The question of terror

Published : Dec 22, 2002 00:00 IST

India's response to December 13, and its growing association with the U.S.-Israel strategic nexus, poses a serious threat to its credentials as a democratic polity.

MOMENTS of revelation have come thick and fast globally since the September 11 events overturned every assumption about security and warfare. Israel had its revelation in October, when Rehavam Ze'evi, a Tourism Minister with little knowledge of hospitality but a forcefully stated commitment to the expulsion of Palestinians from their land, was murdered in an East Jerusalem hotel. For India, December 13 was seemingly the day when the scales fell from the eyes and the course of action that it should take to deal with the scourge of terrorism became blindingly clear.

Jaswant Singh, the Union Minister for External Affairs, lost little time in identifying the perpetrators of the terrorist outrage on Parliament House. The Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT), the militant affiliate of the Islamic congregation Markaz-ul Dawa'al Irshad, bore responsibility for the attack, he said, citing evidence of overwhelming credibility that had been placed before him. Jaswant Singh demanded that Pakistan should crack down on the LeT, arrest its leadership and cut off its sources of funds.

These were, in essence, the contents of a demarche that was delivered on December 14 to Pakistan High Commissioner Ashraf Jahangir Qazi. Jaswant Singh indicated that the options available in case Pakistan failed to comply, were framed in the Union Cabinet resolution adopted the previous day. These were ominous words. The Cabinet resolution, in calling for the liquidation of the "terrorists and their sponsors wherever they are and whoever they are", strongly suggests that unilateral military action, once considered a perilous course, is now strongly favoured.

Earlier terrorist actions in India had elicited sharp denunciations of Pakistan for its sustenance of the groups responsible, but never an explicit ultimatum. The Cabinet resolution was strongly reminiscent of the tone used by U.S. President George Bush after the September 11 attacks: hand over the terrorists to justice or watch as justice is brought to them. They also echoed the Israeli attitude towards the Palestinian political leadership: either do our bidding or face irrelevance and even destruction.

The differences in the case of India's tense stand-off with its western neighbour are palpable. This is not the world's single superpower, able to coerce every nation to render it the logistical support needed to initiate military action against a technologically primitive and materially devastated country. Nor is it an occupying power willing to shed every scruple and resort to maximum military force in facing down the rage and frustration of unarmed civilians.

Unfortunately, the actions of the U.S. in Afghanistan and the brutal Israeli crackdown on Palestinian civilians were precisely the examples that official spokesmen, not to mention parliamentary leaders of the ruling coalition, chose to cite. Shrichand Kripalani, the Bharatiya Janata Party Member of Parliament from Rajasthan, said so explicitly: "The government should do what America has done in Afghanistan and what Israel is doing in Palestine." Former Foreign Secretary J.N. Dixit seemed to sum up these sentiments in his wistful evocation of Israeli actions in occupied territories: "Just look at how Israel reacts. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem in our nature to act."

Two days after the strike, the BJP parliamentary wing resolved to meet and sound its own call to arms. Not being quite abreast of modern doctrines and viable strategies of warfare, the petition was to be couched in the most general terms: aerial bombing of terrorist training camps in Pakistan, if necessary, followed by incursions by infantry and armour.

Pragmatic sections in the country's intelligence establishment were counselling a more moderate course. Since the U.S. war in Afghanistan began, they argued, the strategic gains that had seemingly accrued to the Pakistani regime of General Pervez Musharraf had gradually been eroded. In disregarding the General's request for a suspension of offensive operations during the Islamic holy month of Ramzan and then targeting the Taliban front lines north of Kabul, the U.S. had signalled that it would not be unduly bound by Pakistan's strategic interests.

In facilitating the rapid entry into Kabul of the forces of the Northern Alliance the U.S. had ignored Pakistan's preferences. It had also shown little concern for the tricky political task of coalition building before facilitating the entry of anti-Taliban forces into Kandahar and Jalalabad. Both cities had fallen to militias that were less than fully attentive to Pakistan's interests. Pakistan's doctrine of "strategic depth", in other words, was in an advanced state of collapse.

