Mumbai, the media and militarism

There are occasions in history when collective trauma brings a nation intimately in contact with its deepest anxieties. Mumbai 26/11, to use the media shorthand for the horror that began one night in November and carried on for close to three days, was one such. The terrorist attacks that began November 26 and transformed swiftly into a 60-hour long siege of three landmark buildings in India’s commercial metropolis, have deeply transformed the national polity. The true consequences will take a while manifesting themselves. But it is a conjuncture that demands calm sobriety, while tending to drift towards intolerance and authoritarianism.

Protracted and painful, the siege of Mumbai was the first terrorist atrocity to be covered in real time by India’s booming electronic media industry. At the time of the demolition at Ayodhya in 1992, the industry was in its infancy and well before the deed was executed, the perpetrators took the extraordinary measure of cleansing the site of media persons of all descriptions. Ten years later, when rioters and arsonists held sway in the state of Gujarat for close to a month, the horrors were carried to all corners of the country by a vigilant media. But the pain was not quite so sharply felt, since the people with a voice loud enough in the national political dialogue had no more than a shallow association with those afflicted.

Terrorism has since then, repeatedly visited India, not as long-drawn episodes, involving a slow haemorrhage of public confidence, but as devastating and instantaneous blows –that stun and stagger, but allow for a quick recovery of morale as civic processes kick in and people who cannot really afford the luxury of disengagement from daily routines, resume their normal activity.

Mumbai 26/11 was designed to be the opposite: a long-drawn bloodbath that would claim lives and at the same time test the country’s response capabilities, sap its self-confidence and imprison it in prolonged contemplation of a tableau of destruction. It was meant to heighten the mute awareness that the wider public has of its own helplessness and its seeming lack of influence in major decisions.

Expectedly, the mood was quickly transformed into unending convulsions of rage against the politicians who seemingly hold all the power and had yet allowed an atrocity beyond imagination to occur. Disturbingly, it seemed a short transition from raging against the politicians, to raging against the political system that has ensconced them in authority.

Enlightenment has been sought in the most unlikely quarters, with the U.S. being upheld as an example worthy of emulation. Since the September 11, 2001 attacks on its territory, said one commentator after another on the numerous channels that were collectively orchestrating the national catharsis, there had not been a single attack that had cost the U.S. human life.

Among all the analogies to have emerged from Mumbai 26/11, this is perhaps the most facile and dangerous – that the U.S., protected on both flanks by vast oceanic expanses and separated from the main theatres of instability and violence by realities of geography, is an example for India. Few drew attention to the fact that the U.S. effort to defuse the sources of terror has cost it thousands more lives than were lost in the September 11 attacks, of military personnel who were sent on campaigns in distant lands with no clear sense of what their mission was. Nor did it seem relevant to any of the instant pundits that emerged on the airwaves, that tens, if not hundreds of thousands of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, have lost their lives as a direct consequence of the scattershot U.S. strategy.

There was another sentiment freely aired: that politicians had lost the moral authority to guide and oversee the response to the terror attacks. They had indeed, even lost the right to applaud the resilience of Mumbai, because they had proven persistently unconcerned about the security of the city. The vulnerability of Mumbai to terrorism was underlined in the context of the substantial contribution that it makes to national tax revenue. Perhaps there was nothing more startling in the TV punditry served up by 26/11, than the spectacle of individuals best known for syrupy talk-shows, metamorphosing into fiery advocates of a tax-payers’ revolt by citizens of Mumbai.

These arguments are quite evidently, based on a non sequitur. Mumbai’s unique position as a vital node in the chain of national value creation determines both its contribution to the public exchequer and also, tragically, its special vulnerability as a terror target. But to speak of a special virtue that the residents of Mumbai have earned from the taxes they pay, or to argue that they can of their own volition, withdraw from the compact that binds them to the larger national community, amounts to a unilateral repudiation of the wider matrix of belonging that makes the city what it is. It dishonours the spontaneous empathy that emerged all across the country for those unfortunate enough to be in the direct line of fire of the terrorist marauders. And it undermines the social solidarity that is essential to defeat terrorism.

Unlike other attacks on Mumbai, except perhaps the 1993 serial bombings that remain the worst single-day incident of terrorism in India, this one has focused on symbols of affluence and power. The targets chosen were also emblematic of India’s newly acquired profile in the global chessboard of power. But those who died were not the rich and the powerful alone. The first casualties indeed, were ordinary Indians waiting to board trains at the city’s main railway terminus.

Beyond the urgent and frenetic coverage of the armed encounter that developed between the terrorists and commandos of the Indian army and the National Security Guard (NSG), the media found little time to cover these tragedies, or to provide the victims and survivors a voice in the evolving national dialogue. Though the print media did a relatively better job, the electronic media seemingly had little time for these stories of human suffering.

This raises questions about the range of voices that people want to hear when they seek to cope with a national trauma. Are residents of Mumbai’s more exclusive neighbourhoods to have the run of the airwaves, their anger stoked by eager news anchors prepared to buy into the fiction that social merit is proportionate to taxes paid? Or is a more diverse public dialogue possible?

