Harsh but legal steps are the only way to fight terror

Whenever a violent, or indeed any, incident occurs, we are presented with several substantially different but seemingly plausible versions of it from the participants and eye-witnesses.
This was the theme that was explored in Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon. The police raid in which two alleged perpetrators of the Saturday 13 bomb blasts in Delhi were shot, and a number of others arrested seems to be suffering from the Rashomon effect.
This is not unusual because the incident overlays other phenomena — the radicalisation of a small but significant section of the Muslim youth, the perception of the community that it is being singled out for harsh repression, and the state of denial that many Muslims are in over the issue of radicalisation within their community.

Police

In the case of the Delhi blasts we have a police version, because they are the ones who carried out the raid that netted the terrorists, have had them in exclusive custody and interrogated them. The fact that a police officer was killed while effecting the arrests had added a powerful emotional element into the situation insofar as the majority of the public and the majority community is concerned.
There is a problem here. The reputation of the police, especially the so-called Special Cells which in the era of terrorism are the sword arm of the Intelligence Bureau, is none too savoury. They have been accused in the past of carrying out cold-blooded executions of gangsters and terrorists and passing them off as encounters.

Inspector Mohan Chandra Sharma of the Delhi police special cell, just after he was shot while carrying out a raid to apprehend the alleged terrorists involved in the Delhi blasts of September 13, 2008. Sharma later passed away.

The Delhi special cell’s one-time blue-eyed boy was shot by a realtor earlier this year allegedly on account of a deal gone wrong. Last year ten former special cell policemen were convicted of murder for shooting two businessmen dead in their car at Connaught Place in a fake encounter 10 years ago.
The men murdered businessmen Pradeep Goyal and Jagjit Singh for something as banal as a promotion. When they realised their mistake, they planted a pistol and cartridges in the car after the shooting and claimed the occupants were gangsters and had fired first.
This is not the burden of the Delhi police alone. “Encounter specialists” shot their way into fame and Bollywood in Mumbai when they were given the leeway to conduct extra-legal killings by senior police officers in the 1990s in a bid to control organised crime. With the kind of power they had, they soon moved into the rackets themselves. Today two such “specialists”, Sachin Vaze and Daya Naik are facing charges of extortion and murder.

With the advent of jihadist terrorism, things have gone from bad to worse. In February 2006, the Delhi police announced the arrest of Irshad Ali and Mohammed Muarif Qamar, two alleged Al Badr terrorists, with great fanfare and spun out the usual story of how they had smuggled the RDX and the plans they had for using it.
Later, after a judge’s suspicion led to a Central Bureau of Investigation inquiry, it transpired that the RDX was planted on them. The key to the CBI breakthrough was that an Intelligence Bureau official who lured Qamar to his arrest had used his own cell phone. The shocking aspect of this crime was that the two were actually police informers.
Another example of this was seen in the Delhi High Court’s acquittal last September of six people accused of being a part of the Lashkar-e-Taiba attack on the Red Fort in 2000. While the main accused has been sentenced to death, the High Court did not mince words in questioning the prosecution’s case, as well as the judgment of the lower court in finding them guilty.
When officials charged with such serious responsibility can frame people with such ease, we need to take their charges in other cases ,too, with a generous measure of salt.

Youth

Despite the poor reputation of the Special Cell and its trigger-happy reputation, it is possible that their version of the Delhi blasts is substantially correct. When in July 2006, the British police determined that four young British Muslims had set off the terrible serial bomb blasts across London, there was shock and bafflement in their families.
Bewildered friends, parents and siblings protested their innocence. Many pointed out how close they were to the bombers and it was not possible for them to have done the act. Unfortunately, because of the superb British surveillance system, their actions had been caught on camera.
Other evidence gathered soon made it clear that the boys were indeed guilty.
In the past few days we have been hearing similar anguished denials and protestations of innocence of the boys killed and arrested for the Indian metro bombings of 2008 —Jaipur in May, Ahmedabad in July and Delhi on September 13. As yet the evidence against those charged has not been tested in a court of law and is based on confessions. Like it or not, this is a problem, given the reputation of our police.
But even assuming that some, if not all of those charged are guilty, it represents a serious development for the country. This means that the face of Islamic terrorism in India has changed and it is becoming chillingly similar to that of its international version. A major feature of this is the participation of educated and relatively well-off young persons in jihadist activities.
Most of the Delhi blast accused appear to be regular guys, with all the aspirational attitudes of the Indian young of today. One even has an Orkut profile, while another used to walk the ramp as a model.
This is not unlike Shezad Tanweer, aged 22, and Hasib Hasan (18) who were involved in the July 7, 2006 London bombings. They were products of good schools and fond of sports, especially cricket.
What happened to them could have happened to the Delhi bombers — a spiritual awakening which was exploited by an older mentor towards the jihadist ideology. Some of the younger Nine-Eleven participants, too, were influenced in this way.
The special virtue of the young is that they think nothing is impossible. That is why they have always been cannon-fodder in war. The survivors are the generals and ideologues who send them to destruction and remain in the background, safe.

