Official India’s attitude towards West Asia displays a curious tendency to be several steps behind time. This is a region of unending turmoil, today the epicentre of a confrontation that could engulf the entire world. This much has been evident since at least 2003, when the U.S. began gearing up for its invasion of Iraq, the final act in a saga of destruction that would reduce one of the Arab world’s most viable states to a pathetic state of internal meltdown. For weeks on end, the Indian government dawdled, rather than take a stand. It sat through two weeks and a few days of the invasion, before finally issuing a statement in Hindi that cleverly sought to obscure the distinction between “condemning” and “deploring” the thoroughly illegitimate war of destruction. And it urged the withdrawal of invading forces from Iraq on the precise day that U.S. forces were entering Baghdad.
It is necessary to recall this bit of recent history since the habitual tendency to delay taking a stand has not changed with the UPA government. On July 20, the Ministry of External Affairs issued a statement declaring Israel’s actions “unjustified”. This might have seemed a timely response to the Israeli military’s destructive rampage through Lebanon, which had wrecked most of that country’s civilian infrastructure and killed in excess of 300 civilians. But no, the Indian government’ statement it transpired, bore reference to the trail of destruction that Israeli marauders had left in Gaza. It was at least three weeks since Israel had bombed Gaza’s only power plant, abducted most elected representatives of the Palestinian people, and ground the administrative offices of the Palestinian National Authority to rubble. And while the Indian government agonised over the appropriate response to these crimes against humanity, the Israeli killing machine had moved on to open another front in Lebanon. It was not as if the slaughter in the Gaza had ceased. It was just that it had acquired a “business as usual” dimension and been knocked off the world headlines, since the massacre in Lebanon had momentarily acquired greater dimensions.
A few days later, the criminal U.S. administration of George Bush sent its principal diplomat, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, to West Asia to find a way to end the bloodshed in Lebanon. In what was intended to be a conciliatory gesture towards bruised Arab sensibilities, Rice visited the beleaguered Lebanese capital of Beirut first. She met with the Prime Minister, the speaker of parliament, and other significant participants in the coalition of sectarian groups that is the ruling arrangement in Lebanon. She did not receive, by any account, a single word of sustenance and was sent on her way with the unequivocal demand that Israel stop its aggression and a reconstruction effort be set underway before the terms of a final peace settlement could be discussed.
The Lebanese perception in this sense was congruent with the global commonsense, that for a durable peace to be negotiated, the immediate provocation of Israel’s wanton military brutality should be reined in. Uniquely however, the U.S. had a different perception. Obviously believing that the deafening sound of missiles and bombs wrecking the civilian infrastructure of a country would concentrate minds, the U.S. was insisting that a ceasefire would only be the final outcome of a comprehensive peace settlement. The Lebanese were under duress, being stampeded into signing a peace agreement with Israel – much like the shameful documents of surrender authored by Egypt in 1980 and Jordan in 1994 – that would take the country out of the Arab orbit and make it an accomplice in the cultural genocide of Palestine.
It was already clear by the time of the Rice visit though, that the U.S.-Israeli stratagem was faltering. Much store had been set by this axis of evil on the sectarian groups within Lebanon’s political mosaic rebelling against the Shi’a militant group, Hezbollah, that had sparked off the crisis by its cross-border raid into Israel to kill six Israeli soldiers and capture two prisoners of war. Initial rumbles of discontent from the Maronite Christian leadership within Lebanon seemed to indicate that the game-plan may bear fruit. But during Rice’s visit to Beirut, when she met the Sunni prime minister, the Shi’a speaker of parliament and leaders of other factions within Lebanon’s unique mosaic of confessional politics, she was unequivocally told that the Israeli aggression was perceived across all schisms, as a national rather than a sectarian problem.
The reasons are not far to seek. The religious factions in Lebanese politics are all too aware of the disastrous consequences that disunity can have at this juncture. Memories of the country’s 15 year-long civil war, punctuated by the brutal Israeli invasion of 1982 and the destruction of much of its capital city, are still raw.
Then, the bloodletting was only ended by the 1990 Taif accord sponsored by the Arab League. The conditions both implicit and explicit under which the truce came into effect have never been a secret. Syria would under-write the peace in Lebanon and honour the National Accord of 1943, which was the foundational document of the brittle peace between the country’s different confessional groupings. Lebanese Christians had lost their social, economic and above all, numerical preeminence since the 1943 compact assured them the presidency of the republic in perpetuity. Natural growth and the influx of Palestinian victims of Israeli ethnic cleansing in 1948 and subsequent years, had altered the demographic balances. But if the Taif accord committed itself to honouring the 1943 compact, it was only on the essential condition that the resistance would be kept alive.
There would in other words, be no peace treaty with Israel without a broader settlement of all issues of concern to the Arab world. Uniquely for a process of national reconciliation, the Lebanese state agreed in 1990 to an abridgment of its powers, granting Hezbollah the autonomy in southern Lebanon to sustain the resistance. This was in part a recognition of the stellar role the Shi’a militant group – which operates as a full-fledged parliamentary party in Lebanese politics – had played in sustaining a sense of civil society and nationality in the south of the country through the years of Israeli aggression and occupation. As Rafiq al-Hariri, then the Prime Minister of Lebanon, put it in 1996: “The resistance...is not made by the Lebanese government. It is made by the people. All we are saying is that the people have the right to fight the occupation”.
Today, both the U.S. and Israel seek to portray Hezbollah as the terrorist proxy of hostile governments in Syria and Iran. This self-serving narrative overlooks the close links that Hezbollah has managed to forge with all sections of Lebanese national life. It is for precisely this reason that the U.S. and Israel, after wheedling and coercing the U.N. Security Council into passing resolution 1559 demanding the disarming of Hezbollah and the extension of the Lebanese government’s writ over the entire country, have been unsure about the means available to enforce it. An effort to deploy the Lebanese national army in disarming the Hezbollah would, absent a broader settlement in the region, fail to muster up a political consensus. Even if the battle were to be joined, it would be an unequal fight since Hezbollah, as the most powerful military force in Lebanon, commanding the allegiance of its largest confessional grouping, would easily prevail.
Hezbollah fought the Lebanese general elections of 2005 with a slate of predominantly Shi’a candidates. But it draws the unswerving support of the Palestinian diaspora in the country. And the powerful Druze chieftain, Walid Junblatt, has also allied himself with Hezbollah in the ruling arrangement in Beirut. Further political sustenance has come from Michel Aoun, a former chief of staff of the Lebanese army and a Maronite Christian who has credibility and respect across all confessional groupings. Both Junblatt and Aoun have long opposed the influence exerted by Syria in Lebanese affairs and in allying themselves closely with Hezbollah, they have effectively rubbished the self-serving myth that the U.S. and Israel have sought to propagate.
Unfortunately, some of the more influential Arab states -- motivated both by loyalty to the U.S. aid-giver and apprehension over growing Iranian geopolitical influence – have chosen to buy the western myth. Foreign Ministers of the Arab League were called into session at Cairo on the fourth day of the offensive against Lebanon. In an obvious effort to set the tone for this meeting, King Abdullah of Jordan joined President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt in issuing a statement putting the onus of finding a peace on Hezbollah. Its brand of “adventurism” did not serve “Arab interests” according to the joint declaration, which explicitly warned Hezbollah to steer clear of any actions that could plunge the region into “uncalculated confrontations”. Concurrently, a spokesman for the Saudi Arabian ruling family, came out with a denunciation of Hezbollah’s “uncalculated adventures” which had ostensibly exposed “Arab nations... to grave dangers without these nations having a say in the matter.”