With little space for manoeuvre, Musharraf is likely to be vulnerable to international pressures as never before. His own interests in reining in fundamentalist hotheads was manifested early on in the crackdown on street demonstrations and the incarceration of much of the leadership of the Islamic Right. Hostile actions from India would, argued intelligence experts, enhance his sense of vulnerability to domestic pressure groups and perhaps force him into an unwitting alliance with them. This could have unforeseeable consequences for both Pakistan and India.

As the investigations progress with reports of key arrests in Kashmir, there is an expectation that India will now be able to establish the Pakistan connection in reasonable conformity with international juridical standards. This would, argue intelligence experts, make it incumbent on Pakistan to enforce the standards prescribed in U.N. Security Council Resolution 1373, adopted shortly after the terrorist strikes in the U.S. This resolution, framed under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter, which makes compliance obligatory, requires states to "refrain from providing any form of support... to entities or persons involved in terrorist acts", "take the necessary steps to prevent the commission of terrorist acts", "deny safe haven to those who finance, plan, support, or commit terrorist acts", and "prevent those who finance, plan, facilitate or commit terrorist acts from using their respective territories for those purposes against other states or their citizens".

Following initial expressions of concern and sympathy, the Pakistan military regime responded belligerently to India's demands. Musharraf lost little time in communicating his profound distress to Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee over the attack on Parliament. Using a morally neutral term rather than the glowing epithet of "freedom fighter", the General expressed his shock at the attack by "armed intruders" on the Parliament building. He also said that he was "saddened" by the "loss of life and the injuries suffered by Indian security personnel".

The following day, the official spokesperson of the Pakistan Foreign Office seemed to leave some room for cooperation with India open. Evidence of the possible complicity of any group based in Pakistan would be studied when proffered by India, he said.

Just hours later, the military spokesperson for the Pakistan President seemed inclined to dispense with all such niceties. Echoing the refrain of the Islamic militant groups that Pakistan plays host to, Major-General Rashid Quereshi told a television channel that "nothing is beyond the Indian agencies" when it came to their efforts to "defame" Pakistan and the Kashmir "freedom struggle". The attack on Parliament, he indicated, was of a piece with the bombing of the Srinagar Assembly building on October 1 and the massacre of Sikh villagers in Chattisinghpora in March last year.

With the level of the verbal confrontation spiking upwards, it is widely expected that India's response will depend to a great extent on the signal it receives from the U.S. If there is political turmoil in Afghanistan, Pakistan would be a natural haven for disgruntled elements that are unhappy with the new ruling order that is taking shape there under Western tutelage. The U.S. attitude towards India's own confrontation with Pakistan will crucially hinge on its perception of the continuing utility of the Musharraf regime.

WHAT is clear, though, is that India will have to adhere scrupulously to recognised legal means in handling the problem that has plagued it for close to two decades. It may be politically expensive to seek the easy path to success by tagging on with the campaign being orchestrated by the U.S. and Israel. It is a curious spectacle today to see India in the same camp as these two countries, sharing virtually identical perceptions on theroots of terrorism and methods to combat it. For anybody familiar with the evolution of the global debate on terrorism and its cures, the alliance of convenience involving India, the U.S. and Israel, would seem incongruous.

All through the 1980s, the U.S. and Israel were virtually isolated in periodic U.N. General Assembly votes on the issue of terrorism. An active debate was undertaken through the decade on "measures to prevent international terrorism which endangers or takes innocent human lives or jeopardises fundamental freedoms". It was recognised that these measures would themselves have to be premised upon an understanding of the "underlying causes" which "lie in misery, frustration, grievance and despair and which cause some people to sacrifice human lives, including their own, in an attempt to effect radical changes". But in the process of identifying what was terrorism, the U.N. resolutions clearly upheld the "struggle of national liberation movements" and reaffirmed the "inalienable right to self-determination and independence of all peoples under colonial and racist regimes".

