“Either diplomacy or war”

Source: Indian Express
Thursday , Aug 13, 2009 at 2353 hrs New Delhi:

“Trust but verify,” the Prime Minister says, invoking Ronald Reagan. Of course, Reagan did not just stop at enunciating a maxim. He worked to, and succeeded in helping dismember “the Evil Empire.” One does not have to even ask whether the Prime Minister will do anything of the sort.

But take the maxim itself that the Prime Minister says he believes in following. Has all verification not already shown that Pakistan has not just been organizing terror-strikes against India, it has conducted a proxy-war continuously, unrelentingly for three decades? Evidence apart, haven’t the highest authorities of Pakistan acknowledged as much? Did Musharraf not proclaim, “Jihad is an instrument of State policy”? Has Zardari not said just a fortnight ago that, indeed, Pakistan spawned terrorists? Has our Army not said just a few weeks ago that infiltration into Kashmir has been stepped up again?

The Prime Minister’s reason for going on trusting is belief, it is faith in the current leadership of Pakistan. He told Parliament on 29 July, “I sincerely believe that it is as much in Pakistan’s interest as it is in ours to strive to make peace. Pakistan must defeat terrorism before being consumed by it. I believe the current there understands that. It may not be very strong, but the impression that I have is that the current leadership understands the need for action. [What “may not be very strong”? The current leadership of Pakistan? The understanding that the current leadership of Pakistan has about the need to fight terrorism? Or the impression that the Prime Minister has formed of the understanding that the current leadership of Pakistan has about fighting terrorism?] I was told by their parliamentarians who accompanied Prime Minister Gilani that there is now a political consensus in Pakistan against terrorism. That should strengthen the hands of its leadership in taking the hard decisions that will be needed to destroy terrorism and its sponsors in their country.”

Last time the faith was in George Bush – “The people of India love you, deeply.” Will we never learn? When Benazir Bhutto was the Prime Minister, we were told, “No, no, you don’t understand. She and Rajivji have excellent rapport. You see, they were at Cambridge at the same time” – as Mrs. Indira Gandhi and Zulfiqar Bhutto had been at Oxford in their time! When Nawaz Sharif replaced Benazir, we were told, “No, no, you don’t understand. He is a businessman. He is a practical wheeler-dealer. We can cut a deal with him.” When Musharraf ousted him, we were told, “No, no, you don’t understand. He is going to be there for years, in any case. It is with him that we have to strike a deal.” When he weakened, the argument became the opposite: “You don’t understand. We have to be generous and come to an agreement that he can present to the Pakis as a victory. Don’t you see, the alternative to him are the mullahs? We have to trust him. We can trust him. You see, he has learnt from Kargil.”

Now that Zardari and Gilani have replaced him, “I believe the current leadership there understands that.” Advocates in the Rajya Sabha added the tested argument: “Don’t you see, whenever there has been democracy in Pakistan, relations with India have been better? If we don’t reach out, these current leaders will weaken. The Army will be back, and relations with India will worsen once again.”

Trust apart, are Zardari and Gilani the “current leadership”? Is it not that collective – the Army, the ISI, and the organizations they have spawned, the LeT/JuD, and the like? On the one hand, the Prime Minister asks us to trust the new realization among the current leaders. On the other, in the same statement to Parliament, he reports that both Zardari and Gilani told him that “Mumbai was the work of non-State actors.” Anyone who is prepared to swallow that does not know a fig about, or is deliberating shutting his eyes to the pervasive presence and role of the Army-ISI and allied agencies in Pakistan’s State and society. But even if that assertion is taken at face value, what does it establish? That Zardari and Gilani may be the “current leadership”, they are not in control. How then can a new realization among them – on which also the only evidence we have is the Prime Minister’s gut feeling, “I believe the current leadership understands that…” – be the basis of policy?

And what precisely is this current leadership prepared to “seriously address”? After the Taliban had reached within 100 miles of Islamabad itself; after the Americans had put the fear of a complete rupture into them, these “current leaders” began an offensive against the Taliban. Only against the Taliban in its western provinces. Indeed, even in that region, only against those sections of the Taliban that have gone out of the control of the ISI-Army.

Neither the “current leadership”, nor, of course, the Army-ISI have raised a little finger against the terrorists and organizations they have reared in the East for assaults on India. Quite the contrary, as we shall see.

The moral is what it has always been: do not go by your assessments of “current leaders”. Go by the nature of Pakistan’s State and society. Go by the attitude of that State and society towards – not Pakistan; not the world; not the US, but – our country. And in that, go by their attitude to what they have made into their obsession regarding our country – that is, Kashmir. Is there the slightest evidence that the basic attitude towards India, and towards what they insist is “the core issue” has changed in any way?

“But we cannot change geography,” the argument goes. “Pakistan is our neighbour. It will always be so.” For seven months, the PM says, we have used all bilateral and multilateral instruments. It is only after doing so that the new course embodied in the Sharm-el-Sheikh Joint Declaration has been charted. Actually, the only things that have been done are two: plead with the US and others to do something; and go on talking to Pakistan at different levels. Naturally, this could not and has not yielded anything.

Pakistan will not desist from what it has for three decades been successfully inflicting on us for the simple reason that we are not able to, and manifestly do not have the nerve to inflict any cost on the ones who are orchestrating the assaults.

But it is diplomacy or war, says the Prime Minister, and the Congressmen echo him in chorus. There is no third alternative.

But even in one element – dialogue – of one of these alternatives, diplomacy – there are two alternatives! Dialogue after the preconditions you have laid down are fulfilled. Or dialogue irrespective of whether what you said were preconditions are fulfilled or not. To get the answer to the question whether the choice is only the binary one that the PM posits –“diplomacy or war” – consider two questions:

• How is it that Pakistan has been able to use a third option against us for 30 years? The option, namely, to inflict, and go on inflicting violence on us, but always do so at a level below the threshold that would trigger a full-scale war?

• How is it that Dawood Ibrahim is able to live in style in Karachi and go on orchestrating operations against India? How is it that Paresh Barua and other leaders of ULFA are able to hide in plain sight in Dacca and go on killing people in Assam?

The answer is obvious: Pakistan has built the requisite capacities, and we have not. After every assault, therefore, we are left in the same quandary: “Either diplomacy or war.” And “diplomacy” here means just going from one capital to the next requesting others to do our work for us.