In compliance with a U.S. demarche, the Saudi foreign minister read out a statement at the Arab League session, demanding that Hezbollah cease its “unexpected, inappropriate and irresponsible acts” of aggression against Israel. Saudi Arabia was joined in this demand by Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, the Gulf states and the Palestinian authority, represented not by its elected parliament but by the increasingly isolated president, Abu Mazen. Ranged on the other side, were Syria, Algeria, Yemen and Libya, among others.
Two weeks on, with the Hezbollah resistance showing no signs of crumbling, the mood in the Arab camp was somewhat different. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia authored a personal communication to the U.S. president, delivered by his kinsman and foreign minister, reportedly “beseeching” him to end the Israeli aggression. The Jordanian foreign minister declared that his country would support a ceasefire and the deployment of an international force in southern Lebanon to “dislodge” the Hezbollah from the strategic positions it had occupied. And reverting to the brand of diplomacy that it is most comfortable with, Saudi Arabia committed itself to provide a sum of $ 1.5 billion for the reconstruction of Lebanon.
Israel was by this time reconciled to the strategic reality that its use of air and artillery power had failed to complete the job of decimating the Hezbollah. Leaflets were being profusely dropped in southern Lebanon, warning the civilian population to leave, since Israel intended to convert the entire region into a free-fire zone where nothing would be safe. Israel’s chief of defence staff, Lt-Gen Dan Halutz – who is effectively persona non grata in several countries because of the threat of prosecution for war crimes under universal jurisdiction laws – was urging his forces to destroy at least ten buildings in Lebanon for every rocket that Hezbollah fired. And evidence was emerging that Israel had, as during its wars of destruction against Lebanon in 1982, 1993 and 1996, again been using banned incendiary weapons on civilians in the south of the country.
In 1996, the international advocacy group, Human Rights Watch, had recorded powerful and persuasive eyewitness testimony about Israel’s use of white phosphorus weapons -- which when not fatal, cause intense burns and permanent scars – on Lebanese civilians including children. “The available circumstantial evidence of the illegal use of phosphorus, and/or other incendiaries, by Israel against Lebanese civilians during the 1993 events and afterwards is so compelling as to warrant serious investigation and a public response by the Israeli government”, it had observed: “Among other evidence, Human Rights Watch saw several civilians, including children, in southern Lebanon with burns that are likely to have been caused by phosphorus”.
Far from being forced to account for its crimes, Israel has only been given greater licence and leeway to kill and destroy. As Israel presses on with its ground offensive into Lebanon, it is reportedly prepared for a long stay, till the U.S. is able to cobble together an international force that will be empowered to take aggressive enforcement action against Hezbollah. Few countries have yet volunteered troops for this enterprise. And just when the U.S. administration was seeking to step up its mobilisational efforts, the news emerged of the deliberate targeting by Israel of a U.N. observer post in Lebanon. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan has expressed deep anger and called for an investigation into the incident, which has claimed at least four lives. At the time of writing, it seems that some of the casualties could have been Indian personnel on peace-keeping duties with the U.N.
As with Iraq in 2003, India could soon be faced with a request from the U.S. to volunteer troops for the dirty work of policing Israel’s regime of coercion and aggression in West Asia. And unlike then, it is greatly to be hoped that India will respond this time, not with waffling and equivocation, but with a firm and decisive “no”. The more worthwhile and principled foreign policy pursuit would obviously be to rein in the racist outlaw regime of Israel in the cause of justice for Palestine and Lebanon.
Friday, July 28, 2006
Tuesday, July 25, 2006
Israel in Lebanon: focusing minds through bombs and missiles
Over the third weekend of July, television studios in the U.S. were resonant with talk of an apocalyptic struggle of good against evil. Israel had just begun a destructive military rampage in Lebanon, gutting Beirut’s international airport, destroying the country’s electricity grid and throwing transportation networks out of gear. In obvious admiration, Newt Gingrich, the right-wing ideologue and prospective Republican candidate for the U.S. presidency, spoke of these actions as the first salvos of “World War Three”. Joining him in this ascent towards a variety of religious rapture, were news and talk-show hosts in virtually all channels with a tilt towards the right. If the “war on terror” has lost some of the spectral magic that earned the rabid right two significant electoral victories in the U.S., it evidently needs now to be supplanted by an ever more frightening vision.
But for a war that pitted such clearly defined moral categories as good and evil against each other, the line-up of geopolitical forces on either side of World War III remained indeterminate. With the exception of the U.S. and Israel, global public opinion remained firmly on the side of the supposed forces of darkness. And the dynastic regimes of the Arab world, none too firm in their adherence to democracy, stood uneasily on the side of the U.S. This arrangement of pieces on the international checkerboard had altered, though ever so subtly, in the days since the war began. But every minute shift conveyed grim suggestions of unending turmoil in the region.
Though no explicit words of approval were uttered in public, the U.S. was prepared to risk international isolation in resisting any multilateral involvement to curb Israel’s absolute freedom to terrorise its neighbourhood. At the same time, it was prepared with unseemly haste, to rush to unfavourable judgment in all matters involving Israel’s adversaries. Eleven days into the war, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice paid a visit to the region. In a gesture of conciliation towards bruised Arab sentiments, she chose Beirut as her first port of call, expressing sympathy for the Lebanese civilians caught up in a vicious war, but saying nothing that could be construed as disapproval of Israel’s military actions. Rather, she rehearsed yet again, her well-worn line that a ceasefire would be of little substantive value, if it were to be breached within a matter of months. To be of any enduring use, a ceasefire would have to be accompanied by a comprehensive peace that addressed all the fundamental problems of the region. And in identifying the problems that needed immediate attention, Rice proved disinclined to take a broad view. The one problem she had in mind was the pervasive presence and influence of the Hezbollah militia in southern Lebanon, where it had effectively become a “state within a state”, unamenable to central control from Beirut and able to threaten Israel’s northern settlements at will through lethal rocket fire.
The U.S. attitude in effect reverses the commonsense of international diplomacy, which had been articulated the preceding Thursday by U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan. Addressing the U.N. Security Council, Annan paid due obeisance to the U.S. sensibilities, criticising Hezbollah for its “provocative” foray across the border a week before, when two Israeli soldiers were taken prisoner. This action, carried out without the authority of a duly constituted political authority, showed a “reckless disregard for the interests of the government of Lebanon”. But having said all this, Annan was firm in his belief that Israel's “excessive use of force” was completely unwarranted. It did “little or nothing to decrease popular support” for Hezbollah, and made the Lebanese government, whose authority Israel wanted extended to the entire country, a hapless hostage to the actions of a guerrilla force. Staying well within the bounds of diplomacy, Annan chided Israel for instigating a humanitarian crisis that was likely in little time, to engulf upto a million people.
Fundamental to the divergence between the U.S. and the rest of the world are rival perceptions about the conditions under which negotiations should best be conducted. While conceding that there is a large complex of issues to be resolved, Annan’s proposals suggested that negotiations should ideally proceed in a calm and settled atmosphere. With her own interventions, Rice in effect, was articulating the U.S. position that peace talks are most likely to achieve their objective if conducted with the deafening crescendo of bombs and missiles in the background.
