Reconceptualising Ambush Contextually : A new twist to risk to life
Amar Yumnam
Ambush is a long known and long practised military tactic for attacking. The Oxford Dictionary defines it as “surprise attack by people hiding”. The Cambridge Dictionary sees it as “to suddenly attack a person or a group of people after hiding and waiting for them”. The two online dictionaries of thefreedictionary.com and Wikipedia define it as “A sudden attack made from a concealed position” and as an act “in which the aggressors (the ambushing force) use concealment to attack a passing enemy. Ambushers strike from concealed positions, such as among dense underbrush or behind hilltops. Ambushes have been used consistently throughout history, from ancient to modern warfare. An ambush predator is an animal which uses similar tactics to capture prey, without the difficulty and wasted energy of a chase” respectively.
Certain common features for an ambush to be called so can be discerned from these definitions. First, there should be an element of surprise. Secondly, there should be two different groups of people, one hiding and another moving in the open. The most common places for hiding are thick bushes and the mountainous slopes. The one hiding is the aggressor and the non-hiding the aggressee. In other words, in an ambush the two parties of aggressor and the target-victims are well separated and different groups. In still other words, there is always an element of externality (exogeneity) between the two parties involved in the act of ambush. Thirdly, the event is basically military and not political; the parties involved are mainly the military, with at least the aggressor needing to be armed military personnel, whether state or insurgents.
The Question and The Need: The question necessary to deeply examine today is whether this kind of definition and the characteristics accompanying it can have universal applicability. Remember, we are now in age of post-modernism wherein truths are contextual and hardly universal. The attempt to redefine ambush has become all the more paramount in the context of the highly nonsense-happening land of Manipur.
So long we have been hearing and witnessing the stories of mostly “encounter killings”. But these do happen more or less in most places, and as such there arises no need for endeavouring redefinition of this phenomenon contextually in Manipur. But we cannot say so in the case of ambush. Rather there is now a definite requirement for reconceptualising ambush contextually in the specific case of Manipur. The need for this contextual re-conceptualisation has been established by a recent happening in Manipur. The top-most legal officer of the land was injured in an “ambush” according to first reports of the incident. There were also accompanying attempts to make the incident really look like an ambush in the classical sense of the term as evidenced by the repeated firing into residences near roadways.
The peculiar features of the recent ambush of the top legal officer of the land contrast rather radically with the classical understanding of the term. In Manipur’s case, the aggressor was nowhere in hiding on the way where the target was supposed to pass through, except that the aggressor was sitting in the rear seat while the aggressee was in the front seat of the car in which they were travelling. Of course, the geographical area was mountainous like in the case of the classical sense. Secondly, unlike in the classical case, there is no separation between the aggressors and the target. In fact they were, as we all know, travelling together in the same team, same direction, same occasion and same vehicle.
To put it differently, the element of exogeneity was completely absent in the recent case. Thirdly, the very recent incident in Manipur has high political overtones in a way very different from the classical meaning of the term. There were even initial attempts by political leadership to brush the incident under the carpet. Fourthly, the parties involved were non-military in the present case.
New Concept: In the light of the new radical features emerging in relation to ambush, we can now venture to attempt a new version of ambush. We now know from the Manipur case that in an ambush the two parties involved need not necessarily be military. They can as well be civil and political. Secondly, an ambush can happen without the element of hiding and surprise characterising it. This implies that there can be an ambush which is not exogenous, but rather fully internal to the parties involved and thus making the event endogenous.
Finally: So finally we have two types of ambush. The first one is the classical case wherein the parties involved are military and external to each other. We can call it exogenous ambush. The second one is Manipur’s variant. In this the parties involved can be other than military, and they can be internal to each other. We can call it endogenous ambush. Of the two, the Manipur variant (endogenous ambush) is must more dangerous. While in the case of exogenous one precautionary measures can be adopted, as of today there is no such conceivable remedy for the endogenous variant.