectors of Kashmir and to the Punjab. To provide some experience base, 6 RR battalions were exchanged for 6 Assam Rifles units. The entire experiment of drawing RR battalions from individual regiments produced excellent results, even while the units were deployed in the most difficult areas.

Effectiveness

The initial RR battalions deployed in the terrorist-infested areas of Tarn Taran in Punjab and Anantnag in Jammu and Kashmir proved to be extremely effective. In Punjab, the deployment of the army and RR units contributed significantly to the turnaround in the situation. Since then the RR has been increasingly fighting the low-intensity war on behalf of the army in Kashmir. Casualty figures indicate that from 3 out of 44 army casualties in 1991 being from the RR, the figure had gone up to 82 out of 150 in 1996. Up to February 1997, 17 RR officers (including 1 Colonel, 4 Lt. Colonels and 7 Majors), 13 JCOs and 169 other ranks had been killed in action. The officer to other ranks casualty ratio for the RR (at 1:9.94 till February 1997) was almost double the average for the army in the Kargil War and the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971 (at 1:20).

By the time the RR celebrated its 8th anniversary it had become the most decorated organisation in the army, as it had earned more that 500 gallantry awards. In fact, 25% of the units had already been awarded the unit citation by the Chief of Army Staff for their distinguished performances. By September 1997, due to the combined efforts of the army, RR, and other paramilitary forces, the situation in Kashmir had stabilised to the extent that the army decided to de-induct 13 battalions (12,000 troops) including two brigades from the Kashmir valley over a two-year period. In fact up to Spring 1999, the army had already withdrawn nine battalions (8,000 troops) including a brigade from the Kashmir valley without replacements. The last batch of 4 battalions (about 4,000 troops) along with a brigade HQ commenced de-inducting in April 1999 and was supposed to complete by mid-summer 1999. Despite all this the army was still contributing about 58 battalions to the CI ops – 36 in the Kashmir Valley and 22 in the Jammu region.

Funding

Another change that was made was to have the Union Home Ministry (MHA) – instead of the Ministry of Defence – take over the burden of funding the RR. Although this was a good step, in reality it existed on paper. In 1997, the MHA owed the army Rs.950 crores for the RR. The budgetary outlay for the force was Rs.263 crore in 1998–99. This was upped to Rs.375 crore in the revised estimates for that year and the outlay for 1999–2000 was Rs.587 crores. Clearly if the funding were to come from the correct source in time, the army could use it for its modernisation programmes.

Crest

The RR crest consists of the Ashoka Chakra and two crossed AK-47 rifles with fixed bayonets. Beneath, in a banner, is emblazoned the RR's motto: "Dridhta aur virta".