From behind the scenes though, another story was emerging in unsubtle leaks: that even as Rice was setting off for her tour of the region, the U.S. had given Israel a clear deadline of a week to complete its military campaign. Beyond that, the U.S. was reportedly, not prepared to hold out the assurance that it would resist the international call for a ceasefire. Whether this conformed to the professional military assessment from the Israeli side was unclear. At a cabinet meeting the day before the Rice visit, Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had reportedly assured his ministerial colleagues that “the diplomatic process” would not be pursued “at the expense of destroying infrastructures of terror”, which would “take a very long time”.
Evidently to ensure that maximal havoc was created in the available time, the U.S. was also, as the New York Times reported on July 22, hastening its deliveries of lethal munitions to Israel. “The decision to quickly ship the weapons to Israel was made with relatively little debate within the Bush administration”, reported the newspaper: “Its disclosure threatens to anger Arab governments and others because of the appearance that the United States is actively aiding the Israeli bombing campaign in a way that could be compared to Iran’s efforts to arm and resupply Hezbollah”.
Even without the additional element of rancour injected by this report, Arab states had begun by then to show deep signs of disquiet. Foreign Ministers of the Arab League were called into session at Cairo on the fourth day of the offensive against Lebanon. In an obvious effort to set the tone for this meeting, King Abdullah of Jordan joined President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt in issuing a statement putting the onus of finding a peace on Hezbollah. The predominantly Shi’a Muslim formation, which represents the largest of Lebanon’s many confessional groupings and is a significant presence in the national parliament, was accused of “adventurism that does not serve Arab interests” and explicitly told to steer clear of any actions that could plunge the region into “uncalculated confrontations.” As if on cue, a spokesman for the Saudi Arabian ruling family immediately afterwards, came out with a denunciation of Hezbollah’s “uncalculated adventures” which had ostensibly exposed “Arab nations... to grave dangers without these nations having a say in the matter.”
In compliance with a U.S. demarche, the Saudi foreign minister read out a statement at the Arab League session, demanding that Hezbollah cease its “unexpected, inappropriate and irresponsible acts” of aggression against Israel. Saudi Arabia was joined in this demand by Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, the Gulf states and the Palestinian authority, represented not by its elected parliament but by the increasingly isolated president, Abu Mazen. Ranged on the other side, were Syria, Algeria, Yemen and Libya.
Within a week, the Saudi foreign minister, accompanied by two other members of the ruling family, called on the U.S. President in Washington, to deliver a letter from Saudi King Abdullah. According to media reports, the King “beseeched” the U.S. President to intervene in Israel's military campaign in Lebanon. As he left the presidential premises, the Saudi minister said that he had “requested a cease-fire to allow for a cessation of hostilities”. The “bleeding in Lebanon” had to stop, and there had to be “an agreement to save Lebanese lives, Lebanese properties and what the Lebanese have built, and to save this country from the ordeal it is facing”.
Behind this shift in Saudi attitudes, lies a sense of alarm at the violence inflicted upon Lebanon. Israel had obviously calculated that the scale of mechanical and explosive force it was prepared to apply through air and artillery power, would unhinge the loose coalition of confessional groups that is the ruling arrangement in Lebanon. It had hoped that the Maronite Christian element, traditionally viewed as allies, would lead a revolt against the Hezbollah, if necessary ejecting the party from the ruling coalition and deploying the Lebanese national army to rein in its militia.
It did not take very long before this calculation came a cropper. The religious factions in Lebanese politics are all too aware of the disastrous consequences that disunity can have at this juncture. Memories of the country’s 15 year-long civil war, punctuated by the brutal Israeli invasion of 1982 and the destruction of much of its capital city, are still raw. The bloodletting was ended by the 1990 Taif accord sponsored by the Arab League and its conditions – both implicit and explicit – have never been a secret. Syria would under-write the peace in Lebanon and honour the National Accord of 1943, which was the foundational document of the brittle peace between the country’s different confessional groupings. The Christians had lost their social, economic and above all, numerical preeminence since the 1943 compact assured them the presidency of the republic in perpetuity. Natural growth and the influx of Palestinian victims of Israeli ethnic cleansing in 1948 and subsequent years, had altered the demographic balances. But if the Taif accord committed itself to honouring the 1943 compact, it was only on the essential condition that the resistance would be kept alive. There would in other words, be no peace treaty with Israel without a broader settlement of all issues of concern to the Arab world.
Shortly after the Israelis blasted a residential building of Beirut with 20 tonnes of explosives in an effort to kill him, Hezbollah’s leader Shaikh Hassan Nasrallah sat down for an interview with the Al Jazeera news channel. Asked about the impunity with which Hezbollah functioned in southern Lebanon, engaging in hostile actions that endangered the fragile peace with Israel, he was categorical that the Shi’a militia was operating within the terms of a broader agreement with the Lebanese government. “The government statement, on the basis of which we participated in the government, talks about the Lebanese Government's endorsement of resistance and its national right to liberate the land and the prisoners”, said Nasrallah. Uniquely for a process of national reconciliation, the Lebanese state agreed in 1990 to an abridgment of its powers, granting Hezbollah the autonomy in southern Lebanon to sustain the resistance. And the objectives of the resistance as laid out by Nasrallah, were manifold, though not all were of equal priority.
Despite vacating much of southern Lebanon in 2000, Israel continues to be in occupation of a small patch of land called the Shab’a farms. Furthermore, violations of the sovereign space of Lebanon through land, air and sea are almost a daily occurrence. But neither of these, in Nasrallah’s account, merited great attention on the part of the resistance. Though the border violations in particular, were a grievous provocation, Lebanon he declared, could live with them. Where it would not compromise though, was in respect of the Lebanese nationals and Palestinians who were being held without trial in Israeli prisons, and the civilians who were subject to the daily military atrocities of the Israeli armed forces. Strategically and tactically, in the aggravated situation that prevailed mid-July, with Israeli military action against civilians scaling new heights of random and disproportionate violence, the Hezbollah had no option but to conduct its raid across the border and take two soldiers prisoner.
The subsequent reaction by the Arab states had disappointed Lebanon, but there were in Nasrallah’s strategic estimation, no grounds for anxiety in the internal situation. “We do not fear the internal front”, said Nasrallah: “They are trying to play on the sectarian divisions. They know that playing on the sectarian divisions is dangerous. …. If they want to play on the differences between Sunni and Shi’a, Muslim and Christian, or Druze and Shi’a, it will be dangerous to the country”.
These locutions have multiple layers of significance. On the one hand, an effort to deploy the Lebanese national army in disarming the Hezbollah would, absent a broader settlement in the region, fail to muster up a political consensus. It would moreover, be an unequal battle, since Hezbollah, as the most powerful military force in Lebanon, commanding the allegiance of its largest confessional grouping, would easily overwhelm the Lebanese army. If external powers were to intervene, the outcome would be a descent into civil war, which in conjunction with the daily bloodshed in Iraq, could plunge the entire region into anarchy.
Within Lebanon itself, Hezbollah fought the general elections of 2005 with a slate of predominantly Shi’a candidates. But it draws the unswerving support of the Palestinian diaspora in the country. And the powerful Druze chieftain Walid Junblatt, has also allied himself with Hezbollah in the ruling arrangement in Beirut. Further political sustenance has come from Michel Aoun, a former chief of staff of the Lebanese army and a Maronite Christian who has credibility and respect across all confessional groupings.