But things obviously don’t stop there. There is the further lemma: “And as no sane person wants to go to war, the only way is dialogue.” And then the lemma after that: “As Pakistan has shown that it will not fulfill the pledge it had made of not allowing the territory under its control to be used for terrorism against India, there is no alternative to giving up the precondition…”

And so we recommence dialogue – confident that the next assault will make us forget the last one.

Foretold

In the wake of the attacks in Mumbai, the Prime Minister and others in Government laid down two conditions for the resumption of talks and the “peace process”: that Pakistan must bring to book the ones who had planned, controlled and directed the operations from Pakistan; second, that it must dismantle the infrastructure and groups that it had built up for terrorist assaults against India.

These two conditions were reiterated again and again in the months that followed. S.M. Krishna emphasized them as the new Parliament commenced. I said and wrote then that the Government would be compelled to abandon these conditions and resume the so-called dialogue without any conditions whatsoever.

That required no astrology! The reason was simplicity itself. Americans are desperate to get out of Afghanistan. To do so while retaining the pretext that they have accomplished their objectives, they have to be able to claim that they have restored “normalcy”. For that they are dependent on Pakistan. They will, therefore, have to do Pakistan’s bidding. And that bidding will be, “Get us concessions from India.” They will, therefore, force the Government to make concessions. And the modality for that has to be resumption of “dialogue”.

The Government would have to do all this, I said, as it has become perilously dependent on the US.

How much more “composite”?

That is exactly what has happened. The Prime Minister has had a meeting with the Pakistani President. He has had a two-hour meeting with the Pakistani Prime Minister. As The Hindu has reported, and as the Prime Minister has subsequently acknowledged, the head of the ISI, Ahmed Shuja Pasha, has met Military Attaches in our embassy in Islamabad. There have been meetings at other levels – the “formal Track-II”, so to say. In the Sharm-el-Sheikh Joint Statement the roadmap for further talks has been set out: Foreign Secretaries will meet “as often as necessary,” the Foreign Ministers will meet during the forthcoming UN General Assembly session – which, incidentally, begins in just three weeks.

And the talks that have already started cover everything. The Joint Statement says that the two Prime Ministers “considered the entire gamut of bilateral relations…” Not just that. Our PM has pledged that “India was ready to discuss all issues with Pakistan, including all outstanding issues” – the last two words being a euphemism for Kashmir.

The Government makes out that the “composite dialogue” shall actually be kept in abeyance till, as the PM put it in the Lok Sabha, “Pakistan fulfils, in letter and spirit, its commitment not to allow its territory to be used in any manner for terrorist activities against India.” Yet, as we have seen, the talks are taking place. The roadmap for further talks has been set out. The agenda is to cover everything.

A vital substitution

Several other aspects in regard to this sleight of words should be noted. Twice in his statement in the Lok Sabha, the Prime Minister; and then on the 31st July, S.M. Krishna in the Rajya Sabha laid down as the condition that “Pakistan fulfill, in letter and spirit, its commitment not to allow its territory to be used in any manner for terrorist activities against India.” Ostensibly this is the commitment that it had made in the Joint Declaration of Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee and President Musharraf in February 2004.

Do you notice the change the PM and Krishna have made? In the Vajpayee-Musharraf Declaration the words had been carefully chosen: Pakistan shall not allow the territory “under its control” to be used for terrorist attacks against India – that meant the territory of Pakistan and Pakistan Occupied Kashmir. Replacing “territory under its control” by “its territory”, as Manmohan Singh and Krishna have begun doing, means either of two things: either that we now recognize POK as Pakistani territory, something that the Vajpayee-Musharraf Declaration specifically did not do; or that Pakistan does not have to do anything in regard to groups and infrastructure that it has created in POK and is using against India.

Another bit of bad drafting?

Furthermore, as “all issues, including outstanding issues” are on the table, has Parliament been told; have even the leaders of other political parties been taken into confidence; I dare ask, have other members of even the Cabinet Committee on Security been taken into confidence about the contours of the “solution” to Kashmir that the Government is prepared to arrive at with Pakistan?

Apart from the intrinsic importance of the issue of Kashmir, there are two reasons why the question is important. First, as we saw in the Nuclear Deal, and as we have now seen in the abandoning of preconditions to which the Prime Minister had committed himself and his Government, Manmohan Singh’s stratagem is to present everyone with a fait accompli. Second, the Resolution that the Parliament passed unanimously on Kashmir and which stands unaltered to this day is that the only unfinished business in regard to Kashmir is for India to get back the portion illegally occupied by Pakistan. Does the Government stand by that Resolution or not?

Foolhardiness to foolishness

Foolhardiness crosses all limits in two subsequent clauses of the Joint Statement. First, “Both Prime Ministers recognized that dialogue is the only way forward. Action on terrorism should not be linked to the composite dialogue process and these should not be bracketed” – an expression that gives, to use the expression much favoured by the Prime Minister, a clean waiver to Pakistan from the commitment it had undertaken in the Vajpayee-Musharraf Joint Declaration.

Nor can this be put to bad drafting. For it faithfully reinforces what Manmohan Singh had agreed to in the statement he signed with Musharraf in April 2005. The peace process is “irreversible”, the two proclaimed. Further, the two “pledged that they would not allow terrorism to impede the peace process.” What was the result? Musharraf’s Army and ISI continued to execute their murderous operations against India; and the onus to keep these from impeding the peace process fell on India! The consequence of the new Statement will be exactly that.

The next provision raises foolhardiness to foolishness: “Both leaders agreed that the two countries will share real time, credible and actionable information on any future terrorist threats.” Imagine this pledge had been signed earlier. The equivalent of Zaradari and Gilani in Pakistan receive information that the Indian Embassy in Kabul is going to be blown up. You think they will pass the information to India? Remember that even the friendly American agencies were constrained to say that the ISI had planned the assault. Or look at it the other way: we get to know that terrorists have captured Kuber, and are moving in to attack Taj, the Railway Station, Oberoi in Mumbai; should we give that information to the Pakistani Government so that its agencies and the handlers may alert the terrorists?

