Few ideas have the power to change lives. Indian Army’s Operation Sadbhavna could be that idea. Being run with the express purpose of winning the hearts and minds (WHAM) of the people of Jammu and Kashmir, it is among the biggest military civic action programmes in this part of the world. Yet, no matter what figures are churned out, in terms of its budget and reach among the people, the important word here is ‘could.’ And this word makes all the difference to what Operation Sadbhavna could achieve and what it remains happy achieving.

Despite the potential of the concept, Sadbhavna was cobbled together in the late Nineties as a means to enhance army’s image in J&K, specifically the Valley. While chief minister Omar Abdullah says, “The army has been at the receiving end of a vicious campaign. This is the reason this operation was started to involve the army in projects of public importance to improve its image,” Lt Gen. Arjun Ray (retd), to whom the army gratefully gives the credit of starting Sadbhavna concedes, adding that, “Sadbhavna initially was a public relation exercise by the army to improve its image among the people.”

Clearly, the army, which was fighting vicious militancy in Kashmir, was not a favourite among the people. Despite some psychological warfare that the army indulged in to discredit the militants/terrorists and project itself as saviours, in popular perception it was held as an occupations force. Years of operating among the people, which carried with it the inherent risk of human rights violations, gave fodder to the Separatists to label the force as anti-people. Moreover, once the army was well-entrenched in anti-insurgency operations in the state, there was a need to develop its own intelligence network, the basic condition for which was to win the confidence of the people to such as extent that they believe that sharing information on the militants with the army was more worth their while than the other way round. Given that it was on this narrow foundation that Sadbhavna was being built, it is no wonder that not only the army but even the government could not fully comprehend what changes Sadbhavna could bring about; or how it could have been government of India’s instrument of soft power to overwhelm the disenchanted population in a positive manner.

Lt Gen. Ray is dismissive of the early years of Sadbhavna calling it nothing more than an image-building exercise in which the army helped locals in small ways like repairing the roof of a school or a patch of the road. The project as it runs today on the concept of winning the hearts and minds was conceived in June 2000 when Gen. Ray took over as the first General Officer Commanding of the newly-raised 14 Corps after the 1999 Kargil War with Pakistan. He says, “When I took over in June, incipient insurgency was staring us at the face. The war had just finished and there was a real fear that insurgency would spill over in Kargil. Relations between the Muslims and Buddhists had deteriorated. Riots were taking place and there was a shocking killing of two German tourists and a Buddhist monk.”