Both Junblatt and Aoun have been long-time opponents of the overweening influence exerted by Syria in Lebanese affairs. In allying themselves so closely with Hezbollah, they have effectively rubbished the notion, so pronounced in the Israeli and U.S. narration, that Hezbollah is little else than a terrorist proxy for Syria, determined to work contrary to Lebanon’s national interests. At another level, Nasrallah’s statements reflect a certain confidence that the Israeli assault would heal, rather than deepen sectarian fissures within Lebanon. Since the Israeli strategy has been quite explicitly to inflict pain on all of Lebanon rather than only the offending elements, it seemed to have precisely this effect after the first two weeks. Further, in standing up and signaling that Israel would be called to account for its atrocities on the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, Hezbollah has the potential to transcend the sectarian split between Shi’a and Sunni Muslim, and appeal to a broad mass of the Arab people.
Since the farce of its withdrawal from Gaza, Israel has, with the acquiescence of all Arab regimes, considerably stepped up its daily attacks on the very fabric of civic life in occupied Palestine. These attacks have ascended several notches in virulence since Palestinian national elections in February brought the Islamic resistance group Hamas to power. Western governments have been mobilised to stop all aid flows to the beleaguered people, tax revenues rightfully belonging to the Palestinian administration have been withheld, and access routes through both land and sea have been blocked. In what would be recognised under international rules of war as a legitimate act of self-defence, Hamas militants in June carried out a raid on an Israeli military picket enforcing the illegal siege of Gaza. Two soldiers were killed and one taken prisoner. Since then, Israel has been engaged in the kind of destructive rampage through Gaza that it is now visiting on Lebanon.
That no Arab state managed to summon up the political will to condemn Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people, has been a blot on their already besmirched reputations. That a non-state actor like Hezbollah should have taken up the onus of demanding accountability from Israel, is a further challenge to the Arab state system. Early reactions to the atrocities in Lebanon were conditioned by the aversion most Arab regimes have towards any accretion to the regional strategic influence of Iran, which is still considered, with obvious inattention to truth, the external prop without which Hezbollah would be a negligible political force. The later mood within the Arab leadership, which seemed almost to verge on panic, could well suggest the beginnings of a rearguard to safeguard their rapidly shrinking political legitimacy.
July 25, 2006
But for a war that pitted such clearly defined moral categories as good and evil against each other, the line-up of geopolitical forces on either side of World War III remained indeterminate. With the exception of the U.S. and Israel, global public opinion remained firmly on the side of the supposed forces of darkness. And the dynastic regimes of the Arab world, none too firm in their adherence to democracy, stood uneasily on the side of the U.S. This arrangement of pieces on the international checkerboard had altered, though ever so subtly, in the days since the war began. But every minute shift conveyed grim suggestions of unending turmoil in the region.
Though no explicit words of approval were uttered in public, the U.S. was prepared to risk international isolation in resisting any multilateral involvement to curb Israel’s absolute freedom to terrorise its neighbourhood. At the same time, it was prepared with unseemly haste, to rush to unfavourable judgment in all matters involving Israel’s adversaries. Eleven days into the war, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice paid a visit to the region. In a gesture of conciliation towards bruised Arab sentiments, she chose Beirut as her first port of call, expressing sympathy for the Lebanese civilians caught up in a vicious war, but saying nothing that could be construed as disapproval of Israel’s military actions. Rather, she rehearsed yet again, her well-worn line that a ceasefire would be of little substantive value, if it were to be breached within a matter of months. To be of any enduring use, a ceasefire would have to be accompanied by a comprehensive peace that addressed all the fundamental problems of the region. And in identifying the problems that needed immediate attention, Rice proved disinclined to take a broad view. The one problem she had in mind was the pervasive presence and influence of the Hezbollah militia in southern Lebanon, where it had effectively become a “state within a state”, unamenable to central control from Beirut and able to threaten Israel’s northern settlements at will through lethal rocket fire.
The U.S. attitude in effect reverses the commonsense of international diplomacy, which had been articulated the preceding Thursday by U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan. Addressing the U.N. Security Council, Annan paid due obeisance to the U.S. sensibilities, criticising Hezbollah for its “provocative” foray across the border a week before, when two Israeli soldiers were taken prisoner. This action, carried out without the authority of a duly constituted political authority, showed a “reckless disregard for the interests of the government of Lebanon”. But having said all this, Annan was firm in his belief that Israel's “excessive use of force” was completely unwarranted. It did “little or nothing to decrease popular support” for Hezbollah, and made the Lebanese government, whose authority Israel wanted extended to the entire country, a hapless hostage to the actions of a guerrilla force. Staying well within the bounds of diplomacy, Annan chided Israel for instigating a humanitarian crisis that was likely in little time, to engulf upto a million people.
Fundamental to the divergence between the U.S. and the rest of the world are rival perceptions about the conditions under which negotiations should best be conducted. While conceding that there is a large complex of issues to be resolved, Annan’s proposals suggested that negotiations should ideally proceed in a calm and settled atmosphere. With her own interventions, Rice in effect, was articulating the U.S. position that peace talks are most likely to achieve their objective if conducted with the deafening crescendo of bombs and missiles in the background.
From behind the scenes though, another story was emerging in unsubtle leaks: that even as Rice was setting off for her tour of the region, the U.S. had given Israel a clear deadline of a week to complete its military campaign. Beyond that, the U.S. was reportedly, not prepared to hold out the assurance that it would resist the international call for a ceasefire. Whether this conformed to the professional military assessment from the Israeli side was unclear. At a cabinet meeting the day before the Rice visit, Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had reportedly assured his ministerial colleagues that “the diplomatic process” would not be pursued “at the expense of destroying infrastructures of terror”, which would “take a very long time”.
Evidently to ensure that maximal havoc was created in the available time, the U.S. was also, as the New York Times reported on July 22, hastening its deliveries of lethal munitions to Israel. “The decision to quickly ship the weapons to Israel was made with relatively little debate within the Bush administration”, reported the newspaper: “Its disclosure threatens to anger Arab governments and others because of the appearance that the United States is actively aiding the Israeli bombing campaign in a way that could be compared to Iran’s efforts to arm and resupply Hezbollah”.
Even without the additional element of rancour injected by this report, Arab states had begun by then to show deep signs of disquiet. Foreign Ministers of the Arab League were called into session at Cairo on the fourth day of the offensive against Lebanon. In an obvious effort to set the tone for this meeting, King Abdullah of Jordan joined President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt in issuing a statement putting the onus of finding a peace on Hezbollah. The predominantly Shi’a Muslim formation, which represents the largest of Lebanon’s many confessional groupings and is a significant presence in the national parliament, was accused of “adventurism that does not serve Arab interests” and explicitly told to steer clear of any actions that could plunge the region into “uncalculated confrontations.” As if on cue, a spokesman for the Saudi Arabian ruling family immediately afterwards, came out with a denunciation of Hezbollah’s “uncalculated adventures” which had ostensibly exposed “Arab nations... to grave dangers without these nations having a say in the matter.”
In compliance with a U.S. demarche, the Saudi foreign minister read out a statement at the Arab League session, demanding that Hezbollah cease its “unexpected, inappropriate and irresponsible acts” of aggression against Israel. Saudi Arabia was joined in this demand by Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, the Gulf states and the Palestinian authority, represented not by its elected parliament but by the increasingly isolated president, Abu Mazen. Ranged on the other side, were Syria, Algeria, Yemen and Libya.