Will we never learn? In July 2006, there were a series of blasts in trains across Mumbai. Two hundred were killed. What was the creative response of our Government? Within two months, in another act of faith, it set up a “Joint Mechanism” with Pakistan for fighting terror! This was presented as the great breakthrough, the result of out-of-the-box thinking – “For the first time Pakistan has agreed to cooperate in curbing terrorism. No earlier Government has been able get Pakistan to do this.” If you count only the major strikes by Islamic groups and only from six months after the Mechanism was formed, giving it time to get functional, so to say, and excluding all the strikes in J&K and the entire Northeast, you bump into the explosions on 19 February 2007 near Diwana in Haryana: 68 killed; in Hyderabad on 18 May 2007: 11 killed; in Hyderabad again on 25 August: 44 killed; in Ajmer on 11 October: 3 killed; near simultaneous blasts in Varanasi, Faizabad, Lucknow: 15 killed; in Rampur on 1 January 2008: 8 killed; 8 blasts in Jaipur on 13 May 2008: 80 killed; 8 blasts in Bangalore on 25 July 2008; 17 blasts in Ahmedabad on 26 July 2008: 53 killed; 5 blasts across Delhi on 13 September, and again on 27 September 2008: 27 killed; 26 to 29 November 2008: assaults at multiple locations in Mumbai: 166 killed. In between, there was the attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul in July 2008. And, of course, the attacks across Kashmir, and the Northeast… [For an authentic, regularly updated enumeration, see the outstanding South Asia Terrorism Portal, www.satp.org]

And all through the Joint Mechanism was holding meetings. Of course now, it will not just hold meetings. The Prime Ministers have pledged that it will also pass on or be furnished “real time, credible and actionable information”!

Narrowing even the single condition

That enumeration is a cruel reminder of another facet of our collective psychology: convenient amnesia. We allow, in fact, we almost use every assault to erase from our minds the memory of previous assaults. Of no one is this truer than of our governments. In the Joint Statement that our Prime Minister has signed, the demand that Pakistan dismantle and destroy the infrastructure and groups which it has set up to attack India, of course, finds no mention. But nor does any assault except the attack on 26/11 in Mumbai. The Indian demand has now been reduced to the minimum – that is, that Pakistan bring the organizers and directors of that attack to book.

And notice what the Pakistani Prime Minister has pledged to do even in regard to this minimal demand. In the Joint Statement we are told, “Prime Minister Singh reiterated the need to bring the perpetrators of the Mumbai attack to justice. Prime Minister Gilani assured that Pakistani will do everything in its power in this regard.” And now see how things work out to the convenience of the perpetrators and organisers. Under pressure from countries across the world, Pakistan put the head of the LeT/JuD, Hafeez Sayeed, under house arrest. In the judgement which the Lahore High Court delivered on 6 June 2009, the High Court released Hafeez Sayeed even from the minor inconvenience of remaining in his own house, recording that not a single document had been brought on record that the Dawa or Sayeed or his associates were involved in the Mumbai incident. It also recorded that no evidence had been adduced to establish that Sayeed or any of his associates had any links with Al Qaeda or any other terrorist movement. Indeed, the court went on to say that “the security and anti-terrorism laws of Pakistan are silent on Al Qaeda being a terrorist organisation.” When the case came up before the Pakistan Supreme Court, the position was no different. The oral remarks that fell from the Chief Justice were along the same lines. Sayeed has, therefore, been set free even from having to remain in his own house.

How very convenient! To make a show of doing something, you ask the man to stay in his house. At the hearings, you produce no evidence. The Court frees the man even from that minor inconvenience. And you claim that you have done everything you had pledged to do. Recall that the Pakistan Prime Minister has pledged Pakistan to do “everything in its power in this regard.” Surely, now the Pakistani authorities can say, “What can we do? Our courts have set the man free. Doing anything more about him or his associates is not in our power.”

In fact, what more evidence is required for proceeding against a person like Hafeez Sayeed or Sallauddin who operates to this day out of Muzzafarabad in POK? Their speeches are available on tapes by the hundreds. The literature recording their hate-filled words and the murderous declarations of their organisations against India and Indians are available in piles and piles of publications. But, to the convenience of all concerned, the court insists on “specific evidence”; the Government produces none; the court sets the man free to work his evil. The commitment enshrined in the Joint Declaration is fulfilled!

The perpetrator as Judge

Nor is that the end of this predictable tale. The Joint Statement goes on to record, “He [ the Prime Minister of Pakistan] said that Pakistan had provided an updated status dossier on the investigations of the Mumbai attacks and had sought additional information/evidence. Prime Minister Singh said that the dossier is being reviewed.” That is exactly what I had warned would happen. Soon after the Mumbai carnage, the Government announced that it would give detailed evidence and information to Pakistan. At that very time, I warned of the consequence of doing so: you will be installing Pakistan on the seat of the Judge; the authorities there, the controllers of those authorities – the very ones who would have sanctioned and planned these attacks – will now be pronouncing on whether the evidence you have given them is sufficient and credible or not. Even the Home Minister, P. Chidambram, has since been compelled to say that furnishing evidence to Pakistan has become an endless exercise – they just keep asking for more. As The Indian Express reported the other day, now Pakistan has asked for a sample of the “pink foam” taken on board MV Kuber; a statement from the Indian magistrate who recorded the confessional statement of Kasab; the testimony of experts who conducted the forensic examination of the GPS device; the testimony of experts that establishes that the terrorists were in touch with handlers in Pakistan; the interrogation reports of others who were first arrested, and so on. As for what we will do now, the Joint Statement records our Prime Minister assuring the PM of Pakistan, “the dossier is being reviewed”!

But through this dossier Pakistan has admitted that persons of and from Pakistan have been responsible for terrorist attacks on India, the PM says. This is the first time that Pakistan has made such an admission. The NDA Government was never able to get the Pakistan Government to admit as much… With Kasab in our hands, with his having made a detailed confession, admitting to the role of Pakistanis is the least that the Pakistan Government could have done.

I become the cause!

Then there is the howler regarding “Baluchistan and other areas.” Apropos of nothing, the Joint Statement records, “Prime Minister Gilani mentioned that Pakistani has some information on threats in Baluchistan and other areas.”

Pressed to put up some sort of defence, Pranab Mukherjee told the Lok Sabha that this was just the unilateral view of the Pakistan Government. Is a Joint Statement of two Prime Ministers the place in which one of them records his unilateral assessment of some internal problem that is on his mind? And just see what the Prime Minister of Pakistan said immediately after the Sharm El Sheikh Statement was put out: “The Joint Statement underlines our concerns over India’s interference in Baluchistan and other areas of Pakistan.” The Interior Minister of Pakistan, the Chief of Staff of the Pakistan Army have all been asserting that India is behind the troubles, and not just in Baluchistan. Pakistan has blamed the troubles in Swat, the explosions at the Police Academy in Lahore, even the attack on the Sri Lankan cricketers on India. And here is our Prime Minister signing a Joint Statement incorporating this “unilateral view”.