Shortly after the September 11 attacks in the U.S., the spokesman for the U.S. president warned rather ominously that Americans needed “to watch what they say”. That was one among many expressions of the prevalent mood of intolerance, which the U.S. media continued to feed, providing the context for the reckless plunge into wars in Afghanistan and then Iraq. These were momentous decisions taken on the most shoddy calculations, which a compliant media chose not to challenge. Today, it is acknowledged by all those who were silent then, that their acquiescence may have contributed to the exhaustion and enervation of the U.S. today and its deeply eroded standing in the world.

There are indeed, vital lessons to be learnt by India from the U.S. experience with 9/11, though not of the kind widely imagined. By stoking the anger of hand-picked guests and unsubtly suggesting where the direct responsibility for the Mumbai outrage lies, the news media have seemingly predetermined whatever strategic choices may be available to India. No voices that question the militarist response, have even the remotest chance of being heard with any seriousness.

The Indian media though, seems to have seriously engaged with diversity of a very different sort, considering the multiple dissonances that have emerged on basic points of fact. This speaks as much about the quality of the relationship between the media and the public, as about the nature of the governance compact and the degree of accountability that the security and intelligence agencies seem inclined to accept.

Early on the afternoon of November 27, well before the siege of Mumbai had reached the 24-hour mark, the Director-General of Police in Maharashtra announced that one of the sites of the armed encounter -- the historic Taj Mahal hotel -- had been emptied of all threats. As the day wore on and gunfights continued to rage, he remained unavailable for comment. The following day, the chief of the Indian Army’s Southern Command, who had travelled over from his headquarters in nearby Pune, announced around midday, that the Taj Mahal had just one remnant gunman hiding out in its old wing. The new wing had been thoroughly “cleansed” and the sole hangout would swiftly be neutralised, he predicted.

Gun battles raged on for hours afterwards and it was only early the next morning that the last of the marauders was put out of commission.

There were also periodic broadcasts that the gunmen had seized hostages and were engaged in negotiating a ransom for their release, when the reality was quite the contrary. No hostages were taken, since summary execution was seemingly the directive the terrorists had been instructed to implement.

Early in the encounter, a story was floated that huge quantities of the lethally destructive explosive, RDX, had been uncovered from sites in close vicinity of the Taj Mahal hotel. This story remained the exclusive property of one of the English news-channels, but was quietly and unobtrusively put to rest as the military operation to clear the siege progressed. It resurfaced in another guise though, with the claim that the gunmen who had commandeered the venues had huge quantities of the explosive in their possession and could possibly raze all three buildings, burying commandos engaged in combat in a graveyard of rubble.

Breathlessly, and without any attention to the inherent irony – since the parallel effort at Pakistan bashing was proceeding apace -- the news broadcasts claimed that the terrorists’ motives could be to replicate the Marriot Hotel attack in Islamabad in September, when an explosives-laden vehicle was driven into the compound of the Pakistani capital’s most exclusive hotel, reducing it within minutes into a raging inferno.

The RDX theory in its mutant form, was decisively scotched by the head of the NSG after the clean-up was completed, in full glare of the country’s numerous media channels. But even in its death throes, the theory proved to have some fervent adherents. Within two days of the final shot being fired in the siege of Mumbai, it was reprised, with attributions to anonymous sources. The Taj Mahal and the other luxury hotel that had been commandeered – the Oberoi Trident – the new narrative went, had been seeded with lethal RDX bombs. These had providentially, been detected and defused just in time. The intent of the gunmen otherwise, was to set off those explosives and to escape under the cover of the resultant chaos and confusion.

Thus, even as the theory that the mission in Mumbai was to kill maximally and if necessary, perish in the effort, continued to hold sway, an alternative narrative was gaining ground: that the marauders actually believed they had a credible chance of making good their escape.

There were numerous stories that the media managed to float on how the gunmen beached on Indian shores. To begin with, three distinct locations were identified in Mumbai as places where the gunmen had come ashore, though the rubber dinghy they had used for their landing had ostensibly been spotted and eyewitnesses to their arrival had spoken to the news channels.

Beyond this, there was considerable uncertainty sowed over the mode of arrival. There was first, a story of four decapitated bodies being found, all of the crew of the fishing trawler that had been hijacked by the terrorists, possibly off the coast of Porbandar.

Within two days, the number of victims of this particular episode was scaled back to one. The captain of the fishing trawler, it was surmised, had piloted the raiders to within sight of the Mumbai shore and then been killed.

Concurrently, speculation was being fuelled by unnamed sources within the police forces, that some elements of the crew may have cooperated with the raiders. The investigation, it was put out, was looking with great interest at fishing boat operators who had recently served time in Pakistani jails for breaching territorial boundaries, and perhaps been indoctrinated by Pakistani intelligence.