Within a week, the Saudi foreign minister, accompanied by two other members of the ruling family, called on the U.S. President in Washington, to deliver a letter from Saudi King Abdullah. According to media reports, the King “beseeched” the U.S. President to intervene in Israel's military campaign in Lebanon. As he left the presidential premises, the Saudi minister said that he had “requested a cease-fire to allow for a cessation of hostilities”. The “bleeding in Lebanon” had to stop, and there had to be “an agreement to save Lebanese lives, Lebanese properties and what the Lebanese have built, and to save this country from the ordeal it is facing”.
Behind this shift in Saudi attitudes, lies a sense of alarm at the violence inflicted upon Lebanon. Israel had obviously calculated that the scale of mechanical and explosive force it was prepared to apply through air and artillery power, would unhinge the loose coalition of confessional groups that is the ruling arrangement in Lebanon. It had hoped that the Maronite Christian element, traditionally viewed as allies, would lead a revolt against the Hezbollah, if necessary ejecting the party from the ruling coalition and deploying the Lebanese national army to rein in its militia.
It did not take very long before this calculation came a cropper. The religious factions in Lebanese politics are all too aware of the disastrous consequences that disunity can have at this juncture. Memories of the country’s 15 year-long civil war, punctuated by the brutal Israeli invasion of 1982 and the destruction of much of its capital city, are still raw. The bloodletting was ended by the 1990 Taif accord sponsored by the Arab League and its conditions – both implicit and explicit – have never been a secret. Syria would under-write the peace in Lebanon and honour the National Accord of 1943, which was the foundational document of the brittle peace between the country’s different confessional groupings. The Christians had lost their social, economic and above all, numerical preeminence since the 1943 compact assured them the presidency of the republic in perpetuity. Natural growth and the influx of Palestinian victims of Israeli ethnic cleansing in 1948 and subsequent years, had altered the demographic balances. But if the Taif accord committed itself to honouring the 1943 compact, it was only on the essential condition that the resistance would be kept alive. There would in other words, be no peace treaty with Israel without a broader settlement of all issues of concern to the Arab world.
Shortly after the Israelis blasted a residential building of Beirut with 20 tonnes of explosives in an effort to kill him, Hezbollah’s leader Shaikh Hassan Nasrallah sat down for an interview with the Al Jazeera news channel. Asked about the impunity with which Hezbollah functioned in southern Lebanon, engaging in hostile actions that endangered the fragile peace with Israel, he was categorical that the Shi’a militia was operating within the terms of a broader agreement with the Lebanese government. “The government statement, on the basis of which we participated in the government, talks about the Lebanese Government's endorsement of resistance and its national right to liberate the land and the prisoners”, said Nasrallah. Uniquely for a process of national reconciliation, the Lebanese state agreed in 1990 to an abridgment of its powers, granting Hezbollah the autonomy in southern Lebanon to sustain the resistance. And the objectives of the resistance as laid out by Nasrallah, were manifold, though not all were of equal priority.
Despite vacating much of southern Lebanon in 2000, Israel continues to be in occupation of a small patch of land called the Shab’a farms. Furthermore, violations of the sovereign space of Lebanon through land, air and sea are almost a daily occurrence. But neither of these, in Nasrallah’s account, merited great attention on the part of the resistance. Though the border violations in particular, were a grievous provocation, Lebanon he declared, could live with them. Where it would not compromise though, was in respect of the Lebanese nationals and Palestinians who were being held without trial in Israeli prisons, and the civilians who were subject to the daily military atrocities of the Israeli armed forces. Strategically and tactically, in the aggravated situation that prevailed mid-July, with Israeli military action against civilians scaling new heights of random and disproportionate violence, the Hezbollah had no option but to conduct its raid across the border and take two soldiers prisoner.
The subsequent reaction by the Arab states had disappointed Lebanon, but there were in Nasrallah’s strategic estimation, no grounds for anxiety in the internal situation. “We do not fear the internal front”, said Nasrallah: “They are trying to play on the sectarian divisions. They know that playing on the sectarian divisions is dangerous. …. If they want to play on the differences between Sunni and Shi’a, Muslim and Christian, or Druze and Shi’a, it will be dangerous to the country”.
These locutions have multiple layers of significance. On the one hand, an effort to deploy the Lebanese national army in disarming the Hezbollah would, absent a broader settlement in the region, fail to muster up a political consensus. It would moreover, be an unequal battle, since Hezbollah, as the most powerful military force in Lebanon, commanding the allegiance of its largest confessional grouping, would easily overwhelm the Lebanese army. If external powers were to intervene, the outcome would be a descent into civil war, which in conjunction with the daily bloodshed in Iraq, could plunge the entire region into anarchy.
Within Lebanon itself, Hezbollah fought the general elections of 2005 with a slate of predominantly Shi’a candidates. But it draws the unswerving support of the Palestinian diaspora in the country. And the powerful Druze chieftain Walid Junblatt, has also allied himself with Hezbollah in the ruling arrangement in Beirut. Further political sustenance has come from Michel Aoun, a former chief of staff of the Lebanese army and a Maronite Christian who has credibility and respect across all confessional groupings.
Both Junblatt and Aoun have been long-time opponents of the overweening influence exerted by Syria in Lebanese affairs. In allying themselves so closely with Hezbollah, they have effectively rubbished the notion, so pronounced in the Israeli and U.S. narration, that Hezbollah is little else than a terrorist proxy for Syria, determined to work contrary to Lebanon’s national interests. At another level, Nasrallah’s statements reflect a certain confidence that the Israeli assault would heal, rather than deepen sectarian fissures within Lebanon. Since the Israeli strategy has been quite explicitly to inflict pain on all of Lebanon rather than only the offending elements, it seemed to have precisely this effect after the first two weeks. Further, in standing up and signaling that Israel would be called to account for its atrocities on the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, Hezbollah has the potential to transcend the sectarian split between Shi’a and Sunni Muslim, and appeal to a broad mass of the Arab people.
Since the farce of its withdrawal from Gaza, Israel has, with the acquiescence of all Arab regimes, considerably stepped up its daily attacks on the very fabric of civic life in occupied Palestine. These attacks have ascended several notches in virulence since Palestinian national elections in February brought the Islamic resistance group Hamas to power. Western governments have been mobilised to stop all aid flows to the beleaguered people, tax revenues rightfully belonging to the Palestinian administration have been withheld, and access routes through both land and sea have been blocked. In what would be recognised under international rules of war as a legitimate act of self-defence, Hamas militants in June carried out a raid on an Israeli military picket enforcing the illegal siege of Gaza. Two soldiers were killed and one taken prisoner. Since then, Israel has been engaged in the kind of destructive rampage through Gaza that it is now visiting on Lebanon.
That no Arab state managed to summon up the political will to condemn Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people, has been a blot on their already besmirched reputations. That a non-state actor like Hezbollah should have taken up the onus of demanding accountability from Israel, is a further challenge to the Arab state system. Early reactions to the atrocities in Lebanon were conditioned by the aversion most Arab regimes have towards any accretion to the regional strategic influence of Iran, which is still considered, with obvious inattention to truth, the external prop without which Hezbollah would be a negligible political force. The later mood within the Arab leadership, which seemed almost to verge on panic, could well suggest the beginnings of a rearguard to safeguard their rapidly shrinking political legitimacy.