People

Some two years ago, after the Mumbai blasts, the Jamiat ulema-e-Hind had organised a symposium on the issue of terrorism. While this was the Jamiat’s internal meeting, they also had a session involving a number of former intelligence and police officials and journalists. The Jamiat has since come out with a categorical denunciation of terrorism and pushed its mentor organisation, the Darul Uloom at Deoband, to do the same.
But one conversation I had with a couple of Maulanas remains imprinted in my mind. The long-bearded clerics, dressed in orthodox pyjamas and kurta were grim. They admitted that they had lost contact with the young of their community. “Till recently, the Deoband-educated clergy could influence them,” one said, “but today, half-educated clerics from dubious backgrounds are exerting undue influence in the shanty-towns and ghettoes of our cities.” He could have added that so were TV and internet, which connect the educated Muslim youth to Osama, Palestine and Iraq and the radical ummah.
How do we reconcile the challenge of terrorism with the need to keep our social fabric, and indeed, national unity intact? We need harsh laws and tough action to crush terrorism. But we also need a sound judiciary to moderate the harshness of such action by preventing unjust and illegal action of the security agencies which only feeds the resentment of the Muslim community. The problem is with the lower judiciary which virtually acts as an arm of the police special cells.
We also need civil society groups, not just the human rights people, but retired policemen, intelligence officers and judges who can interface between the people affected by anti-terrorist action and the security forces.
This article appeared first in Mail Today September 24, 2008

Mr Advani, POTA alone cannot defeat terrorism

POTA like laws are needed, but they are part of a larger set of measures that need to be taken to fight terrorism. They involve radical restructuring of our counter-terrorist forces, efforts to reach out to the alienated Muslim community, and a judicial system that is able to moderate check against unjust application of anti-terrorist measures.

Young Khushi Jha rides on the stretcher with her father Sri Rang Jha who was injured in Connaught Place by a bomb blast on September 13

The first thing I did when I heard the news of Saturday’s bomb blasts was to call my college-going daughters. The Greater Kailash M-Block market is just about one and a half kilometres from where we live and it is not unusual for my girls and their friends to hang out there on a Saturday evening. It wasn’t only parents who felt that clutch of panic at that time. Dear and loved ones from across the country and even abroad called later. You never know.
There is a certain terrible randomness in the way people are struck down in such incidents. They may have been window-shopping, on a family outing, at work or just hanging out. In a city where 3,000 people die in a year from road accidents, chance plays a larger than life role in our lives. But when people are out to kill you with bombs and guns, the odds are much shorter.
As a journalist getting into harm’s way is an occupational hazard. But, with the reportorial years behind me, the physical risk I face is as much as that for any other citizen of Delhi. And that has not been insubstantial in the last quarter century.
An uncle of mine died, the sole casualty, of a bomb blast outside Palika Bazar in the summer of 1990. A few years earlier, another actually faced a terrorist who fired at him from the road, and missed, as he stood on the balcony of his first floor house in Chittaranjan Park.
But it is not the personal risk that you worry about the most. For the dead it no longer matters. It is about those who are left behind — the trauma of losing a spouse, parent or child, of making ends meet, or the battle of those maimed to live with scars within and without.