The identity of the captured attacker -- the only one caught on film in reasonable clarity, thanks to a news photographer who reached Mumbai’s principal railway terminus just when the first shootout began – was again cause of great confusion. Taken alive after a beachfront shootout on November 26, there were different versions of his name afloat till a week later. First accounts spoke of him as fluent in English and well-educated. A subsequent account told of him being of indigent family origins, with education well short of primary schooling. There were reports that he had been gravely injured and had begged for life-saving medical attention at the hospital he was taken to, and then a clarification by the dean of the medical college attached to the same hospital, that he was unharmed except for minor bruises. Finally, contrary to the account in one section of the media that he was being held in an “undisclosed location”, the medical expert testifying to the captured terrorist’s condition was identified by both name and affiliation.

Ostensibly based on the interrogation of the main accused, a major English language newspaper on December 2, carried a front-page account of how the massacre had been planned. It did not name any sources. Mumbai’s Police Commissioner the following day, perhaps gave away the game when he was reported by the same newspaper as validating its account.

The disorientation induced by Mumbai has been sufficiently grave for traditional rules of journalistic procedure – distance, dispassion and objectivity – to be thrown overboard. These apart, the Rashomon effect was obviously at work in a very stark fashion, with every media observer being convinced that events could with justification be interpreted in accordance with a predetermined attitude.

On December 2, India’s external affairs minister, Pranab Mukherjee, playing host to the Secretary-General of the Arab League, spoke of a range of options that were under consideration to deal with the aftermath of Mumbai. Though he specified none and indicated no preferences, Mukherjee’s statement was interpreted in diametrically opposed fashion by two of the country’s biggest English-language newspapers: one headlined its story “India open to military action against Pakistan”, while the other said quite definitively, “Pranab rules out military action”.

The latter attitude though, was a minimal strain in the media in the aftermath of Mumbai, since Pakistan-bashing was perhaps the only constant element in the competitive clamour for attention. Illustrative of how it has been deemed unnecessary to even provide a semblance of a hearing to the other side of the argument: a commentator on an English news-channel was dismissive about the need to present evidence to the Pakistan government, since such had been since long, featured on the front pages of all Indian newspapers.

It seemed irrelevant that there is a protocol of inter-governmental communications, that is quite independent of what is written in newspapers, whether on the front page or otherwise. Pakistan’s oft-stated request that evidence be placed before it of specific individuals and organisations suspected of involvement in terrorism, was dismissed as continuing testament to its state of “denial” and its unfailing recourse to “dilatory” tactics.

At the same time, the media found little amiss in reporting that India had presented detailed evidence on Pakistan’s involvement to the U.S.

The question the Indian media face is not a trivial one. Is it going to be an exclusive forum for the more extreme voices? Or can it find a sensible way forward, even in a conjuncture as trying as Mumbai 26/11, to promote a genuine social dialogue that is attentive to the true risks and benefits of any particular strategic course? From the huge variety of voices seeking to be heard in India, the media seemingly distils out only those that serve its prior conceptions. Though difficult in trying times such as now, can the media hear voices from across the border? Would it have any use for instance, for the following observations from the December 2 editorial in Dawn, one of the most restrained and sober voices in the Pakistan media: “…what cannot be condoned is the behaviour of the Indian media, that taking its cue from the politicians — and from a culture of nationalism that is especially apparent where Islamabad is concerned — came down hard on Pakistan, often conjuring up fantastical descriptions of the way the siege of Mumbai was laid. Not only does this put pressure on the Indian government to keep up its accusations and resist moves for a cooperative stance, it also damages people-to-people ties, for after all, the media is meant to speak for the common man”.

It has also completely passed the Indian media’s attention that beginning on November 29, Karachi, where the Mumbai marauders ostensibly set off from, was gripped by ethnic rioting on a scale never before seen. None of the known players in Karachi’s volatile political milieu owned any responsibility for the violence. As The Daily Times of Islamabad, another newspaper known for relative sobriety, commented in its December 2 editorial, the Prime Minister of Pakistan had asked for intelligence on the incidents and “at least one TV channel (had) reported that an intelligence report sent to the prime minister has held India responsible for the mayhem”.

This alibi, The Daily Times continued, was not really credible, since the history of strife between two of the city’s large ethnic communities – the Mohajirs and the Pashtuns – made the indigenous origin of the trouble an entirely plausible scenario.

Elsewhere in the editorial columns of the same newspaper, is the observation that November 2008 has been the bloodiest month so far for the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan. The country’s territorial sovereignty was “fast eroding” as non-state actors took over ever-expanding swathes of territory, denying the authority of the legally constituted Pakistani state. Foreign military intervention in Pakistan, if it came about, would be more on account of ongoing events in Peshawar than what had happened in Mumbai.

In the circumstances, if India’s argument that the Mumbai marauders enjoyed official patronage in Pakistan is accurate, then the military and intelligence establishments in that country are effectively guilty of treason against their own people. If that case can be made with some credibility it would surely be of interest to the people of Pakistan, who are heavily invested in a sustenance of the current phase of civilian rule. More than a military adventure, which could mire India in a worse strategic mess than the U.S. today finds itself in, a candid and transparent dialogue between governments and people is what is required. That clearly, is not something that could even begin, as long as the media continues to be an accessory of militarism, rather than a voice of sanity and the public good.