July 25, 2006
Monday, July 24, 2006
Mumbai and the question of terror
Mumbai is a generous city, a city that for all its signs of decay, still manages to accommodate any needy person in search of a livelihood. And as Mumbaikars showed the very day after the serial bombing of their city’s lifeline, it is a courageous city. Both by compulsion and by unswerving commitment to the basic credo of getting on with life, while likewise allowing all others, Mumbai is a city whose rhythms can never be silenced.
Following the July 11 attacks on Mumbai’s suburban transportation system, there was much lament in public forums, that India’s struggle against terrorism had gone seriously adrift. The proposition was advanced, not unheard of before, that force can only be combated by an equal, opposite -- perhaps even a disproportionate -- application of the same principle. And there was some bemoaning of the fact that India’s campaign against terrorism, after its brief victory in the early-1990s in the Punjab theatre, had lost sight of the basics in subsequent challenges: in Kashmir and in the proliferation of affronts that the Indian state has had to face in diverse corners of the country.
The closest perhaps that Mumbai has come to having its spirit broken, was for two weeks in January 1993, when its streets were taken over by rampaging mobs intent on inflicting maximum violence on a vulnerable minority. And just two months later, it was paralysed into silence and submission when a retaliatory sequence of bombings devastated crucial nodes of its daily life.
Since that horrendous outrage, there have been several attacks on civic life in the city that have challenged the common citizen’s loyalty. And yet, with all the provocation, there has been no occasion since when civic peace has been disturbed, when the fabric of inter-community understanding has been in danger of being shredded.
If there is a lesson underlying all this, it is simply that a citizenry committed to peace and determined to preserve the civic responsibilities that make life in a big city possible, is the principal resource that a state can count upon in its struggle against terrorism. It is a curiosity then, that in all the policy deliberations that followed Mumbai’s tragedy, not to mention the advisory opinions that the media so generously proffered, this issue never featured in any significant manner.
As a term, “terrorism” may remain slippery and evasive, though there is little that is vague about the real world manifestations of the threat. India in particular, has suffered enormously from successive, and intimate, encounters with the random and insensate violence of terrorism, designed with deliberate intent, to disrupt the rhythms of daily life for a civilian population and sap public loyalty to the political order. The motives of terrorism could be various: a sense of grievance at real or imagined injustices, a quest for vengeance against palpably real atrocities. But in terms of its long-term calculus, terrorism invariably targets the will of an entire people, to sap their stated and unstated consent in the perpetuation of a political order.
That Mumbai has defied this calculus despite repeated provocation, is a tribute to the resilience of the city and to the vital stakes that all of India has in its well-being. At the very least it would seem, the citizens of Mumbai need recognition for their fortitude -- an example for the whole country – and this can only come through pursuing the perpetrators of July 11 with all the determination and fairness that the law mandates.
Initial signals have not been the most propitious. The principal opposition party, the BJP, has with its allies, made known its determination to put the government on the mat in the monsoon session of Parliament over its alleged softness on terrorism. Reprising a favoured theme – which it has never tired of harping upon since the Terrorism and Disruptive Activities Prevention Act (TADA) was repealed in the mid-1990s and the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) in 2004 – it has demanded the enactment of a special category of law in addition to all existing statutes, to deal the modern-day scourge of terrorism.
The Government for its part has responded with a disavowal of any such intent, but in a meeting with chief secretaries from all the states on July 20, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh effectively acknowledged that prevalent practices and procedures had proven woefully inadequate. “It is the primary responsibility of the state to maintain public order and ensure the safety of its people”, said the Prime Minister: “You will have to empower your police forces to discharge their functions at higher levels of efficiency”.
It is not clear that the additional powers sought for the police and security agencies would be achieved through legislation. Some part of the challenge in the Prime Minister’s perception evidently involves the enhancement of operational efficiencies within these forces. But a little consideration would show that there is a strategic challenge beyond these relatively more mundane matters, that still remains to be grappled with.
Media reports of July 14, obviously primed by well-planned leaks, suggested that the union cabinet at its first meeting since the Mumbai atrocities, had been told by top security officials, that Pakistan was directly responsible. The consensus though, was vitiated by two senior ministers. One of the dissenters, according to the media leaks, pointed to the finding by an independent initiative, that the alleged terrorist plot on the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) headquarters in Nagpur, and the June 1 police encounter in which all its intending authors were killed, had in fact been staged. Another senior minister, harked back to a lethal bomb blast in the district headquarters town of Nanded in Mahrashtra, in which two people had been killed, both of them associated with Hindu extremist organisations. The timing of the Nanded blasts, he pointed out, suggested a deep political intent, since it came around the time that BJP leader L.K. Advani was to transit through Maharashtra as part of his cross-country odyssey focusing attention on terrorism.
Since neither of the ministers identified as the dissenters within the union cabinet could have wanted to be associated with an unpopular viewpoint in an especially fraught moment, it is safe to assume that the media leak about their interventions came from other sources. But since dissent has reached the level of the union cabinet on the issue of terrorism – where the unspoken national consensus so far has been to lay all the blame on Pakistan – it is perhaps important to assess how credible the underlying information is.
The inquiry into the Nagpur incident was led by B.G. Kolse Patil, a former judge of the Bombay High Court, and involved twelve other individuals representing five distinct civil liberties and legal advocacy bodies. Its report, completed mid-June and covered rather indifferently by the media, is brief but convincing. It points to numerous lacunae and discrepancies in the official narration of the encounter in which three “jehadi” terrorists were killed, and refers to the unwillingness or inability of the Nagpur police commissioner to meet with the inquiry team and answer certain very basic doubts. It concludes in the light of all the information available, that the encounter was “fake” and requires a “fair probe” in the national interest.
Similar ambiguities and concerns surround the Nanded bomb blasts, which did not receive any of the nation-wide coverage that the Nagpur incident did. The few media reports that did emerge, quoted authoritative police sources identifying the deceased as active members of a Hindu extremist organisation, who had been engaged in the fabrication of an explosive device. But interest soon died out and the police, for reasons yet unclear, sought to dissuade any further media coverage on the grounds that it would damage the investigative process.
When public scepticism over the Nagpur incident was acknowledged in the media, it was only to deflect awkward questions. The argument was deployed that the intelligence and security services had acted on credible information that an attack was imminent. Rather than arrest the militant elements and pursue the tedious legal process of prosecution, the agencies decided that a more effective recourse would be to eliminate them. Recent incidents, such as the hijacking of Indian Airlines IC 814 in 1999, when the Indian government was compelled to release three terrorists held for operations in the Kashmir theatre, had shown that detaining jehadi elements and pursuing the process of the law was a high-risk enterprise.
It cannot be a very reassuring thought for most common people, that summary justice will be the norm when the security agencies deal with the risk of terrorism. The policy of shooting first and then suppressing, or when that is impossible, evading the awkward questions, may play well in an environment of overwrought nationalism and hyper-insecurity. But it feeds into a climate of official impunity, makes for very poor long-term efficacy and involves numerous risks to ordinary citizens.
December 13, 2001 was a defining moment in India in this sense. The attack on India’s parliament premises by two car-loads of gun-wielding desperados, marked a transition from a holding operation by the Indian State, to an offensive doctrine of prevention and even pre-emption of terrorism. It enabled a coordination on the terrain of principle and practice between India and other self-proclaimed leaders of the struggle against terrorism, notably the U.S. and Israel. And in the domestic arena, it was to be the test case of the efficacy of a newly crafted anti-terrorism law, POTA.