The Prime Minister told the Lok Sabha that he had categorically told the Prime Minister of Pakistan that India had nothing to do with the troubles in Baluchistan, etc. As that was the case, what was the difficulty in adding one sentence after that “unilateral view” of the Pakistan Prime Minister? Why could just a few words not have been added to record, “In response, the Prime Minister of India said that India had nothing to do with the troubles in Baluchistan or any other areas of Pakistan”?

But the Government and its backers were not done. In both the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha, they invoked me to explain the reference to “Baluchistan and other areas” in the Joint Statement! Had I not said in Parliament, they demanded, had I not written that Pakistan will desist only when we acquire the capacity to do a Kashmir to Pakistan in Pakistan? Had I not said that Pakistan itself was presenting us opportunities in Baluchistan, Baltistan, POK, etc.? Had I not said, they asked, “Not an eye for an eye, not a tooth for a tooth. For an eye, both eyes. For a tooth, the whole jaw”? How can you now object to the reference to Baluchistan in the Statement? they demanded.

What importance these spokesmen confer on me! That two Prime Ministers should be moved to make a reference to matters just because of what I had said. I might as well say all that again. After all, that is exactly the view I hold. And may be, by my saying it again, in the next Joint Statement they will refer to me by name!!

Faithful drafting

To attribute all these things to “bad drafting” is worse than disingenuous. No official, certainly not a Foreign Secretary who has served the country with great distinction in the most delicate assignments for decades, would have slipped up on a document as important as a Joint Statement of two Prime Ministers. Quite obviously, someone whose command he could not disregard would have told him to agree to the words which we now find in the Joint Statement.

Moreover, the words faithfully reflect the convictions on which the Prime Minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh, has been proceeding all these years. When the Joint Statement puts the victim of Pakistan’s terrorism – that is, India – at par with the perpetrator of that terrorism – that is, Pakistan – it does so in furtherance of his oft-expressed view that Pakistan is a victim of terrorism. When this Joint Statement records, “Both Prime Ministers recognized that dialogue is the only way forward. Action on terrorism should not be linked to the composite dialogue process and these should not be bracketed,” the Statement does no more than once again reaffirm what Dr. Manmohan Singh pledged in the statement he signed with President Musharraf in April 2005, namely that the two of them “would not allow terrorism to impede the peace process.”

Characteristic

But red herrings are the well-practiced device. The Government has signed the End Use Monitoring Agreement with the US. It maintains, with the same disingenuousness, that, in fact, the Agreement precludes the United States from unilateral inspections of equipment it supplies – that the venue and timing of the inspections shall be determined by India. This is how the Prime Minister put it in the Lok Sabha: “There is no provision – I repeat, there is no provision – for any unilateral action by the United States side with regard to inspection or related matters. India has the sovereign right to jointly decide, including through joint consultations, the verification procedure. Any verification has to follow a request; it has to be on a mutually-acceptable date and at a mutually acceptable venue. There is no provision for on-site inspections or granting of access to any military site or sensitive areas.”

The US supplies F-16 fighters. What will we do? Bring them for display for display and inspection to the India Gate? The US supplies some optical devices for our Air Force’s aircraft. What will we do? Take them out of the aircraft for them to be inspected at some civilian venue?

The fact is that American officials – Condoleezza Rice, Nicholas Burns, and others – had repeatedly assured the US Congress that the Administration would ensure, what they called fall-back safeguards. That is, if the US was not satisfied with the inspections that were carried out by the IAEA, the agreements to be signed with India would ensure that India would give access to US inspectors to inspect the equipment and materials which had come from the US. And the 123 Agreement specifically provided for this – all that it did was to replace the word “inspectors” by the word “experts”. India pledged under that Agreement to “facilitate” the visits of those “experts”.

The End Use Monitoring Agreement merely operationalizes that pledge, and enlarges it to cover all sensitive supplies from the US. That is how the US Assistant Secretary of State, Philip Crawley said that this new Agreement is part of the understandings arrived at during the negotiations of the Nuclear Deal. But we are to swallow, “mutually acceptable date and venue.”

The device is even more evident in regard to the Prime Minister’s new observation in regard to the transfer of enrichment and reprocessing technologies. Throughout the discussions on the Nuclear Deal, when persons like me read out specific provisions of the 1954 US Act, of the Hyde Act, Government spokesman maintained, “But those are laws of the US. We are not bound by them.” The question was: “Is the US Government bound by them? Will US companies that will be exporting materials and reactors and technologies to India be bound by them?”

Persons like me read out the specific provisions of US laws as well as the repeated affirmations of President Bush, Condoleezza Rice and others in which they pledged that India would not be given the processing and enrichment technologies, and that the US Government would work with other members of the NSG to ensure that they also would not make such technologies available to India. But, “No, we are not bound by US laws or what US officials say… ‘Full” means full…”

And now see what the Prime Minister has slipped in. Responding to the concerns which members had expressed about restrictions that seem likely on transfer of enrichment and reprocessing technologies to India, the Prime Minister told the Lok Sabha:

“…our Government is fully committed to the achievement of full international civil nuclear co-operation. Consistent with this objective in September last year, India has secured a clean, and I repeat we secured a clean exemption from the Nuclear Suppliers Group, one that was India specific. At that time also, there were attempts to make a distinction but we got a clean exemption which means that the Nuclear Suppliers Group consisting of 45 countries has agreed to transfer all technologies which are consistent with their national law.”

Did you notice the last seven words -- “which are consistent with their national law”? But, exactly as persons like me had pointed out at the time, the US laws – the 1954 Act, the Hyde Act, the new Act passed in October 2008 approving the 123 Agreement – prohibit the US from transferring such technologies and they bind the US Government to work with other members of the Nuclear Suppliers Group to ensure that they also refrain from transferring such technologies.

That is the device: do what you will; present everyone with a fait accompli; and slip in a few words every now and then to establish that you have done nothing which you have not already said you would do!

Just the trailer

Each step is leading to the next one. The Joint Statement which the Prime Minister has signed with the Prime Minister of Pakistan and the disastrous concessions which he has made through it, are not a case of bad drafting. They are what the conductor – the US – finds convenient. We should, therefore, open our eyes to what is coming: pressures to withdraw over troops from Siachin; pressures to grant “autonomy” to Kashmir… All this simply because the US, dependent as it is on Pakistan today, has, to get Pakistan to curb the terrorists along its Afghan border, to deliver to Pakistan what the latter has not been will to get on its own.

