Reject terrorism by any name: Vajpayee

By P.S. Suryanarayana

NEW YORK, NOV. 10. The Prime Minister, Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee, today called for ``firm'' steps to ``rebuff any ideological, political or religious justification for terrorism''.

Addressing the 56th session of the United Nations General Assembly here, Mr. Vajpayee sought to condemn Pakistan, without mentioning it by name, by asserting that the politics of terror had a vacuous base.

For ``a global order at peace with itself'', a ``strong inner resolve for (economic) development (across the world) and (for) poverty alleviation'' was as important as the current ``campaign against terrorism'' and the ``collective search for security''. He also outlined a four-point ``preliminary agenda'' for a ``Comprehensive Global Dialogue on Development'' that he had first proposed last year.

Suggesting a new focus on terrorism, Mr. Vajpayee said, ``We should reject self-serving arguments (that) seek to classify terrorism according to its root causes and therefore justify (a) terrorist action somewhere while condemning it elsewhere. Those that advance these arguments should explain what the root causes of the brutal acts of September 11 were.'' This was an apparent attack on Pakistan, whose President, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, is backing the U.S. in its war against Afghanistan while characterising the separatist violence in Jammu and Kashmir as a political phenomenon with no terrorist veneer. Mr. Vajpayee's objective was to point out that the politics of terror could have no critical mass of respectability.

Without endorsing the controversial theory of a possible clash of civilisations on religious grounds as visualised by Samuel Huntington, he said, ``We in India know from our own bitter experience that terrorists develop global networks driven by religious extremism.'' Such terrorist operations ``are supported by drug trafficking, money laundering and arms smuggling''.

``Closely-coordinated efforts of the international community'' could alone ``counter'' those ``states'' that ``follow a policy of sponsoring and sheltering'' the terrorists, Mr. Vajpayee underlined. The veiled reference to Pakistan could not be missed in this context as well.

While rejecting the idea that terrorism could at all have any ideological or political foundation, he implicitly pointed out that the anti-terror campaign could itself be fought to sustain a political vision. The recent terrorist strikes in the U.S. and in Jammu and Kashmir ``represented an arrogant rejection of the values of freedom and tolerance, which democratic and pluralistic societies cherish''.

The Prime Minister made out a case for global economic development on an equitable basis across state boundaries as a suitable antidote for terrorism of certain types. Towards this end, he reaffirmed his earlier proposal, first made during his visit to the U.S. last year, that a comprehensive global dialogue on development be held.

The objective of such a dialogue would be to ``address the highly unstable situation in which one-third of the world's population lives in luxury and condemns the remaining two-thirds to poverty and want''. This situation ``is a fertile breeding ground for political unrest, economic chaos and social fractures''.

It was against this background that he outlined the four-point agenda for a possible global development dialogue. The points are: the accelerated liquidation of the external debts of low- income and highly-indebted countries, poverty alleviation programmes, the stabilisation of international prices of primary commodities and welfare-development programmes for all of the world's needy children.

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