Rashtriya Rifles


The Rashtriya Rifles or RR (translation: National Rifles) is a branch of the Indian Army under the authority of the Indian Ministry of Defence. The RR is a counter-insurgency force made up of soldiers deputed from other parts of the Indian Army. The force is currently deployed in the state of Jammu and Kashmir.

Since the RR are under the authority of Ministry of Defence, and furthermore were initially designated "paramilitary" to get around an army manpower ceiling, they are sometimes misidentified as part of the Paramilitary forces of India. In actuality however, they are a force completely composed of Indian Army personnel, who undergo pre-induction training and operate in a grid structure to deal with insurgents at high altitudes.

HistoryEdit

Initial DoctrineEdit

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 a jihadist 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).

RaisingEdit

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.
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