Open your eyes now. No use wailing after the deeds are done.

Combating Terrorism -II

Arun Shourie
�A State that�s patronising terrorists should wake up to the consequences; in any case its immediate neighbours must�

* Corresponding to the four ��don�ts�� are six ��do�s��: Believe what the ideologues and organisations of the terrorists say. The one thing for which ideologues and organisations can be credited is that they are absolutely explicit about their aims and objectives. The fault -- the fatal fault -- is that of liberal societies: to this day they continue to shut their eyes to what these organisations proclaim to be their aim: domination, conquest, conversion of the ��land of war�� into the ��land of peace,�� that is the land which is at peace because it is under their heel -- exactly as they had shut their eyes to Hitler in the 1930s and to Stalin later. Read their press, reflect over their books and pamphlets, and act in time -- that is, before they have wreaked the havoc they proclaim they will.

* To combat a belief-system One must have a thorough knowledge of the scriptures of that ideology: during the early 1980s, propagandists start asserting, ��Sikhism is closer to Islam than to Hinduism;�� how can one counter the poison unless one has deep and intimate knowledge of the Granth Sahib, unless one knows what the Gurus fought for and against whom they fought? Commentator after commentator has been referring to the Taliban as Deobandis, he has been recounting how they were minted at the Binauri madrasa in Karachi. But unless we know what the Dar ul Uloom in Deoband has been churning out we will be easily deflected from grasping what has been forged in those factories of hatred.

* Similarly, unless we have liberated ourselves from the shackles of political correctness sufficiently to broadcast what these religious seminaries have put out, and are putting out to this day, how will we awaken citizens to the danger that faces them?

* Go by what the scripture as a whole says, not by what a stray passage plucked from it says - what will determine the outcome is the mind which the scripture, the tradition creates; and this will be determined by the teaching as a whole, not by a stray passage.

* Go by the plain meaning of the scripture, not by the construction that apologists and commentators contrive to put on it: again, it is by the plain meaning of the scripture that the faithful will proceed, not by the convolutions of some liberal.

* Go by what those who are recognised by that group as authorities say about the ideology -- the CPSU in Stalin�s Russia, the ulema in Islamic groups and States; not by what some columnist or retired politician says. Often great effort is expended in securing press statements that support the anti-terrorist campaign -- on occasion even a fatwa has been procured to that effect. These are useless.

Those who issue them are dismissed as ��sarkari sants��, their statements are rejected as command performances. This rejection reflex is deeply, and consciously instilled into members of such groups, indeed into the communities themselves. If someone who is not a member of the group -- if he is not a Communist, if he is not a Muslim -- his critique will be rejected automatically: what else can you expect from that ��agent of imperialism�� in one case, from that ��enemy of the faith�� in the other.

On the other hand, no believer will raise questions of any consequence -- neither about the basic approach of the group nor about, to take the current context, the individual act of destruction.

If he does so, his critique will be dismissed as swiftly, and as much by reflex: ��he has crossed the barricades,�� that was the refrain about fellow-travelers who at last spoke up; ��he is an apostate�� -- that has been the refrain in Islamic societies for centuries about any believer who has dared to raise even the slightest question that touches fundamentals.

To gauge the true content of that ideology and its potential for evil, see what these authorities do when they are in power: to ascertain what Communism actually means, do not be lulled by the act that Communists have to put up in a free and open polity such as ours; see what their gods did in Stalin�s Russia, in Mao�s China; to gauge what a religion portends, see what their rulers did in medieval India, what Iran went through under Imam Khomeini, what the Taliban have been doing in Afghanistan.

Terrorism is just a weapon, it is just one among an array of weapons. To expect that by killing one band of terrorists, smashing one network, or even by reclaiming one country from the grip of an extremist band, one has taken care of the problem is suicidal. The aim of the terrorist is not to trigger one explosion, his fulfillment is not in carrying out one assassination. The explosion and assassination are instruments. The terrorist is himself an instrument, he sees himself as an instrument -- of history in Marxism-Leninism, of the Will of Allah in Islam.

For that reason to think that by giving in over Chechnya, by making concessions to Hamas, by handing Kashmir to them, one will effectively deal with ��the causes of Muslim anger�� is to play the fool. For the believer the ��problem�� is not Chechnya or Kashmir. The ��problem�� is that aeons having passed, the world has not yet accepted his creed.

His object is not the real estate of Chechnya or Kashmir, or Jerusalem. His object -- indeed, the duty which has been ordained for him -- is to convert the land of war, that is the land the people of which have not yet submitted to that creed, into one in which that creed prevails. The believer cannot remain true to his faith unless he prosecutes the war till this consummation is achieved. Ideologues and propagandists have a well-practiced division of labour in this regard.

The directors of the ideology intoxicate believers with visions of how affairs will be ultimately -- of how total domination will be secured over the whole world. The propagandists addressing the rest of the world, on the other hand, focus a narrow beam -- on the next, single objective: Palestine, Kashmir, Chechnya. The beam is as blindingly intense as it is narrow: the aim is to convince ordinary folk that if only this one concession is made, all problems will cease. This focus and suggestion is accompanied by a systematic campaign -- through front-organisations, intellectuals, fellow travelers -- that raises an ��intellectual�� debate, and thereby foments doubts in the minds of the victims about the moral rights of the issue.

The assault has two prongs. On the one hand violence and terror: these aim at tiring out the victims by inflicting death and carnage. Simultaneously, doubts are fomented in the victims developed about the rightness of their cause -- these ripen into a rationale for capitulation: why not yield a bit on Kashmir?, after all, this one gesture will ensure peace, and we will be free to go our way after that; in any case, the world is not entirely convinced of our case... Victory on that one item in its pocket, the group commences the same sequence on the next target: and doing so is but natural, for the issue -- Kashmir, Chechnya -- was just an instrument.

