From the archives, 16 Sep 2003

WIDENING THE DISCOURSE ON TERROR

 

Concentration on the violence of the act and its distressing outcome restricts reflection on terrorism in its wider dimension. There is also the perspective that seeking ‘roots’ of terrorism only serves to rationalize it, an unacceptable proposition. Since such effort could indirectly legitimise the pernicious, though politically useful, ‘action-reaction’ theory, it is not pursued. Furthermore, in India the dominance of the explanation that the incidence of terrorism in India is ISI engineered on account of Pakistan’s congenital antipathy to India or their manner of redressing the adverse power equation accentuates the discourse on terrorism.

 

One manner in which such restriction has occurred is the understanding that ‘terrorism’ is that perpetrated by foreign and criminal sponsorship as in Kashmir and Mumbai. Mass terror stemming from mob action, largely with state collusion and generally borne by minority communities as evidenced in the anti-Sikh riots and Gujarat, has not attracted requisite attention. However, given the unremitting incidence of terrorism in India of both kinds, there appears to be a requirement to study any linkage between the two, for the ending or containment of one may be dependent on the manner the other is addressed.

 

Rightly the internal intelligence agencies and the police have been acting with dispatch in destroying terrorist ‘cells’. The Home Minister let on that the last count of cells neutralized was at ninety-two all over the country. In this regard it would be rational to assume that should such alacrity attend police action in cases of one-sided mob violence, any underlying rationale for the mushrooming of these ‘cells’ would dissipate. Therefore while nullifying these cells, convictions such as the recent one of Dara Singh for the murder of missionary Graham Staines would be to address the problem at both ends.

 

Reflection on Chief Justice Khare’s observation that the essence of democracy is not electoral majorities but is ‘rajdharma’, arbitrarily defined here as governance furthering constitutional freedoms, is an opportunity for widening the discourse on terrorism in this manner. The Chief Justice was commenting on the Best Bakery case of the Gujarat pogrom The Chief Justice’s conflation of democracy with the rule of law is a reminder that roots of terror also have an internal, equally compelling, dimension. Judicial activism in this direction has been buttressed by the salutary conviction of Dara Singh’s for the murder of Australian missionary Graham Staines.

 

Three instances where departure from the democratic principle has resulted in long running security problems has been the unrest in Punjab of the Eighties, the Kashmiri militancy of the Nineties and the bomb blasts in Mumbai of 1993 and 2003. There is no gainsaying the fact that a sense of grievance arising from the perceived injustice of the anti-Sikh riots and the hardline suppression of the Kashmiri militancy has fuelled disturbed conditions characterized by terrorism to an extent. The bomb blasts in Mumbai, while bearing the stamp of ISI and D Company, could have been averted had police politicization not made them participants in the largely one-sided riots of 1993 and 2002. Widening the popular definition of terrorism has the underside of making it unweildly, but in the event may be a practical reaction to the Indian circumstance.

 

Another pertinent aspect that escapes attention, for want of substantiating information, is that in the absence of civilized engagement between India and Pakistan, these terrorist acts are a substitute dialogue between the two states entrusted to respective intelligence agencies. The Pakistani reading of the bomb blasts and sectarianism in Karachi and elsewhere has echoes of India’s fixation with the ISI. In both states votaries of a ‘tit for tat’ policy exist and may have seized the policy agenda. Ending terrorism would thus require a political approach, along both dimensions, internal and external, besides the present law and order and military approach.

 

Admittedly, the present approach to terrorism may well be a ‘political’ one, in that it is one sanctioned by political rulers and is naturally conditioned by a right wing world-view, one that globally subscribes to dousing ‘fire with fire’. Demands of making of the majority community a ‘vote bank’ increase with the proximity of elections. Being seen as ‘soft’ on terrorism, by considering ‘roots’ as against the outcome of terrorism, may not be politically attractive. However, in the Indian context, considerably more complex sociologically, historically and politically, a ‘political approach’ demands, inter alia, depoliticisation of governance, with professionalisation of policing being a major strand of the effort. The perspective of democracy as majoritarianism, lying at the root of institutional decomposition, requires review.

 

Privileging militarized policing alone may yield a diminishing deterrence value. There is a need to prevent the dastardly nature of terrorism limit the debate on ending it. The criminality of the act should not be allowed to delegitimise its political context. Even as the act and its perpetrator faces inexorably the long arm of the law, the arm should not itself be selective. While it is likely that the wider contestation over the definition of nationalism between civic constitutionalism and cultural-territorial nationalism would provide long term answers, the interim could be negotiated by a securitisation of the ‘roots’ of terrorism.