Terrorism is yesterday’s war, but shhh…govt can’t say it

Admitting that terrorism is no longer a big threat would mean having to answer questions over the actions and policies of the government in the name of anti-terrorism

In 1991, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) was probing the source of funding of Kashmiri militants. One arrest led to another and the agency was suddenly in possession of two diaries that had a long list of payments made to people who were identified by their initials. Digging deeper, the CBI realised that they were staring at one of the biggest corruption scandals of independent India as the initials when expanded revealed the identity a former President, a PM and scores of serving ministers, Opposition politicians and bureaucrats as recipients of payoffs. CBI choked at the prospect of having to confront the high and mighty and hastily tried to hide the diaries in the maalkhana (store) for good, till this writer exposed this scandal and the agency’s attempt to bury this case in the now-defunct publication, Blitz.

What was so evident in the Jain Hawala scandal then did not really get any traction at the time the scandal came to the fore, either from the standpoint of terror funding or national security. The late Rajinder Puri, who filed a public interest litigation in the Supreme Court seeking its intervention to supervise the probe into this extremely sensitive case had demanded that the recipients of the payoffs should be booked under the now-repealed Prevention of Terror Act (POTA) or National Security Act (NSA). He was ignored.

However, the case was probed by an anti-corruption agency, the CBI, which levelled charges against those who figured in the infamous list under the Prevention of Corruption Act. What was ignored is the fact that the money for payments to the Kashmiri militants and that for the politicians came from the same source -- a foreign company trying to set up a power plant in the violence-torn state of Jammu & Kashmir. Visibly, the company bribed both the belligerents as well as the politicians to buy peace.

The big question is, how would the country react to such a scandal now? Would the prosecuting agencies have the courage to declare such offenders as terrorists or those who constitute a threat to national security?

Going by the exertions displayed by the Narendra Modi government against terrorism, which is now the cornerstone of both its foreign and domestic policies as it paints Pakistan as the promoter of terrorism, and Indian Muslims as their alleged sympathisers. This is warped thinking that attempts to deface a part of our history that shows that two main religions have for long co-existed, but it is the kind of thinking that has paid the BJP rich electoral dividends. Despite its repercussions for our syncretic society, the government is unwilling to forego this convenient strategy of giving prominence to terrorism over other issues of far more immediate and long-term import.

In the last few months, India has played host to conferences to fight terror. They have been largely against the mechanics and financing of terrorism rather than the ideology that supports it or the absence of democratic representation that encourages people to take up arms. It is due to the old conundrum of who is a freedom fighter and who is a terrorist that the countries in some of these conferences failed to arrive at a definition of terrorism or how to explain certain kinds of violence.

There is no such confusion in India these days. Perhaps the only country that is still concerned with the issue when there is widespread recognition that the caravan of Global War on terror (GWOT) has moved on after the Taliban -- synonymous with terrorism in all its facets -- was reinstated to rule Afghanistan by the United States. After this momentous event on August 15, 2021, the concerns of the US and the West have moved from terror to issues pertaining to the Westphalian idea of territorial sovereignty and energy dependence. Bizarrely, with the US gaze moving away from Asia toward Europe, terrorist violence suddenly plummeted everywhere. Even the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), surprisingly, slipped into a pause mode. Terror attacks in India also hit a low. This admission by police and army officials -- that militant attacks have greatly decreased -- was clothed in expected ambivalence. The government had the choice to credit it to the abrogation of Article 370 in Kashmir, but endorsing the view that the war against terror had lost its sting would have been problematic for those nuancing our foreign and domestic policies. If indeed terror attacks have subsided, then what was the government talking about it in international forums and raging over, especially during elections, within the country? What would it do about all the people it has arrested or accused of being associated with terror outfits? Would the government’s policies and actions not look hugely anachronistic given the facts on the ground?

Admitting that terrorism is no longer a big threat would mean having to answer questions over all the actions and policies of the government in the name of anti-terrorism that have impacted unquestioning ordinary lives. For instance, why do hotels still search for the elusive bomb in every car before it enters their premises? Worse is the crazy security at the airports, where passengers have to take off their belts and at many places even their shoes to convince the security staff that one is no “shoe bomber”.

So many things would have to be scaled down, which would together mean that the mindless control that the State exercises over citizens today in the name of fighting terrorism would have to be given up substantially. This government, which prides itself on being muscular, is not ready for this dramatic shift. Instead, it draws endorsement from a beholden media for its unending diatribe against all those who oppose the government’s narrative, many of whom have been put away in jail or are derided as members of an imaginary “tukde-tukde gang”.

Terrorism is a tricky issue, but it gets more complex when politics defines it. That is the reason the Hawala accused were defined as merely corrupt and not as enablers of terrorism!

(The writer is Editor, Hardnews magazine)