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Dynamics of extremism in Jammu & Kashmir

Article · November 2014

DOI: 10.13140/2.1.4023.9045

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Ashish Goyal
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 Dynamics of extremism in Jammu & Kashmir

Ashish Goyal

School of Mathematics & Statistics, The University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW
2052, Australia

e-mail: ashish.goyal@student.unsw.edu.au

Abstract

India has been suffering from conflict over Kashmir for the last 6 decades and terrorism
emerged as a result of this conflict. Until recently, despite horrifying loss of life and vast
expenditures on security, very little studies have been conducted to study the mechanism of
terrorism and its pattern in Jammu & Kashmir (J&K). This paper asks an important question:
is it a fact that there is less violence observed in J&K in winters affected by terrorists activity
compared to those in other seasons? Later on, a mathematical model has been proposed to fit
the scenario of J&K and the number of terrorists crossing border was estimated to be 842 per
year.

Keywords: Terrorism, weather, mathematical model, Students t-test, simulation

Introduction

Enders and Sandler define terrorism as the premeditated use or threat to use violence by
individuals or subnational groups against non-combatants to obtain political and social
objectives through the intimidation of a large audience beyond that of immediate victims [1].
Generally, existing literature agrees that terrorism is expected to hinder economic growth
through various channels, such as increase in productions and transaction costs, decrease in
tourism revenues, decrease in foreign direct investments and international trade. Blomberg et
al. [2] report that terrorism leads to a diversion of spending from investment to government
expenditures to strengthen security forces for fighting terrorism.

In India, terrorism remained a problem for last couple of decades [3] and still, a large portion
of government annual budget goes to security related issues affecting the economic and social
growth of Indian economy. Indian government encounters terrorists activities all over India
but Kashmir has been remained hub for the major proportion of these incidents. Over the past
decade, militant Kashmiri separatists have received sufficient support by Pakistan’s powerful
and largely autonomous ISI to continue terrorism against India which is also perceived as a
proxy war. In May 2003, the Indian Defense Minister claimed that about 3,000 ”terrorists”
were being trained in camps on the Pakistani side of the LOC [4]. Specially, terrorist
activities in J&K are closely related and dependent on the migration of terrorists from
Pakistan [5]. Further, the paper by B. Raman seeks to describe all the aspects of terrorism
(immigration from Pakistan and counter-terrorism measures) even considering the facts of
religious and non-religious terrorism. The paper has described that how co-operation of
Indian counter-terrorist force with South East Asian region and new counter-terrorism
policies had strengthen the counter-terrorism. The paper also discusses the peace achieved in
India with the help of counter-terrorism efforts of Government [6]. In India, Border security
force (BSF) is majorally responsible to keep the terrorists activities to the minimum [7].

Despite of few trinkets of literature available on terrorism in J&K [3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13,
14], major questions still remain unanswered. Therefore, the objective of the current article is
to answer following basic queries:

1. Is number of terrorists killed is correlated to the number of terrorists incidents?

2. Do number of terrorists incidents in a region experience seasonal effects?

3. Is there any correlation between number of terrorists killed and number of civilians killed?

4. Is there any correlation between number of security personnel killed and number of
terrorists killed?

The scope of this article also covers the proposal of a mathematical model replicating the
scenario of terrorism in J&K and refines the model parameters through qualitative data
analysis.

Material and Methods

Statistical Procedure

Data used for statistical methods has been derived from [15]. Number of terrorists incidents
are only available for duration January 1998- December 2001. Therefore, first we determine
the correlation between number of terrorists killed and the number of terrorists incidents in
this duration using Chi-square test (95% CI). After establishing a correlation, we later
employed the number of terrorists killed as a representative of number of terrorists incidents
for data purposes.

For north-western parts of India, Indian Meteorological department has categorized the
months of December, January and February as winter season [16]. We further calculated the
average of terrorists killed in a winter month and in month of any other season using [15].
Then, paired Students t-test (95% CI) was used in order to make the statistical hypothesis
test. Similar methodology was pursued to find other correlations and statistical differences.

Mathematical model, parameter values and optimization routine

To model the dynamics of terrorism, we used three variables: 𝑇 (𝑡), the number of terrorists
in the region, 𝑃(𝑡), population of the region, and 𝑆(𝑡), number of BSF present in the region.
In the modelling process, it has been assumed that the terrorists activities are a result of cross-
border terrorism from Pakistan [5] and the presence of BSF prevents encounters of
population with terrorists and protects them. In view of consideration of above, the
generalized model is governed by,
𝑑𝑇
𝑑𝑡
= 𝐴(𝑁 − |cos(𝜔𝑡)|) − 𝑑𝑇 − 𝛼1 𝑇𝑆
𝑑𝑃 𝛼2 𝑃𝑇
= 𝐵1 − 𝑑𝑃 −
𝑑𝑡 1+𝑆

𝑑𝑆
= 𝐵2 − 𝑑𝑆 − 𝛽𝛼1 𝑇𝑆
𝑑𝑡

The description of all the parameters is given in Table1. We found that number of civilians
killed per year lie in the range [0-1000] which is very less than the population itself (9.7
million). Therefore, we take 𝛼2 = 0, which also means security is too high. Similarly,
number of army personnel in J&K goes over 0.1 million which is quite large than the number
killed due to encounters with terrorists and in J&K , army personnel gets replaced very fast.
Therefore, for simulation purpose, we also assume, 𝛽 = 0.