Mumbai's Horror

Scenes of horrific violence, conducted with cruel and deliberate premeditation, elicit anger and indignation. Mumbai’s 48-hour ordeal of terror, covered in real-time by the country’s numerous news channels, unleashed spasms of rage across the country. The fury is only likely to intensify when security operations are concluded and a true measure obtained of the horror that was unleashed on Mumbai that fateful night of November 26. And calls for vengeance will for long continue to reverberate.

More than all the serial bombings that India has seen, the siege of Mumbai poses, in terms of its continuing ramifications, a clear danger to every value on which the country rests: openness, diversity and tolerance. The Prime Minister in his first address to the nation after the crisis began, seemingly sounded the retreat from his party’s longstanding insistence that it would not countenance any fresh abridgment of civil rights to combat terrorism. Several media commentators have joined in with calls for extraordinary legislative measures and the empowerment of the security agencies.

An alternative mode of seeing is illustrated in the life and death of Hemant Karkare. The chief of the Anti-Terrorism Squad in the Maharashtra Police, the highest ranking Indian official to fall to terrorism in many years, was among the first to engage the armed desperadoes as they began to cut a swathe of destruction through Mumbai. He was cut down, along with several trusted colleagues, by the lethal firepower that the terror-ring managed to smuggle onto Indian shores. He leaves as an abiding legacy, the sterling sense of duty he displayed in his final hours.

The last month of his life, Karkare was engaged in the high-profile investigation of a network involving a supposed sadhvi, the self-proclaimed head of a religious foundation, a serving army officer and sundry others, which had allegedly carried out a string of bomb attacks in various parts of the country. He had earned the bitter ire of the principal national opposition party and its allies, which accused him of leading a politically motivated investigation and inflicting thoroughly unconscionable indignities on persons of the true faith.

There was grim irony then, in seeing the same political dignitaries jostling to offer tribute to the fallen officer, in a cynical effort to leverage his death for maximum advantage.

Once the shock and horror subside, the reality the nation confronts is of a terrorist threat that has climbed to an entirely new dimension: from stealth attacks carried out by faceless protagonists, to frontal operations carried out by individuals who do not hesitate to show themselves in full public view.

Reflexively, the security and intelligence community in India has held out the dire warning to Pakistan, that it would be expected in the days ahead, to prove its innocence, or risk a painful retribution. This threatens the faltering and tenuous Pakistani state which is evidently losing control of the many fanatical groupings that have flourished on its territory under a variety of patrons, including the superpower that is today sworn to their destruction. To challenge the Pakistani state to mortal combat would risk destroying the last potential buffer that stands between the entire South Asian region and a descent into anarchy.

At the same time, there is much that India needs to address in the fundamentals of its approach to terrorism. Late October, the Hyderabad police released four Muslim youth who had been held in custody, tortured and humiliated, for suspected complicity in the bombing of the Mecca Masjid in the city in May 2007. They had been arrested, it turned out, merely on a whim.

Around the same time, an investigation by the Central Bureau of Investigation established that officers of the Special Cell in the Delhi Police had conspired with the Intelligence Bureau, to implicate two Kashmiri youths in a terrorism plot. The two had in fact, been police informers who had fallen out of favour after an internal power struggle in the police force. Again, the two were held in custody for a needlessly long period of time and tortured, after incriminating evidence was planted on them.

The bare fact is that since terrorism became a consuming concern all over the world, India has consistently failed the test of evolving an approach that is even remotely likely to command the allegiance of the larger public. Where a broad public consensus is a vital component of a successful engagement, India’s approach has stigmatised one community, undermined social solidarity and created new wellsprings of resentment from which terrorism gains nourishment.

At the same time, a discourse that is patently antithetical to democratic policy dialogue has been promoted on the grounds that terrorism trumps all other concerns. Whatever may be the culpability of agencies and non-state actors based in Pakistan, India needs to ensure that domestic concord holds. That cannot be achieved by shutting off all critical voices in civil society and insulating the security and intelligence agencies from scrutiny. To suppress the democratic debate at home is to hand victory by default to alien forces of terrorism.

Hindutva's terrorism links

Terror strikes, randomly killing people who just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, unhinge reason. They breed an intolerance of difference and create conditions under which ordinary people are willing to abandon the commonsense of daily coexistence. In the immediate aftermath of a terrorist outrage, innocents who have suffered, demand recompense. And those fortunate enough to escape the direct experience of pain, fear that providence may not be so kind the next time around.

Part of the intent of terrorism, is that it creates the conditions in which quack remedies gain a measure of legitimacy. Acceptance comes in part from the seeming simplicity of these remedies, as also from their conformity with an existing template on terrorism.

That template was created in India soon after the September 11, 2001 attacks in the U.S. Though various authors have contributed, none has left as distinct an imprint on this master-narrative as Narendra Modi, then the BJP’s principal spokesman. Yet to become chief minister of Gujarat and with the horrors of February 2002 still a distant glimmer, Modi pronounced the mantra that has seemingly become the catechism for all official investigations: even if all Muslims are not terrorists, all terrorists are Muslims.