BELIEVERS will inevitably come to internalise this mindset -- of unremitting violence � whenever the ideology has the following ingredients:

* Reality is simple;

* It has been revealed to one person;

* That person has put it in one Book;

* Every syllable in that Book is divine, it is the ultimate truth; anything that contradicts what is in the Book is not just false, it is a device of the Devil, a device to mislead and waylay the believer; nothing that is not in the Book is of consequence;

* The Book is difficult to fathom;

* Therefore, believers require an intermediary -- the Party, the Church, the ulema;

* Once all humans embrace the way of life that the Book prescribes, eternal peace and prosperity will break out; unless all embrace it, that dawn will not break;

* It is, therefore, the duty of that intermediary to invite you to accept the Faith;

* The truth of the message is so vivid that if, in spite of the invitation, you do not embrace the faith, that is itself proof that you are inherently evil; it is, therefore, the duty of that intermediary, indeed it is the duty of every ordinary adherent to put you out of harm�s way: for you are then blocking the march of History -- in Marxism-Leninism, you are blocking the Will of God, you and your obstinacy are thwarting the dawn, and manifestly you are doing so because of the evil in you;

* As this is a duty ordained, it is but right that the agent use whatever means are required to ensure that the Cause prevails. Unless the rest of the world has come to consist of docile imbeciles, these propositions inevitably entail violence -- the forms of violence that come to mind when we talk of terrorism being just the weapon of choice for a particular circumstance, a particular locale.

THE faith has three further ingredients:

* It forecloses alternatives to inevitable, protracted, indeed eternal, and violent struggle. Allah, for instance, repeatedly declares that unbelievers are congenitally perverse, that nothing the faithful can possibly do will bring them round -- for, He says, I have Myself made them turn their faces away from Me; indeed, He tells believers, I have deliberately put them in your way to test you. They have but one aim, He tells believers: to turn you away from your faith, to beguile you into becoming like them, to deceive you into giving up your duty.

* It drugs the faithful into believing that victory is not just inevitable, it is imminent. Recall, the ��imminent collapse of capitalism�� theses that were the staple of Communist pamphleteering.

* But as victory eludes the believers, the Faith provides rationalizations, indeed consolations for failure. It conditions the believer -- in this case the terrorist -- to persevere in either event, in the face of defeat as much as upon succeeding.

* When he succeeds, he is fortified in the belief that Jehovah in the Old Testament, Allah in the Quran, History in the Marxist texts, is on his side. When he fails, the indoctrination leads him to believe that Jehovah, that Allah, is just testing him -- God wants to assess whether his faith in Him will falter in the face of the setback. In the alternate ��secular�� religion, the adherent is conditioned to believe that, as History moves dialectically, the setback will itself create the conditions for eventual success.

Faced with such indoctrination, two things are imperative:

* Know the opiate, broadcast it before hand, and thereby provide the spectacles through which the believer will view the event;

* Having forged the spectacles, do not just sit back and hope that the believers will see events through them. In the wake of the engagement, especially when the terrorist group has been subjected to a setback, show up the hollowness of the rationalizations that the believers had internalised. Of course, the group will have its ways of shutting out the evidence of defeat. But even as it does so, it will be weakening the foundations of falsehood on which its edifice is built.

Till the other day, Pakistani intellectuals and ulema were projecting the Taliban as one of the great successes -- of the Army and the ISI who had secured ��strategic depth�� for Pakistan, of Islam -- for rulership of pure, idealist youngsters had been established, a rulership that the people loved as it had brought peace, as it had pulled them back from the abyss of immorality and licentiousness.

That was the refrain -- day in and day out for years. And then suddenly Pakistan was being told that joining the campaign to crush the very same Taliban was a masterstroke. The somersaults that the Comintern used to execute seemed so clever at the time. Soon, they delegitimized the ideology itself.

The lethal potential of these ideologies is now compounded by the fact that States such as Pakistan have adopted terrorism as an instrument of State policy. Musharraf has said in so many words, ��Jehad is an instrument of State policy.�� For such States this is a particularly attractive proposition: it is war on the cheap. The ideology that goes with adopting such means, the spread of the gun-culture that invariably accompanies such a strategy, eventually boomerangs -- as the Talibanisation of Pakistan shows. But in the meanwhile the decision of a State to adopt terrorism as an instrument is certain to inflict enormous costs on its neighbours.

What was said of Mussolini�s goons is doubly true of terrorists: ��they were nothing without the State, but with it they were unstoppable.�� In a shrunken world, all countries are the ��neighbours�� of such a State -- as the US has been reminded by the 11th September attacks. The State that patronises such governments or States should wake up to the consequences its patronage will foment. In any case, the immediate neighbours must.

Often a State can end up inflicting grave injury on another even when it does not bear active hostility towards its neighbour. For instance, the intelligence agencies and sections of the Army of Bangladesh are so closely linked to their counterparts in Pakistan that leaders and cadre of groups such as ULFA operate in complete safety from them. Bhutan and Myanmar exemplify a different sort of situation: the administrative grip of these countries over their own territory is so loose that terrorists operating in India are able to carve out their own areas of influence in those countries.

AS important as getting at the State which patronises terrorists is to get at their networks. Terrorists have established numerous fronts: mosques, madrasas, ��research institutions��, ��charity foundations��. The range of persons and organisations against whom the US and other countries had to move after the 11th September attacks -- from those that had been involved in managing finances to those who had been providing safe houses -- gave a glimpse of how the networks, even of just one brand of terrorism, now spread across the globe. Indeed, one of the devices they have mastered is how to use religion and ��religious bodies�� as fronts: Bhindranwale�s conversion of the Golden Temple into a headquarters for terror, eventually into a fortress; the use of charities in Pakistan for raising laundering funds for jihadi groups; the orchestrated appeals from across the globe that the Americans suspend bombing during Ramzan...

For a society to survive, it must have the gumption to tear these veils apart, expose the fronts for what they are, and demolish them.

Terrorism constitutes a threat to all: what is being inflicted on one country today can be inflicted on another tomorrow. It is worse than imprudent, therefore, for a State to consort with States that patronise, finance, train, arm, give sanctuary to terrorists.

For the same reason, and as the evil are so well knit, States should share their resources, in particular intelligence to combat terrorism. That is what should be. In the real world, a country such as India must remember that no one else is going to fight our war for us. For fighting that war the sine qua non is: when the battle has been won, do not forget those who delivered you -- as, to our shame and misfortune, we in India are in the habit of doing.

Part I - What if Osama were caught in India? A debate would explode: should he be tried under evidence act? POTO?

Indian Express
December 19, 2001

Combating Terrorism I

Arun Shourie

What if Osama were caught in India? A debate would explode: should he be tried under evidence act? POTO?

From our experience over the last 20 years the following emerge as self-evident axioms.