Muslims

On Sunday morning I took my dog to her long-time vet. We never discuss politics, and he somewhat apologetically broached the subject of the blasts. “The feelings against Muslims are going to go sky-high,” he ventured. I responded with the somewhat cliché-ridden statement that a community should not be blamed for the actions of some individuals. But I knew what he was talking about. I told him of the arbitrariness of the casualties, and the Muslims who died or were injured, but it is true that the overwhelming bulk of people killed were Hindus. I took another track which he understood immediately.
The police would pick up ten Muslim boys, beat them up and after they were released at least three would be ripe for recruitment by the Indian Mujahideen or whichever group that came looking for them. Could we live with an alienated Muslim population, in permanent conditions of suspicion and civil war?
The Sangh Parivar believes that a hard line on terrorism, focusing on Islamic extremism, will help consolidate the majority Hindu community behind the BJP. They are playing with fire if they think that this will be a costless exercise. Their first assumption is that draconian laws alone can combat terrorism.
Their second is that isolating the “guilty” community and applying relentless police pressure will end terrorism. Just what happens when a community is put under such a pressure cooker is evident from what is happening in Palestine and Lebanon. Relentless and disproportionate force has so hardened the communities that even the most hard-line Israeli will concede that his countrymen are no more secure today than they were thirty years ago.

Police

Mr L.K. Advani speaks of the efficacy of POTA. The strident campaign of the BJP of course hides the fact that in its watch there was no let-up in terrorist incidents, and at the time POTA was there. And instances of misuse were so blatant that there was little outcry when the Congress-led UPA government repealed it. A stringent anti-terrorist law does have a place in an overall strategy of fighting terrorism, but what Advani and Co seem to suggest is that it has a central role. This is simply not true. The biggest problem is politicians themselves who have used such laws to imprison rivals and other inconvenient political groups, not terrorists.
The second problem is that the people who would apply the act are our policemen who have built up a formidable reputation for corruption, arbitrariness and brutality. A law is only as good as the institution that would apply them. And ours are rotten to the core. People can buy their way out of a murder charge, be framed for a narcotics crime, and be labeled a terrorist at someone’s whim. The act will provide the police an easy option of “solving” terrorist crimes by railroading innocents, because its provisions will make confessions before a police officer admissible in court.
Residents of the capital city which has seen waves of terrorist attacks going back to the 1980s, have, in a sense, gotten inured to such attacks. In that sense the terrorist project will not succeed: There will be no communal violence after an attack and neither will people rise in revolt against the government of the day. There are hundreds of families that would have been touched one way or the other by terrorist incidents in the last twenty-five years. They have learnt to live with their pain, physical or otherwise. But stoicism is a virtue of people, not of governments.
The system must be flexible, willing to learn and have the ability to reform itself to meet the challenges of the day. The Union Home Secretary is on record to say that the system is learning from each incident. Maybe on 13/9 the police did display more order and the hospitals were more responsive. But, by and large it was difficult to say that the response was as professional as it should have been. Actually, the Union Home Ministry, the intelligence apparatus and our police departments have shown little inclination to change. The post-Kargil reforms have largely remained on paper. Compare this to the enormous restructuring that has taken place in the US where a new anti-terrorism law has come with an entirely new Homeland Security department and a reshaped intelligence apparatus.

Justice

Leave alone the nuts and bolts of bureaucracies and laws, there is no evidence on the ground that our system understands the nature of the challenge. A section of the young in our Muslim community has been infected by the virus of militant radicalism. They have to be isolated and neutralised. This may sound clinical, but it is not because we are dealing with human beings, societies and communities. Eliminating the terrorist virus requires force, but only at the micro-level.
At the macro-level the need is to more closely integrate our Muslim community into the national mainstream. As of now, they feel that their entire community is under suspicion and their sense of rejection from the body politic is growing. Unfortunately, some political formations are not helping, and indeed, encouraging the process by demonising the Muslims in a bid to consolidate what they believe is the Hindu majority vote bank.
The war against terrorism cannot be fought cheaply, it cannot be fought symbolically through laws like POTA and it cannot most certainly be fought by dividing communities. The only way to fight terrorism is through a just war. Such a war has to use instrumentalities that may be tough, but fair and able to discriminate between the guilty and the innocent.
Just as a terrorist attack is about indiscriminate murder, counter-terrorist action must be about discriminate force, based on the rule of law.
This article was first published in Mail Today September 16, 2008