This is the template that was broken late in October, with potentially shattering political consequences, by the discovery of an elaborate network of terrorism involving the faithful of the Hindutva flock. The plot began to unravel with the arrest of a retired army officer in Pune and a woman from Bhind in Madhya Pradesh, who was once active in the students’ wing of the BJP before she donned the robes of piety and assumed the title of sadhvi. To great consternation all around, the investigations soon identified a lieutenant-colonel working with military intelligence and stationed in Jammu, as a key player in the terror network. And as the investigations progressed into the bombings on September 29 this year, in Malegaon in Maharashtra and Modasa in Gujarat, another saffron-robed religious preacher, normally based at Jammu, was arrested from a village of Kanpur district in Uttar Pradesh.

The Hindutva political fraternity, stung to the quick, reacted with allegations of a frame-up. Modi joined the fray with dark imprecations about a plot to undermine military morale. Propagandists for Hindutva in the media in turn, have sought to draw a distinction between “terrorism” and “vigilantism” – the one born in the stated desire to destroy the nation-state, the other spawned by the growing sense of frustration among the righteous majority, at the State’s failure to safeguard lives and liberties.

What all the sophistry fails to cover up, is that the reflexive belief -- fostered especially over the last seven years -- that those of the Islamic faith alone are responsible for terrorism, has created a cloak of impunity under which every manner of atrocity has flourished. It is conveniently overlooked that places of Islamic reverence have often been targeted in lethal bomb attacks – as with the cemetery adjacent to a mosque in Malegaon in September 2006, on an occasion when the pious gather to pay homage to the dead, and the Mecca Masjid in Hyderabad during Friday prayers in May 2007.

These incidents have been easily subsumed within the master-narrative of jihadi terror by invoking the visceral animosity that adherents of Wahhabi Islam supposedly harbour towards the syncretism of sub-continental religious practice. Police investigations, guided by this quack diagnosis, have targeted innocent Muslims by the scores. As recently as November 4, four suspects held for varying lengths of time for supposed involvement in the Mecca Masjid bombings, were acquitted by a Hyderabad court of all charges, including waging war against the State. They narrated sordid stories of torture, forced confessions and finally, of trials that were they not so tragic, could only be described as farcical.

Similar stories of arbitrary arrest and torture have emerged from Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Malegaon, Mumbai, Varanasi and Delhi, to name only a few cities that have witnessed terrorist atrocities in recent years. They were gathered together in written depositions and orally presented before an Independent Peoples’ Tribunal in Hyderabad as recently as August this year.

In few cases have the investigations into jihadi terrorism managed to produce credible evidence that will stand judicial scrutiny. In virtually all of them, the police have brought charges and pressed for conviction almost solely on the basis of confessions obtained in highly questionable circumstances.

These new expediencies in investigation need to be read in the light of the growing clamour from Hindutva political forces, that a law specific to the menace of terrorism needs to be brought in, which would make confessions in police custody admissible as evidence in court. They need to be seen in conjunction with the weak-kneed and amoral response of the editorialists and the liberal fringe in politics: that the Indian people should be prepared for an abridgment of their rights to defeat a far greater enemy of human liberty.

Few have so far paused to question why the Indian people should surrender the freedom of which they have so little. But with the discovery of Hindutva’s terrorism link, there is a possibility, though still remote, of a paradigm shift in perceptions – a shift of potentially far-reaching benefits for all. Needless to say, this is a possibility that will only be realised if the political apologists for Hindutva are subjected to the processes of accountability demanded by the rule of law.

Intertwined Destinies, Bristling Borders

Conjoined by history, Pakistan and Afghanistan need new ideas to work themselves out of the geopolitical trap they have been lured into by the U.S.


As a term in the international political science discourse, “failed state” is of relatively recent origin. It would take a great deal of effort to understand when the term entered the vocabulary, gaining currency first in a tiny trickle, before becoming the virtual torrent it is today. What is germane for present purposes, is that Afghanistan and Pakistan both gained the honour around the same time – Afghanistan perhaps a few years ahead of Pakistan, though the two have since been marching in virtual lockstep.

Despite the lack of clarity about its provenance, there is little doubt that the U.S. foreign policy establishment has played a key role in lending the notion of the “failed state” respectability. The discussion has been fuelled in large part by the concern within these circles on the growing disorder of the international states system. In the mid-1990s, the term was applied to states that seemed to be on a progressive pathway towards disintegration. The end of the Cold War as it was called, was also the beginning of a severe process of deterioration of internal governance structures in a number of countries.

That coincidence, if that indeed it was, needs to be further researched. But if “failure” as pronounced by the U.S. foreign policy establishment is the sole criterion, then South Asia – and India as the pivotal nation within the region – has much to worry about.

For Pakistan, conferment of the honour of “state failure” dates from around the late-1990s, roughly from the time that disillusionment with the Taliban was beginning to dawn in the U.S. and the numerous U.S. companies that had looked to the Islamic militia as the key to opening a pathway towards the energy riches of Central Asia, were beginning to tire of the strategic complexities involved in the new version of the “great game”. Pakistan was then one among many countries considered worthy of the accolade, which of course had been conferred upon Afghanistan well before.