*
The technology of inflicting large-scale violence is becoming easier to obtain, and -- per quotient of lethality -- less and less expensive. This in turn yields three lemmas:
*
The target country has to be equipped to counter the entire spectrum of violence: to take the current examples from the United States -- from aircraft being used as missiles to anthrax;
*
It is almost impossible in an open society to block a determined lot from acquiring the technology they want by blocking the technology itself -- the only practical way is to be a leap ahead of the technology the terrorist acquires;

All this is certain to cost the target country a great deal -- but that is the price one has to pay to survive in the world of today; to cavil at it is no better than an elderly couple that grudges the locks they have to put on doors in a city marred by crimes against the elderly.

As the technology of violence has become more and more lethal and as it has been miniaturised, the final act can be done by just a handful, indeed just by an individual acting alone. That individual can bide his time. He can choose his place. He has to succeed just once. For that reason, it is not possible to completely insulate a country from the depredations of the terrorist. Superior intelligence is obviously the key to making things more difficult for the terrorist. But just as important is what the targeted society does in the wake of the attack: overwhelming, and visibly overwhelming reprisal alone will deter others from emulating the terrorist who gets through. Potential recruits, as well as the controllers of organisations and countries that backed him, must be personally touched by the retaliatory measures.

While the final act can be executed by even a single individual, terrorism as a means cannot do without an extensive network: from nurseries that indoctrinate youngsters and forge them into lobotomised killing machines, safe-houses, couriers, informers, suppliers of weapons and explosives, to those who will carry on businesses to earn the money needed for ammunition and arms, and the rest.

By now there are very many groups that have taken to terrorism. They are increasingly intertwined: in India, as well as the world over -- look at the range of locations from which persons were picked up in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The knitting together comes about in many ways. Groups in India are encouraged by agencies hostile to India to coordinate their activities: for instance, the ISI has been putting Naxalite groups, the various groups operating in the Northeast in touch with each other.

Often the groups are brought together by ��natural�� factors: for instance, both groups may be running drugs -- they may become couriers, suppliers, customers of each other; they may be securing arms for an arms supplier -- and through him they may get to know each other; they may be using the same agents or routes for money laundering....

Among the technologies the terrorists have mastered is that of using the instruments of mass media. They use these to arouse sympathy for their cause -- look at the shrewd way in which Hamas in Palestine, the Taliban in Afghanistan generate revulsion at what their opponents do by giving selective access to Western media to photograph civilian casualties. They are as adept at using the mass media as Greens and other activists for creating the echo-effect that so often leads policy makers to desist from taking stern measures.

��They are wrong-headed,�� many in Punjab used to say of Bhindranwale and his men, ��but you can�t deny their idealism, their readiness to die for what they think is right.�� The reality is altogether different. Terrorism has become lucrative business: in the Northeast, for instance, joining one of the terrorist organisations is a sure way to rake in a minor fortune -- the proceeds from the ��taxes�� the organisations collect, the ransom they extract from kidnapping. The terrorists strive hard to cover their loot under the cloak of ideological, even idealist rhetoric: recall the religious rant of the terrorists in Punjab, and the reality behind it -- what they were doing to young girls across the state, the properties that their leaders had amassed. Just as the terrorists strain to hide their loot, the State and society must bare the truth about them.

To de-fang the terrorist the country has to move on many fronts: their sources of money, those who give them facilities to stay and stage their operations, their sources of weapons and explosives, the network of their couriers. And the moves against these multiple targets have to be carried through simultaneously. For these measures to succeed, all institutions of the State have to act in the same direction, indeed they have to work in concert. For the police to capture terrorists and for the courts to function the way our courts do, for them to go on using norms devised for quieter times, for the Army to track down caches of explosives while the Customs men let in RDX -- is to hand victory to the terrorists.

The lemma is inescapable: we cannot have a flabby State, a somnolent society and a super-efficient anti-terrorist operation. That no one gets convicted for the Bombay blasts for eight years is certain to encourage scores to sign up. Customs officers who take bribes for letting in gold one day are certain to overlook arms consignments tomorrow. Police personnel who let Bangladeshis smuggle themselves across the border in return for bribes will constitute no obstacle to agents of the ISI making their way into the country.

Imagine what would happen if Osama bin Laden slips out of Afghanistan. If he made his way into Iran or China, the international alliance would be confident that he can be executed without any one knowing. If he went to one of the Central Asian countries, the allies would be confident that, if they wanted him for trial, he would be handed over. If he escaped into Pakistan, the allies would be confident that Pakistan could deliver either solution -- hand him over or have his vehicle fall off a cliff in an accident.

But what if he escaped into India? Acrimonious debates would explode. Should he be tried under the Indian Evidence Act or under the provisions of POTO? By ordinary courts or a Special Court? Is the Government not acting under American dictates as to what we should do? His rights as an undertrial... Another hijacking... fulsome focus on the wailing of relatives of the passengers... Released in exchange for letting the passengers go...

Not just the formal institutions of the State, society must act to that end -- that is, the overwhelming number of individuals must be acting in concert independently of or in support of what the State is doing. The State apparatus on its own can no longer stem the Bangladeshis� demographic invasion. It can only be staunched by creating that atmosphere in the Northeast which will convince the potential infiltrator that he better stay away from this region, as it is hostile territory, a territory in which he is certain to lose life and limb.

Not just society in general, the ordinary, individual citizen too must be acting in concert with the authorities. The passenger who kicks up a fuss when he is frisked at an airport, the house-owner who insists that being advised to inform the neighbourhood police station about the new tenant is an intrusion into his private affairs -- such individuals unwittingly help terrorism: on the one hand, the terrorist has an easier time establishing the safe-house from which he will carry out his next explosion; on the other, the average policeman is discouraged from doing his assigned duty.

For any of this to happen, the balance of discourse has to be reversed, literally reversed in India. Under POTO, the terrorists� lawyer is to have the right to meet him during interrogations. Under it a policeman doing his duty can be tried on the charge that he misused his authority and he can be imprisoned for up to two years -- even if he is not convicted in the end, rushing from court to court, as the Punjab policemen are doing today, will be enough. Such are the provisions, and yet the Ordinance is being pilloried out of shape. Esoteric distinctions are being made: the Ordinance provides that the terrorist�s property can be seized. ��But that should be property acquired by him from the proceeds of terrorism. It would be unfair to seize property that he or his relatives may have acquired by legitimate means.�� How will we fight terrorism with this mindset?

Temporary expedients will boomerang: giving handsome amounts to the SULFA cadre, giving them jobs, allowing them to retain weapons -- these steps have resulted in Assam now having not one set of extortionists -- ULFA -- but two. For the same reason, were the USA, for instance, to do what news reports suggest it is considering doing -- delivering a package of 7 billion dollars to a society and State as heavily Talibanised as Pakistan -- it would only be compounding the problem -- for neighbours of Pakistan in the immediate future, and for itself eventually. Events have repeatedly thrown up this lesson, and yet few heed it. One reason surely is that those who have a resource -- say, money -- or are particularly good at one thing -- say, technology -- instinctively think that that particular resource is what will do the trick.

