The Hindu : Tackling terror

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Jan 31, 2003

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Tackling terror

By T. Sreedhar

The U.S. approach can never be an answer to the problem of terrorism... The Indian approach of keeping the issue localised and finding a political solution did work in the past and may work in the future.

AFTER 9/11, a section of the Indian intelligentsia began a debate on the country's response to terrorism and violence. Like the U.S. attacked Taliban-Al-Qaeda camps and hideouts in Afghanistan, India should attack terrorist hideouts in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and if necessary Pakistan itself. The Indian Air Force has the range and capabilities to undertake such a mission if the political leadership wants it. But is this the correct approach?

India started experiencing terrorism and violence, sponsored from across its borders, from 1947 itself. First, it was Pakistan in Jammu and Kashmir and, later, it was China in the Northeast. International security managers called them insurgency movements and proxy wars or low intensity conflicts. These security managers looked at these developments through the spectrum of decolonisation and the ideological framework of the Cold War. In fact, they were doing similar things in some of their former colonies.

Since unity in diversity and pluralism are the ideological cornerstones of the Indian Republic, as long as territorial integrity was not affected any amount of dissent was accommodated. At the height of the Chinese-sponsored insurgency in the 1960s, I remember a procession taken out by a group of people supporting China in my hometown of Vijayawada. Less than 50 strong, the group went through the streets shouting slogans such as "Chairman Mao Zindabad". No one became paranoid at this extraordinary behaviour of a small group; and the Government of the day never thought of passing any "patriotism act". Similar was the case with the Mizos, the Nagas and the Bodos in the Northeast or with the Gorkhaland agitation. Today, they would all be considered acts of terrorism and violence.

In those days, the Government made periodical assessments and deployed the security forces not to allow any untoward development which could disturb the social order.Whether it was Mizoram or Nagaland or Manipur in the 1960s and the 1970s or Punjab in the 1980s, force was used but to a limited extent. This well-calibrated Indian response made people such as Salig Harrison in the 1960s come out with the thesis that India was going to be divided into 16 countries and Stephen Cohen in the 1980s to infer that the armed forces were being increasingly used for internal security and maintenance of law and order.

At another level, there was a deliberate policy of encouraging the local leadership to involve itself in participatory politics. People following the developments would never have thought that a person such as Laldenga would give up violence and become Chief Minister of an Indian State. Similarly, few who witnessed the DMK's violence in the late 1960s would have thought the party would head the State Government subsequently. For that matter, who could have foreseen that the diehard Marxists would opt for electoral politics in West Bengal or Kerala or politically sensitive Tripura.

No one in this country had considered allowing the state apparatus to put under the microscope anyone with a dissenting viewpoint; a thing that happened in the past in places such as the U.S. and is happening more visibly in the post-9/11 Northern Hemisphere.

The terming of some nations "rogue states" or fingerprinting every visitor from some countries are all indications of how paranoid the Northern Hemisphere has become.

The 9/11 attacks are unfortunate and should be condemned strongly. Strangely enough, the people who executed the 9/11 incidents and their ideologues were hailed as "holy warriors" less than 15 years ago by the U.S.

Equally strange is that five years before 9/11, the U.S. was hobnobbing with the ideologues of those responsible for 9/11; and advising countries such as India to recognise them and do business with them. In the Indian context, terrorism and violence prior to or post-9/11 are not different. The terrorists killed in Jammu and Kashmir by the Indian security forces include people from Sudan, Iraq, Palestine, Yemen, China and Pakistan. The indigenous involvement in terrorism, which was at its peak in the early 1990s, came down drastically by the late 1990s. According to various Kashmir watchers, now terrorism is being sustained by mercenaries and diehard followers of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban with sanctuaries in Pakistan. The empirical evidence collected about the suicidal attacks from 1990 to 2001 in India shows that only in one incident was a local involved; the rest were all mercenaries.

Much before the U.S. realised that regimes such as the Taliban were a threat to any civil society, India refused to do any serious business with them. In fact, India was trying to sensitise the international security managers to the dangers of such regimes and their mentors. Interestingly, not a single Indian is reported to have been involved with the Taliban-Al-Qaeda network.

The U.S. security apparatus, with its state-of-the-art technology, could not save the Pentagon from being attacked on 9/11. On December 13, 2001, a group of terrorists from Pakistan attacked India's Parliament, ultimate symbol of the Indian Republic. The republic mobilised its armed forces to convey to Pakistan and its supporters that it meant business. This deterrence worked.

Where do we go from here? In spite of a sustained campaign from a section of the intelligentsia, the Indian Republic refused to internationalise the terrorism issue like the U.S. and Israel are doing. After the U.S. President's statement that he was fighting a "crusade" in September 2001, India's political leadership quietly distanced itself from the U.S.-led coalition's war against terrorism.

Since then, the Indian participation has been restricted to sharing of intelligence and other related activities with the U.S. within the overall framework of improving bilateral relations. Otherwise, the political leadership has repeatedly emphasised that India has to fight its own battle against terrorism. India refuses to accept the U.S. theory that if a terrorist attacks security personnel, he and the nation that sponsored him must be attacked. That approach can never be an answer to the problem of terrorism.

The U.S. experience of more than one year of the war on terrorism has shown that it can never work. Similarly, the Chinese and Israeli models of physically eliminating the terrorists and changing the demographic composition of a region to achieve ethnic homogeneity and isolate problem ethnic groups have not resolved the issue. The Indian approach of keeping the issue localised and finding a political solution did work in the past and may work in the future. The October 2002 elections in Jammu and Kashmir and the ongoing negotiations with Nagas are the basis for this optimism.

(The writer is a Visiting Professor at the CWAAS, School of International Studies, JNU.)

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