Nearly five years years after that pivotal event in India’s history, the long-term consequences remain ambivalent at best. Of the four individuals who were arrested shortly afterwards and charged with waging war against the Indian state, three were swiftly convicted and sentenced to death under POTA. One other accused person, a woman, was sentenced to an extended term in prison, the sentence partly moderated by the fact that she had a child of tender years.
In appeal before the Delhi High Court, two of the convictions were quashed. But the prosecution, led by the Special Task Force (STF) of the Delhi Police would have none of it. Choosing its occasion well, it went in appeal to India’s Supreme Court on December 13, 2003. On August 4, 2005, the Supreme Court confirmed the acquittals handed down by the Delhi High Court. It also absolved another of the accused of the charge of conspiracy, instead holding him guilty of the lesser crime of concealing knowledge about the conspiracy. Yet, even as it mitigated the sentence of this individual, effectively knocking out several of the props of the prosecution case, the Supreme Court contrived, in a surviving curiosity of judicial reasoning, to uphold the death sentence on the fourth defendant.
Multiple suspicions arise once it is noted that the only person against whom the charge of involvement in the December 13 conspiracy has stuck, was a surrendered militant, obliged by the terms of his capitulation, to keep regular contact with the anti-insurgency wing of the Jammu and Kashmir Police. It was an invidious position that he found himself in, subsequent to his 1993 surrender. While having to go the extra distance to prove his fealty to the terms of his surrender, he was also under constant threat of liquidation by his erstwhile confederates in the Kashmir militancy. For a while, the way out of the conundrum was, seemingly, to pay up a sum – determined at the momentary discretion of his handler in the security apparatus – as protection money. The alternative was to enlist as a “special police officer”, or in plain language, a police informer.
When the December 13 case was in appeal in the Delhi High Court, some of India’s most eminent jurists appeared on behalf of the accused. Ram Jethmalani argued that “the evidence discloses total non-application of mind and an unforgivable frivolity of attitude”. He also charged that the police case was “riddled with illegality”, and the evidence disclosed “concoction and fabrication”. In similar vein, senior advocate Shanti Bhushan, contended that his client had “been falsely implicated in the conspiracy case by the investigating agency”, which had “gone out of its way in concocting evidence”.
If this record of manifest ineptitude is the legacy of the December 13 attacks, which had international ramifications and almost brought India and Pakistan to war, then the state-of-play in the prosecution of the worst terrorist atrocity ever on Indian soil, the 1993 Mumbai blasts, does not inspire very much confidence either. In October 2000, the designated judge in Mumbai declared that the hearing of the case had concluded. The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) was given a limited period of time to present concluding evidence regarding the nature of the explosives used in the attacks, following which the defence lawyers were expected to submit their final pleas. Six years on, the case is effectively frozen in the limbo it was then cast into. Meanwhile, of the 124 accused, ten have died, while over 30 remain still in custody. The rest have obtained bail and by all accounts, are not under any serious encumbrance, since their ranks include some of the affluent and influential. Whether from the viewpoint of the victims or the alleged perpetrators of the 1993 atrocities, the ends of justice clearly, are a long way from being met.
Can it do any good for public confidence that the police and intelligence agencies have come a cropper in two of India’s most significant terrorism trials, despite being empowered with extraordinary statutes? Can it be taken for granted then, that the resolve of the common citizen, an unacknowledged though invaluable resource in the battle against terrorism, will remain as firm as it is now? These questions need to be posed now with a fresh vigour by the public, since to this record of conspicuous failure must be added a story of the deliberate abdication of responsibility in pursuing the guilty of the 1993 communal carnage in Mumbai. In most reasonable assessments, January 1993 was a macabre turning point in that city’s career of cosmopolitanism and civic concord. Mumbai’s people deserve nothing less than full accountability for all the crimes they have suffered, starting from then.
(ENDS)
Following the July 11 attacks on Mumbai’s suburban transportation system, there was much lament in public forums, that India’s struggle against terrorism had gone seriously adrift. The proposition was advanced, not unheard of before, that force can only be combated by an equal, opposite -- perhaps even a disproportionate -- application of the same principle. And there was some bemoaning of the fact that India’s campaign against terrorism, after its brief victory in the early-1990s in the Punjab theatre, had lost sight of the basics in subsequent challenges: in Kashmir and in the proliferation of affronts that the Indian state has had to face in diverse corners of the country.
The closest perhaps that Mumbai has come to having its spirit broken, was for two weeks in January 1993, when its streets were taken over by rampaging mobs intent on inflicting maximum violence on a vulnerable minority. And just two months later, it was paralysed into silence and submission when a retaliatory sequence of bombings devastated crucial nodes of its daily life.
Since that horrendous outrage, there have been several attacks on civic life in the city that have challenged the common citizen’s loyalty. And yet, with all the provocation, there has been no occasion since when civic peace has been disturbed, when the fabric of inter-community understanding has been in danger of being shredded.
If there is a lesson underlying all this, it is simply that a citizenry committed to peace and determined to preserve the civic responsibilities that make life in a big city possible, is the principal resource that a state can count upon in its struggle against terrorism. It is a curiosity then, that in all the policy deliberations that followed Mumbai’s tragedy, not to mention the advisory opinions that the media so generously proffered, this issue never featured in any significant manner.
As a term, “terrorism” may remain slippery and evasive, though there is little that is vague about the real world manifestations of the threat. India in particular, has suffered enormously from successive, and intimate, encounters with the random and insensate violence of terrorism, designed with deliberate intent, to disrupt the rhythms of daily life for a civilian population and sap public loyalty to the political order. The motives of terrorism could be various: a sense of grievance at real or imagined injustices, a quest for vengeance against palpably real atrocities. But in terms of its long-term calculus, terrorism invariably targets the will of an entire people, to sap their stated and unstated consent in the perpetuation of a political order.
That Mumbai has defied this calculus despite repeated provocation, is a tribute to the resilience of the city and to the vital stakes that all of India has in its well-being. At the very least it would seem, the citizens of Mumbai need recognition for their fortitude -- an example for the whole country – and this can only come through pursuing the perpetrators of July 11 with all the determination and fairness that the law mandates.
Initial signals have not been the most propitious. The principal opposition party, the BJP, has with its allies, made known its determination to put the government on the mat in the monsoon session of Parliament over its alleged softness on terrorism. Reprising a favoured theme – which it has never tired of harping upon since the Terrorism and Disruptive Activities Prevention Act (TADA) was repealed in the mid-1990s and the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) in 2004 – it has demanded the enactment of a special category of law in addition to all existing statutes, to deal the modern-day scourge of terrorism.
The Government for its part has responded with a disavowal of any such intent, but in a meeting with chief secretaries from all the states on July 20, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh effectively acknowledged that prevalent practices and procedures had proven woefully inadequate. “It is the primary responsibility of the state to maintain public order and ensure the safety of its people”, said the Prime Minister: “You will have to empower your police forces to discharge their functions at higher levels of efficiency”.
It is not clear that the additional powers sought for the police and security agencies would be achieved through legislation. Some part of the challenge in the Prime Minister’s perception evidently involves the enhancement of operational efficiencies within these forces. But a little consideration would show that there is a strategic challenge beyond these relatively more mundane matters, that still remains to be grappled with.