The terrorist must be defeated at every turn, in every engagement. While contending with the IRA youth, Mrs. Thatcher rightly said, ��Publicity is the oxygen on which the terrorist lives.�� Success is the food on which he multiplies: the strikes against the World Trade Center Towers will live in terrorist mythology for decades, they will lure recruits to lethal organizations for long. If the terrorist is able to execute an operation successfully, he, his organisation, their sponsors must be subjected to punitive retaliation of such an order that all of them down the line feel the costs of having inflicted the violence they did. In this matter, we must remember:

There is no kind way to prosecute a war; war is death and destruction, it is blood and gore. Those who recoil from what war entails should mobilise the people at the first sign of extremist ideology so that the terrorists are forestalled, and the State does not ultimately have to move against them -- in fact, the kind who shout the loudest once war begins are the very kind who in the preceding years have lent a verisimilitude of legitimacy to the fabrications of such groups.

No war has been won by deploying ��minimum force�� -- the quantum that liberals concede when the terrorist leaves them no option but to allow that something just has to be done. Wars are won by over-powering the opponent with over-whelming force. And so it must be in the case of terrorism, and of the States that sponsor it: not ��an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth��; for an eye, both eyes, for a tooth, the whole jaw.

The next lesson too is so obvious that its disregard can only be taken to be deliberate: it is a fatal error to judge what needs to be done in an area or in times infested by terrorists, by standards honed from normal places and quieter times. No judge, no human rights organization that today gives lectures about the conduct of the Police in Punjab has set out how the Police was to prosecute the war when the entire judicial system had literally evaporated: magistrates were in mortal dread of terrorists, witnesses -- even those who had seen those dearest to them being gunned down in front of their eyes -- would not, they could not come forth to testify without risking their lives. Far from falling prey to such specious assumptions, such habitual hectoring, we should beware of the oft-proclaimed device of extremist groups and movements: to use the instruments of democracy to destroy democracy. We should bear in mind Hitler�s ��legality oath�� -- he had sworn that the Nazis would use only legal means to attain power; he stuck to the oath. We should declare openly: yes, we will heed the rights of terrorists -- but only to the extent to which they heed the rights of their victims.

Their access to arms, to money etc. is important, but even more consequential is the ideology of the terrorists: this is what fires them, by internalizing which they become killing machines; this is what beguiles ordinary by-standers into supporting them. More than anything else, this ideology must be exhumed. To accomplish this, there are four things to shun, and six to do.

Shun pseudo explanations. ��Unemployment, specially among the educated youth�� -- each time terrorism erupts, it is attributed to some figment such as this. Unemployment was no higher in Punjab than elsewhere in the early 1980s. Terrorism erupted there and not in, say, Bihar, because Pakistan saw and seized the opportunity that the lunacy of our local politicians had presented: to gain a leg over the Akalis, the Congress leaders had patronized Bhindranwale; he went out of hand; Pakistan took over the bunch around him.

Similarly, unemployment is no less in Punjab today than it was then, but there is no terrorism -- because Pakistan�s design was crushed. What spurred terrorism in Punjab, what spurs it today in Kashmir, in the Northeast is not unemployment -- but opportunity: we have created an open, unobstructed field for the enemy. A country seeing that the one it views as its enemy has blinkered its eyes, that it has tied its hands, shackled its legs, sealed its lips -- as we have -- shall not let the opportunity pass: victory is at hand, it will convince itself.

For the same reason, shun pseudo-remedies. ��But we must get to the roots of their anger,�� many an analyst writes today. And deduces that India, Israel or Russia just must make some concession or the other on Kashmir, Palestine or Chechnya. But the ��anger�� has not been triggered by issues of this kind. It is the result of indoctrination, its roots lie not in Chechnya and Kashmir but in what is drilled into their wards by madrasas.

Similarly, on the assumption that it is inadequate development which is fueling terrorism in an area -- say, Kashmir or the Northeast -- governments are apt to conclude that the remedy is to pump more money into the region, or give further incentives for industrialists to set up shop there. The money just goes to the terrorists. The people, and even more so the rulers of the area, sense that terrorism brings lucre: they develop an immediate, mercenary reason for keeping the area in ferment. Crushing defeat, not more money, is the remedy.

Beware of rationalizers. They come in two sets: the liberals, and the professional propagandists. The latters� efforts are well known, though liberal societies invariably underestimate the sophistication of their techniques, as well as their gall: in reading their tracts, for instance, the average person is liable to think that he has insulated himself by discounting their claims a bit; confident that he has taken the requisite prophylactic, he becomes all the more susceptible to the 100 per cent fabrication.

The liberal apologists are much more destructive: they are more numerous; as they are ��people like us,�� their formulations and rationalizations are more readily believed. ��No religion teaches the killing of innocents,�� says the liberal apologist today � a cliche that turns on what is meant by the word ��innocent��, a meaning the liberal never spells out with reference to the text. For instance, is the person to whom the doctrine of that religion or of that group has been offered, and who does not embrace it, ��innocent��? Innocent not in the eyes of the liberal apologist, but in the eyes of that religion or text. ��God says in the holy book,�� the liberal bleats, ���To you your religion, to me mine��; God declares, �There is no compulsion in religion�.�� But that is but a microscopic fraction of what the text says. Nor does the liberal ever recall the very specific context in which such stray phrases occur in the text. Recall the efforts of the apologists for Communism to whitewash the reality with essays about the �Early Marx�, about the �Paris Manuscripts�.

Shun political correctness. Few things have prevented the West from waking up in time to the dangers that Islamic terrorism today constitutes for it as notions of what is politically correct. These notions have stifled scholarship, they have stifled discourse. They have led the West to shut its eyes to the ideology by which the terrorists were being fired up. The verbal terrorism by which notions of what is correct and what is not the dominant intellectual group in India -- the leftists -- has enforced the norms has disabled the ruling groups, and, through them, the country, to the point of paralysis. Standing up to that verbal terrorism, liberating discourse from those notions is the first requisite of fighting the war against terrorism in India.

Part II - �A State that�s patronising terrorists should wake up to the consequences; in any case its immediate neighbours must�

Indian Express
December 12, 2001