The Science of Failed States

By the early years of the millennium, the science of “failed states” was being systematically established. In 2005, the “Fund for Peace”, a research and advocacy body based in Washington DC, in association with Foreign Policy magazine, began putting out an annual listing of the world’s “failed states”. It was the global, negative beauty pageant that was awaited with the most dread.

In 2005, Afghanistan ranked 11th in the listing and Pakistan 34th. In the system adopted by the analysts of “failed states”, Pakistan just escaped being classed under the “alert” category, which comprised all the countries deemed beyond the threshold. It was however, ranked top within the next category of critical attention, named “warning”.

The following year, Pakistan was ranked 9th, well within the “alert” category and ahead (or to be more precise, behind, since this is a negative beauty contest) even of Afghanistan, ranked 10th. It was perhaps the most precipitate collapse of credibility as a state, at least as far as perceptions within the U.S. foreign policy establishment are concerned.

In part because it managed to halt its own precipitate slide in the indicators that make up the “failed state” index, Pakistan recovered fractionally in the rankings to 12th position in 2007, while Afghanistan dwindled to 8th. The following year brought about a further decline in the fortunes of both: Afghanistan clocking in at the 7th place and Pakistan intimately behind (or rather ahead), at 9th place.

In the most recent listing of state failure, 35 of 177 nations were classed under the “alert” category, suggesting the imminent possibility of failure. Another 92 countries were categorised under the “warning” list. Taken as an aggregate of crisis possibilities, this means that no fewer than 71 percent of the nations that were within the sample and well over 60 percent of the current membership of the United Nations, are deemed to be in danger of implosion.

In the most recent rankings, India came in respectably at 98th, classed within the tail-end of the “warning” category. But India has ample reason to worry, since five countries within its near neighbourhood, from amongst the membership of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), have been graded under the “alert” category. And the two others keep India company in the “warning” list.

Whatever the ethical merits of the rankings – and it must be noted that they lack a sense of history and completely leave out of account western culpability in the undermining of Third World states – they provide a window into understanding the current situation in Pakistan. Increasingly, it is a country whose fate is tied up with Afghanistan. This is not just because of undeniable historical links and ties of community and kinship, but also because, to their dual misfortune, they have been designated as battlegrounds in the preservation of a geopolitical order of growing fragility. They have in the interests of mere survival, surrendered virtually all autonomy to a superpower that began a military adventure within their territories in the firm belief that it would not be challenged. Now that superpower is flailing about and sinking into a morass of strategic confusion as it seeks to deal with the multitude of challenges – military and above all economic – that it faces.

The law of unexpected outcomes has kicked in with a vengeance.

When the accidental U.S. president, George W. Bush, launched his wars against Afghanistan, and following that, Iraq, he was convinced that these were not wars of choice: they had been forced on the U.S. Equally, he was confident that the wars would end at a time of his choosing. Yet as he nears the end of his term, he is clueless about how and under what conditions he would be willing to call an end to the many wars he has launched, now unanimously recognised to have been wars of choice. And it is the misfortune of Afghanistan and Pakistan, that they have been the countries targeted in this misbegotten adventure by a superpower that simply did not know when its time was up.

Since the wars for maintaining U.S. primacy began, every major rite of political passage in Pakistan has had the conspicuous representation of somebody from Afghanistan. Pervez Musharraf was Pakistan’s army chief, president and chief executive all rolled into one, when the military operations in Afghanistan began. In fractional, but distinct measures, he was compelled over time to surrender this vast accumulation of power. Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan’s most well-known political leader, was expected incrementally, to assume the power that Musharraf ceded. But the Benazir-Musharraf pact never had the remotest chance of being implemented. The orderly transfer of power that the U.S. had scripted was quickly transformed into a messy affair, involving the putative rights of a widower to assume control of a political legacy, almost in the manner of a family heirloom, and his own shadowy past, involving multiple instances of seriously breaching public trust.

Shortly after the last vestige of Musharraf’s authority was removed, Asif Ali Zardari – who assumed leadership of the Pakistan Peoples’ Party (PPP) following the assassination of his wife Benazir -- was voted into office as the president of Pakistan. Present at his inauguration was Hamid Karzai, the figure who in western perceptions, represents the new Afghanistan. As Zardari shortly afterwards, addressed his first press conference as head of state, Karzai continued to be at his elbow.

This was an event without precedent, that had media observers scratching their heads in puzzlement. As the front page report in Dawn, Pakistan’s principal English-language daily put it: “President Zardari’s move to address his maiden press conference along with a foreign dignitary surprised many in the federal capital. Some analysts considered it a result of bad advice being given by people around him.”

Substantively, neither President had very much to say, aside from denouncing terrorism and vowing to combat all its forms. Karzai for his part, expressed “concern” over civilian deaths in Afghanistan and Pakistan, or as the U.S. and its allies put it, “collateral damage” in the war against terrorism, though without specifically referring to the air-strikes that had taken a heavy toll of civilian life in Afghanistan in the months preceding. And he stressed the need to win the “cooperation” of the people to make terrorism extinct.

This was the presumable alternative to the preferred western strategy of intimidating the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan into submission through massive displays of military prowess. The target of military action, said Karzai, “should be sanctuaries of terrorists, be these in Afghanistan or in Pakistan, and not the civilian population. We cannot tolerate civilian casualties and a fool-proof mechanism has to be established”.