Media reports of July 14, obviously primed by well-planned leaks, suggested that the union cabinet at its first meeting since the Mumbai atrocities, had been told by top security officials, that Pakistan was directly responsible. The consensus though, was vitiated by two senior ministers. One of the dissenters, according to the media leaks, pointed to the finding by an independent initiative, that the alleged terrorist plot on the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) headquarters in Nagpur, and the June 1 police encounter in which all its intending authors were killed, had in fact been staged. Another senior minister, harked back to a lethal bomb blast in the district headquarters town of Nanded in Mahrashtra, in which two people had been killed, both of them associated with Hindu extremist organisations. The timing of the Nanded blasts, he pointed out, suggested a deep political intent, since it came around the time that BJP leader L.K. Advani was to transit through Maharashtra as part of his cross-country odyssey focusing attention on terrorism.
Since neither of the ministers identified as the dissenters within the union cabinet could have wanted to be associated with an unpopular viewpoint in an especially fraught moment, it is safe to assume that the media leak about their interventions came from other sources. But since dissent has reached the level of the union cabinet on the issue of terrorism – where the unspoken national consensus so far has been to lay all the blame on Pakistan – it is perhaps important to assess how credible the underlying information is.
The inquiry into the Nagpur incident was led by B.G. Kolse Patil, a former judge of the Bombay High Court, and involved twelve other individuals representing five distinct civil liberties and legal advocacy bodies. Its report, completed mid-June and covered rather indifferently by the media, is brief but convincing. It points to numerous lacunae and discrepancies in the official narration of the encounter in which three “jehadi” terrorists were killed, and refers to the unwillingness or inability of the Nagpur police commissioner to meet with the inquiry team and answer certain very basic doubts. It concludes in the light of all the information available, that the encounter was “fake” and requires a “fair probe” in the national interest.
Similar ambiguities and concerns surround the Nanded bomb blasts, which did not receive any of the nation-wide coverage that the Nagpur incident did. The few media reports that did emerge, quoted authoritative police sources identifying the deceased as active members of a Hindu extremist organisation, who had been engaged in the fabrication of an explosive device. But interest soon died out and the police, for reasons yet unclear, sought to dissuade any further media coverage on the grounds that it would damage the investigative process.
When public scepticism over the Nagpur incident was acknowledged in the media, it was only to deflect awkward questions. The argument was deployed that the intelligence and security services had acted on credible information that an attack was imminent. Rather than arrest the militant elements and pursue the tedious legal process of prosecution, the agencies decided that a more effective recourse would be to eliminate them. Recent incidents, such as the hijacking of Indian Airlines IC 814 in 1999, when the Indian government was compelled to release three terrorists held for operations in the Kashmir theatre, had shown that detaining jehadi elements and pursuing the process of the law was a high-risk enterprise.
It cannot be a very reassuring thought for most common people, that summary justice will be the norm when the security agencies deal with the risk of terrorism. The policy of shooting first and then suppressing, or when that is impossible, evading the awkward questions, may play well in an environment of overwrought nationalism and hyper-insecurity. But it feeds into a climate of official impunity, makes for very poor long-term efficacy and involves numerous risks to ordinary citizens.
December 13, 2001 was a defining moment in India in this sense. The attack on India’s parliament premises by two car-loads of gun-wielding desperados, marked a transition from a holding operation by the Indian State, to an offensive doctrine of prevention and even pre-emption of terrorism. It enabled a coordination on the terrain of principle and practice between India and other self-proclaimed leaders of the struggle against terrorism, notably the U.S. and Israel. And in the domestic arena, it was to be the test case of the efficacy of a newly crafted anti-terrorism law, POTA.
Nearly five years years after that pivotal event in India’s history, the long-term consequences remain ambivalent at best. Of the four individuals who were arrested shortly afterwards and charged with waging war against the Indian state, three were swiftly convicted and sentenced to death under POTA. One other accused person, a woman, was sentenced to an extended term in prison, the sentence partly moderated by the fact that she had a child of tender years.
In appeal before the Delhi High Court, two of the convictions were quashed. But the prosecution, led by the Special Task Force (STF) of the Delhi Police would have none of it. Choosing its occasion well, it went in appeal to India’s Supreme Court on December 13, 2003. On August 4, 2005, the Supreme Court confirmed the acquittals handed down by the Delhi High Court. It also absolved another of the accused of the charge of conspiracy, instead holding him guilty of the lesser crime of concealing knowledge about the conspiracy. Yet, even as it mitigated the sentence of this individual, effectively knocking out several of the props of the prosecution case, the Supreme Court contrived, in a surviving curiosity of judicial reasoning, to uphold the death sentence on the fourth defendant.
Multiple suspicions arise once it is noted that the only person against whom the charge of involvement in the December 13 conspiracy has stuck, was a surrendered militant, obliged by the terms of his capitulation, to keep regular contact with the anti-insurgency wing of the Jammu and Kashmir Police. It was an invidious position that he found himself in, subsequent to his 1993 surrender. While having to go the extra distance to prove his fealty to the terms of his surrender, he was also under constant threat of liquidation by his erstwhile confederates in the Kashmir militancy. For a while, the way out of the conundrum was, seemingly, to pay up a sum – determined at the momentary discretion of his handler in the security apparatus – as protection money. The alternative was to enlist as a “special police officer”, or in plain language, a police informer.
When the December 13 case was in appeal in the Delhi High Court, some of India’s most eminent jurists appeared on behalf of the accused. Ram Jethmalani argued that “the evidence discloses total non-application of mind and an unforgivable frivolity of attitude”. He also charged that the police case was “riddled with illegality”, and the evidence disclosed “concoction and fabrication”. In similar vein, senior advocate Shanti Bhushan, contended that his client had “been falsely implicated in the conspiracy case by the investigating agency”, which had “gone out of its way in concocting evidence”.
If this record of manifest ineptitude is the legacy of the December 13 attacks, which had international ramifications and almost brought India and Pakistan to war, then the state-of-play in the prosecution of the worst terrorist atrocity ever on Indian soil, the 1993 Mumbai blasts, does not inspire very much confidence either. In October 2000, the designated judge in Mumbai declared that the hearing of the case had concluded. The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) was given a limited period of time to present concluding evidence regarding the nature of the explosives used in the attacks, following which the defence lawyers were expected to submit their final pleas. Six years on, the case is effectively frozen in the limbo it was then cast into. Meanwhile, of the 124 accused, ten have died, while over 30 remain still in custody. The rest have obtained bail and by all accounts, are not under any serious encumbrance, since their ranks include some of the affluent and influential. Whether from the viewpoint of the victims or the alleged perpetrators of the 1993 atrocities, the ends of justice clearly, are a long way from being met.
Can it do any good for public confidence that the police and intelligence agencies have come a cropper in two of India’s most significant terrorism trials, despite being empowered with extraordinary statutes? Can it be taken for granted then, that the resolve of the common citizen, an unacknowledged though invaluable resource in the battle against terrorism, will remain as firm as it is now? These questions need to be posed now with a fresh vigour by the public, since to this record of conspicuous failure must be added a story of the deliberate abdication of responsibility in pursuing the guilty of the 1993 communal carnage in Mumbai. In most reasonable assessments, January 1993 was a macabre turning point in that city’s career of cosmopolitanism and civic concord. Mumbai’s people deserve nothing less than full accountability for all the crimes they have suffered, starting from then.
(ENDS)
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