In 1988, the population of J&K was 𝑃(0) = 8 𝑚𝑖𝑙𝑙𝑖𝑜𝑛 [17]. In 1988, insurgency started,
therefore, we assume an initial value of 𝑇 (0) = 10. Also, we assume 𝑆(0) = 60000. We
assumed before insurgency, there was no need to deploy more troops of BSF to J&K to raise
strength and therefore, considering initial steady state, we got 𝐵2 = 25000. Parameter
estimation for remaining parameters involves nonlinear estimation of the system of three
simultaneously nonlinear equations. We used the ’trust-region-reflective’ algorithm in Matlab
R2011a to find the remaining parameters against the data available for the number of
terrorists killed every year [15].

Table 1: Parameter Values along with their description

Parameter Description Value and Reference
𝐴 Rate of immigration of terrorists 842/year 1
𝑁 constant determining time of maximum 1.1 1
immigration of terrorists
𝜔 angular frequency 𝜋/12
𝑑 Natural Death rate 0.06/year [18]
𝛼1 Death rate of terrorists due to encounter with 6.87e-005/year.BSF
BSF personnel 1
𝐵1 = 𝐵1 𝑃 Growth rate of population 0.072/year [18]
𝛼2 Death rate of population due to encounter with 0/year [15]
terrorists
𝐵2 = 𝐵2 𝑆 Recruitment rate of BSF in J&K 25000/year
𝛽 proportion of BSF to terrorists died due to 0/year [15]
encounter with terrorists
1
Determined after optimization routine against the data of terrorist killed in Fig3.

Results

First, correlation between number of terrorists killed and the number of terrorists incidents
was established using Chi-square test(df=47, 95%CI) for the data shown in Fig1(A) under the
null hypothesis that there is no correlation between the two and the sample is a random
sample. We found p< 0:0001 which is statistically significant and therefore, null hypothesis
can be rejected (See, Fig1(A)). In fact, we found a positive relation (Pearson correlation
coefficient, r=0.50) which signifies that more the number of terrorists killed, more the
corresponding number of terrorist incidents. Similarly, we tested correlation between
terrorists killed and civilians killed and correlation between security personnel killed and
terrorists killed for the data shown in Fig2(A) and Fig2(B). In both cases p< 0.0005 shows a
good correlation between two quantities. These facts will be used utilized later on to deduce
important inferences.

In order to check if the number of terrorists incidents experience effect of change in seasons
in J&K, we proposed the following null hypotheses:

- Null hypothesis 𝐻0 : Number of terrorists killed in a winter month is greater than or equal to
terrorist killed in a month of any other season.

- Alternative hypothesis 𝐻1 : Number of terrorists killed in a winter month is less than to

terrorist killed in a month of any other season.

The existence of statistically significant differences would reject null hypothesis and accept
the alternative one. The results of the statistical study using paired student’s t-test(df=14,
95%CI) and data from Fig1(B) showed statistically significant differences (p=0.0007). In this
case, we reject null hypothesis and establish that the number of terrorists killed in any month
of winter is greater than the number of terrorists killed in a month of any other season.
Further, since we have already establish that number of terrorists killed is proportional to the
number of terrorists incidents, we can install that number of terrorists incidents observed in a
winter month is greater than in a month of any other season. We did the same analysis for the
civilians killed and security personnel killed in a winter month against any other month (Data
given in Fig1(C)-Fig1(D)) and we found that they are also statistically significant, p=0.0005
and p=0.0002 respectively.

We also simulated our model using the parameter values obtained after optimization routine
and shown in Table1. The plotted data of terrorists killed in a year against the model derived
data of terrorists killed in a year using MATLAB R2011a was found very consistent (See,
Fig3). Therefore, the model can be used for the prediction of terrorism in J&K.
Fig 1 Caption: Plot of data derived from [15]:(A) number of terrorist killed and number of
terrorists incidents registered every month between January, 1998 to December, 2001, (B)
number of terrorists killed in a winter month and a month of any other season between 1998-
2012, (C) number of BSF killed in a winter month and a month of any other season between
1998-2012, (D) number of civilians killed in a winter month and a month of any other season
between 1998-2012.
Fig 2 Caption: Plot of data derived from [15] from year 1988-2012:(A) number of security
personnel (BSF) killed and number of terrorists killed every year, (B) number of civilians
killed and number of terrorists killed every year.

Fig 3 Caption: Plot of real world data from [15] and model simulated data of terrorists killed
on the y-axis where x-axis represents year from 1987 to 2012.

Discussion

From our analysis, we have found that the number of terrorist killed in a winter month is less
than the number of terrorists killed in a month of any other season. This is because during
winter season, J&K experiences a heavy snowfall which results in low migration of terrorists
from Pakistan to J&K and the terrorism in J&K is wholly dependent on the number of
terrorists who crosses border illegally [5, 16]. We also discovered that the number of civilians
killed and number of security personnel killed in a winter month is also low because of the
low number of the terrorists incidents in winter as compared to other seasons. Thus, we can
state that the weather plays a very important role in defining the condition and state of
terrorism in J&K. Further, we introduce a mathematical model which fits the scenario of J&K
and therefore, can be employed in future to make predictions and specifications for the
policies to be formulated.

Author Biography

Author is a research scholar with research interests in Mathematical Sociology, Biology and
epidemiology of infectious diseases.
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