Musharraf botches his compact with Benazir

Karzai also happened to be in Islamabad on December 27, 2007, the day Benazir Bhutto was assassinated. The two met around noon that day and according to an account rendered from first-hand observation, exchanged much good-natured banter, though without getting down to any serious business. Scheduled to meet two senior legislators from the U.S. that evening, Benazir went directly into a meeting with a senior political aide, who she tasked with preparing a memorandum to be presented to her U.S. interlocutors. She thought it an especially urgent priority that the peculiar status of the military intelligence agencies in Pakistan should be explained to the U.S. political establishment.

Benazir then went on to her public meeting at Liaqat Bagh, named in tribute to Pakistan’s first Prime Minister, assassinated in 1950 in the same vicinity. Her assassins struck less than five hours from her meeting with Karzai. The clumsy official response shocked the world and led to much adverse comment since it seemed focused on effacing all traces of the outrageous assault on democracy rather than identifying those responsible for it. Benazir’s killing only served to underline, in the words of a perceptive observer, the “chasm of trust between Pakistan’s government and its people”.

Zardari was far away, in Dubai, as the deadly attack on Benazir took place. In a technical sense, he had secured indemnity in multiple cases of corruption, abduction and murder, through the extraordinary ordinance promulgated by Musharraf in October 2007. Yet Zardari did not feel sufficiently emboldened to return with Benazir to Pakistan that same month.

This may have been a decision made in abundant caution, since the terms of his return, as also of Benazir’s – as specified in the National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO) signed into law by Musharraf on October 5 -- like all such hastily crafted pieces of law, had areas of ambiguity that could conceivably have been manipulated to place Zardari under custody. Clearly, the man who had earned widespread disrepute for his rampant corruption and cronyism during Benazir’s last tenure as prime minister, had no wish to repeat the long years he had spent in jail between 1996 and 2005, for charges that included the murder in 1996 of Mir Murtaza Bhutto, his brother-in-law and prospective challenger for the mantle of the Bhutto political legacy.

Musharraf’s anxiety level in October though, was sufficient for him to bury all concerns about Zardari’s unsavoury past. He was intent on securing re-election as president by national and provincial legislatures that were at the end of their tenures and had little authority to elect a head of state to a full five-year term. The NRO was part of a deal to ensure him the loyalty of Benazir’s bloc of legislators, for which he was prepared reciprocally, to promise the waiver of the multitude of charges Benazir and her family faced. The legal device that was invoked for this very personalised exertion of the presidential power of pardon was an arbitrary cut-off point: October 12, 1999, the day Musharraf as chief of staff of the Pakistan army, overthrew Prime Minister Nawaz Sharief and installed himself as chief executive. In effect, the NRO divided up Pakistan’s political history into the ante and post-Musharraf periods. And as chief of staff of the army and an omnipotent president, Musharraf in October 2007 assumed the authority to extinguish, with a stroke of his pen, all cases registered before his advent to power.

Despite the long and arduous bargaining that went into it, this entire compromise was a seriously flawed affair. Musharraf first reportedly met in secret with Benazir in the Gulf emirate of Abu Dhabi in July 2007. Clearly, some extraordinary circumstances had impelled him into this concession to the civilian politicians he had disdained and in earlier public utterances, held singularly responsible for all the woes that Pakistan as a nation faced.

Sources of Musharraf’s anxiety

Among the many circumstances that might have forced his hand, the bloody confrontation at the Lal Masjid in Islamabad in July 2007 was undoubtedly, among the most important. That was when long-simmering provocations by two brothers, both with claims to Islamic wisdom, who controlled the officially-funded Lal Masjid in Pakistan’s capital city – the venue for congregational prayers by much of the country’s top military brass – reached tipping point. Vigilante squads from the Lal Masjid had for months together been roaming free, imposing their own version of Islamic purity on the city. Islamabad’s prestigious Qaid-e-Azam University was targeted for its alleged disregard for Islamic values. Houses were raided and women taken hostage for alleged immorality. And a radio station operating within the premises of the mosque backed up this campaign of vigilantism with flagrant incitements to violence.

The Lal Masjid clerics were in effect given the untrammelled authority to both create flashpoints of tension and determine their modes of resolution. With great self-importance, clerics in the Lal Masjid played host to the Saudi Arabian ambassador, as also the Chinese diplomats who approached them as supplicants pleading for the release of compatriots taken hostage while working as technical experts on infrastructure projects. All this while, the premises of the mosque were being saturated with guns, explosives and lethal weaponry of every description.

Musharraf’s motives in condoning this perilous accumulation of power within a religious institution in the national capital, can only be guessed at. As Pervez Hoodbhoy, professor of physics at Qaid-e-Azam University – and a highly respected spokesman for civil liberties – has argued, Musharraf could have been “banking on Islamic fanatics to create chaos in the nation's capital” and engineering a “bloodbath”, that would give him the alibi for an army intervention and the possible declaration of a “national emergency”. These in turn, would have given him a credible basis for arguing that national elections scheduled for October 2007, could not be conducted.

