Srinagar: For a few brief moments, the stars shooting through the sky over Badami Bagh glowed brighter than the morning sun, ripping through the air with great peals of thunder. Four kilometres away, at the journalist’s home in the Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) hostel, a small group of reporters wondered if a war had broken out, or the historic Corps headquarters at the Badami Bagh cantonment had been attacked. Fire raged inside the complex for hours.
That morning of 29 March, 1994, Director-General of Military Intelligence (DGMI) Lieutenant-General E.W.Fernandes had decided to visit the Army’s 2 Field Ordnance Depot—the prosaically-named museum complex inside Badami Bagh, a fascinating trove of weapons, improvised explosive devices (IEDs), pamphlets, photographs and books recovered from jihadists across Jammu and Kashmir.
Even though the Army drastically revised its procedures for handling ordnance after that event, those procedures seem not to have been taken on by the police—leading to the tragic killing of at least nine personnel at the Nowgam police station. That raises the question of why lessons weren’t reduced to paper, and internalised, across the system.
An on-ground classroom
Even though curious journalists were often taken to the complex, the museum also had an operational purpose: Leaders of troops coming into the area could get a quick idea of what their adversaries’ arsenal looked like, and later discuss tactical responses to it with subordinates. Troops came from different theatres, and had seen IEDs and weapons used in different ways; the museum provided a quick, on-ground education on what they would soon experience on the battlefield.
That morning, Lieutenant-General Fernandes—a highly-regarded officer, who some considered a prospect for higher office—had decided to review the museum as he prepared for his new job as DGMI.
Large numbers of junior officers accompanied the DGMI. Colonel S.K.Bansal, Colonel E.T. Mathews, Lieutenant-Colonel K. Krishnamoorthy, the commanding officer of the 96 Composite Intelligence Unit, his second-in-command, Major L.C. Yadav, and five other officers, three junior commissioned officers, two soldiers, and one civilian.
To this day, no one knows exactly why the blast went off: The kinds of forensic investigation infrastructure that might have given better than speculative ideas did not exist. The terrorist group Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen claimed it had planted a timer and detonator at the site, but no evidence to support this propaganda ever surfaced.
Few disputed that keeping ordnance recovered from jihadists was a high-risk enterprise: Explosives, as they age, can become chemically-unstable, making accidents more likely. There was a massive amount of ingenuous weaponry, though, constantly making it to 2FOD (a type of low explosive) for study: explosive stored in tree hollows, in potato cases, and even in domestic appliances.
To facilitate study, a procedure demanded that all recovered material be transported back to Badami Bagh for study.
Elaborate systems exist to protect ordnance, especially in peacetime. The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s guidelines run to several hundred pages. India’s Petroleum and Explosives Safety Organisation, similarly, lays out elaborate guidelines to guard against the detonation of common explosives like ammonium nitrate, which exploded in Nowgam.
Transformed procedures
The single most important development that came out of the Army’s learnings from Badami Bagh was that explosives and IEDs were to be destroyed on site by experts. Instead of transporting hazardous materials, certificates from local officials would be provided for the purposes of legal proceedings.
Even these stringent measures haven’t put an end to the problem. Eight people were killed in January because of a process accident at an ordnance factory making high-grade plastic explosives in Maharashtra’s Bhandara. There have also been regular fires at ordnance storage sites, often because of electrical short-circuiting.
The risks are highest in police Malkhanas, or storage warehouses, which are located inside urban centres. The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) issued plans for model Malkhanas in 2016, as part of a programme of upgradation, but compliance has been patchy. The guidelines specifically mandate that “the seized explosives shall not be kept in Malkhana. They shall be kept in magazines, away from the police station.”
Yet, the police in Jammu and Kashmir chose to ignore these instructions in Nowgam.
(Edited by Tony Rai)