The U.S. and Israel, which were in the 1980s raising the level of their engagement with the racist South African regime in the subversion of national liberation struggles in the entire continent, had an obvious interest in thwarting the evolution of this understanding. In repeated votes at the U.N., including on a key 1984 resolution that deprecated the policy of "State terrorism" and "actions by States aimed at undermining the socio-political system in other sovereign States", the U.S. and Israel found themselves isolated within the global community.

The exercise of evolving a feasible understanding of terrorism and the methods of dealing with it, reached a dead-end by the end of the decade. This was a triumph as much for the policy of diplomatic coercion that the U.S. was adept at, as for the exercise of massive military force that was the Gulf war of 1991. If today the U.S. and Israel have managed to win the allegiance of a wide range of countries for their operations, it is an indication of the triumph of military coercion over democratic consensus-building. India's unseemly rush to join the U.S.-Israel camp is itself an index of its weakening democratic credentials and diminishing commitment to governance through consent rather than coercion, chiefly under the current dispensation.

India's revisionism on the question of terror is of course explained in the main by the decade of escalating violence it has faced in Kashmir. But in the process of teaming up with Israel and the U.S., India turns its back on several of its basic commitments and surrenders irretrievable ground on the plane of principle. In the bargain, a dangerous equivalence is established between the problem in Kashmir, which India has always claimed is amenable to a solution within the parameters of the Indian Constitution, and the problem of Palestine, which is clearly irresolvable within the racially exclusionary and discriminatory parameters of the Israeli Constitution.

Except to bigoted right-wing minds, the origins of the militancy in Kashmir can be found in a fairly long-standing denial of political rights and the unstated Central government policy to entrust the governance of the State to a narrow clique that would be accountable above all to Delhi rather than to the people of Kashmir. It would be apparent again to all but the same right-wing religious hyper-nationalists that the problem of Palestine is qualitatively different, arising from the expropriation of a long-settled population from the land and the subsequent practice of ethnic cleansing as a systematic element of Israeli state policy.

India as a democratic polity stands dangerously diminished by its clumsy effort to be part of the U.S.-Israel strategic nexus. In pragmatic terms too, the strategic gambit is likely to backfire, since military responses to civil conflicts have never been known to produce durable results. It can provide transient gratification to the aggressor country provided it can walk away from the conflict zone with no compunctions about the damage it has inflicted - as the U.S. plans to do in Afghanistan. Or where a country is built upon notions of historic rights to a land, there could be a fleeting sense of solace drawn from the destruction of the symbols of a people that are in inconvenient occupation of that land in contemporary times. Except in the fevered imagination of Hindutva extremists, the situation in Kashmir cannot be fitted into either of these situations - without serious moral and material damage to the Indian polity.

Recent debates about the advisability of enacting a draconian new law to combat terrorism, seem to indicate that India has begun to confront this dilemma. The law exists today as the Prevention of Terrorism Ordinance (POTO), but the spirited opposition that has been mounted by both political groupings and civil society organisations, indicates that there are now growing reservations about the exclusive recourse to force in the task of curbing terror.

POTO is perceived in many circles as a virtual declaration of lawlessness, which could seriously undermine the authority and credibility of the State. Voices of sanity have recently been urging that terrorism can only be combated under the rule of law. The chairperson of the National Human Rights Commission and former Chief Justice of India, J.S. Verma, recently devoted an entire address to this theme, cataloguing the range of laws that is available for dealing with terrorism, even without the draconian powers conferred by POTO.

If the rule of law is an obligation in the fight against domestic terrorism, it is no less so in the international arena. To emulate racist outlaw regimes such as Israel or even the U.S., which has learnt to write its own law in accordance with the strategic convenience of the moment, would be a reckless course for India to pursue.

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