The Hindu : Stand up to the saboteurs

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Sep 13, 2002

Opinion

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Stand up to the saboteurs

THE TERRORIST STRIKES in Jammu and Kashmir on September 11, the high point of which was the gunning down of the State Law Minister, Mushtaq Ahmed Lone, as he was addressing an election rally in Kupwara district, are of a piece with what has been evolving into a pattern in recent weeks as the politically critical poll process got under way. Lone, a National Conference nominee for the Lolab Assembly seat, is the second contestant to be eliminated in less than a week — the other was an independent, also from a Kupwara constituency. Desperate as the terrorist elements are to sabotage the democratic process, one should anticipate that they will focus more and more sharply on party functionaries, campaigners and contestants — apart from public rallies — as the democratic process entered the climactic stage, a strategy the Sikh extremist groups tried in Punjab when they found a surge of enthusiasm among the violence-weary people and political class to participate in the poll exercise. In Jammu and Kashmir, the palpably spirited popular response to the campaign and the bold venturing of some `rebels' of the separatist outfits into the democratic ways have evidently made the jehadi elements even more desperate, prompting them to try `strategic targeting'. It cannot be a mere coincidence that Kupwara, where the terrorists have succeeded in killing two candidates so far, is where several of such `rebels', notably from the People's Conference whose founder Abdul Gani Lone fell to the bullet of an extremist, are in the electoral fray. There are credible reports of quite a few candidates from the lower rungs of the other pro-independence groups also contesting as `independents'. Needless to say, this aspect of the terrorists' strategy should be factored in appropriately by the official establishment while streamlining the election-linked security cover.

The response of the Centre and the State Government to Wednesday's incidents that left in all 18 persons dead — some 15 of them security personnel — has been on predictable lines. A vehement condemnation of the killings, an emotional articulation of a sense of outrage, a spirited reiteration of resolve to ensure that the elections are free, fair and truly participatory and, above all, a compulsive reference to the "unabated" terrorist infiltration across the border with Pakistan, the suggestion here being that the onus of securing the democratic process against the terrorists' vicious attacks rests largely on Islamabad. But the point is that the political stakes for India in the current Assembly elections are critical as never before, given the sort of attention and scrutiny the process has come under at the global level due to its being widely recognised as the crucial "first step" to a possible resolution of the Kashmir conundrum. Therefore neither the Atal Behari Vajpayee regime nor the Farooq Abdullah administration can abdicate its primary responsibility in making a success of the event judged against conventional parameters of participative democracy and in the face of determined effort by terrorists to scuttle it.

On the security front, where the task before the Centre and Jammu and Kashmir Government is undoubtedly quite daunting, the system put in place is bound to come under strain as the staggered poll process goes through its four phases. The bottom line however is that, when confronted with a heightened threat from desperate terrorist elements, the response of the two Governments should be such as to defeat their designs rather than appear to yield ground meekly. To cite an example, an airstrip in Poonch district where Congress leaders were to land for addressing a rally nearby was the target of terrorist attack on Wednesday, and the intention obviously was to create a scare and impede campaign, which is a basic requirement for any free electoral exercise. Given this context, any helplessness in providing adequate security for campaigning by national leaders of the Congress — or any party for that matter — would amount to submitting to the terrorists' intimidatory ways and subserving their objective of discrediting the poll process.

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