The game was up when China, smarting from the humiliation of supplicating for the release of its kidnapped technicians, issued an ultimatum. The subsequent conflagaration in the heart of Pakistan’s capital claimed, by the official count, 107 lives, though unofficial estimates put the magnitude of the carnage much higher. Musharraf had won a dubious triumph at enormous human cost. He had once again been shown up as the sorcerer’s apprentice who in his self-imagined cleverness, unleashes forces that later come back to haunt him.

Just days after the Lal Masjid bloodbath, Musharraf woke up to the discomfiting realisation that his continuing patronage by the U.S. could not really be taken for granted. On July 16, 2007, the U.S. Director of National Intelligence released his National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), a periodic summation mandated by the U.S. Congress, of the most authoritative findings of U.S. intelligence agencies. The NIE had several inconvenient truths to tell. It told for instance, of how the extremist group Al-Qaeda had, despite all the pressure exerted by the U.S. military machine, “protected or regenerated key elements” of its capability in the relatively sheltered environment of the Waziristan region in Pakistan. It observed too that Al Qaeda had achieved significant success in its effort to “recruit and indoctrinate operatives” willing to strike on U.S. territory, in part through an Iraqi affiliate.

The NIE set off feverish activity on another front, provoking calls by politicians, both minor and major, for aggressive new military action. Barack Obama, then one among many candidates for the presidential nomination of the Democratic party, insisted that the U.S. should be at liberty to act in the Waziristan region if “actionable intelligence” existed and Pakistan failed to do what was necessary.

Pakistan’s ambassador to the U.S. then, the former general Mahmud Ali Durrani, responded with alacrity. Variously describing the findings of the NIE as “absolutely incorrect” and “an absolute fallacy”, Durrani reminded his U.S. hosts that they had no option but to rely on Pakistan to bring peace to Afghanistan. Unilateral action by U.S. forces often resulted in unacceptable levels of “collateral damage”, with few of the legitimate military objectives being met. Pakistan could not afford to sustain these levels of civilian deaths. Besides, Pakistan had the concern that U.S. intelligence very often was “faulty”, “inaccurate” and tended not to be “timely” either.

These locutions were clearly, a coded reference to the frequent missile strikes in Waziristan and other border regions of Pakistan, which were by then inflicting casualties in the scores. Two such attacks occurred in June 2007, though the bloodiest till then, was the October 2006 strike on a madrasa, which killed around 80 students. Eager to dispel any notion of its territorial sovereignty being breached, Pakistan had stepped up on all occasions to take responsibility for these attacks.

Waziristan erupts again

The same month brought another testing moment for Musharraf, when tribal chieftains in the Waziristan region, home to autonomous and fiercely independent Pashtun tribes that had never acknowledged the centralising power of the federal government in Islamabad, decided to tear up the peace agreement worked out in 2006.

Musharraf had secured the uneasy right to station his forces in the tribal regions in 2002, in exchange for a reciprocal promise that he would pay special attention to the developmental needs of an area that had subsisted for literally centuries in an administrative limbo. In 2004, under pressure from the U.S. to do something drastic to end the safe havens that Islamic militants fleeing Afghanistan had secured in the region, Musharraf sanctioned offensive actions by his forces. The results were catastrophic. Despite gung-ho predictions of swift and certain victory as his troops marched into the unknown, Pakistan’s armed forces suffered immense losses. And to multiply his agonies, the truce that Musharraf concluded after this misadventure was, soon after the Lal Masjid confrontation, unilaterally abrogated by the tribal chieftains of Waziristan who accused federal forces of a persistent pattern of violations.

Impelled by dire necessity to talk terms with the civilians he had once disdained, Musharraf soon ran into problems. Within a month of commencing the secret parleys, Benazir announced that the talks were off. Negotiations with Musharraf’s representatives, she said, had progressed “80 percent” of the way towards a deal, but resistance from members of the Pakistan Muslim League (Qaid-e-Azam), or the “King’s Party” as it was called in Pakistani political circles, had scuppered chances of a successful outcome. Benazir was also fairly explicit about what the ideal outcome of the negotiations would be: Musharraf’s resignation as army chief of staff and his reelection as civilian president for another term, and the restoration of her rights, as also of all party colleagues, to contest elections and hold political office.

It is uncertain whether Benazir had a specific sequence in mind when she placed these demands on record, though it is abundantly clear that neither side had the slightest faith in the other. Musharraf only signed the NRO into law on the eve of the scheduled election to the presidency. Despite the PPP’s very marginal presence in the electoral college, he was desperate to get Benazir’s endorsement, simply because there was no other way the second term he aspired to, could be spent in relative tranquillity. In the event, the PPP walked out of the assembly chambers in both the national and provincial capitals, rather than vote for Musharraf’s reelection.

If Benazir believed that Musharraf would stand down as army chief prior to seeking reelection, she was again gravely mistaken. Musharraf made sure that he still was in absolute power when seeking reelection, which permitted him the luxury – in disregard of all constitutional requirements – to choose the day that he would shed his khaki. And the day he chose was the eve of his swearing in for a second term as president. He had meanwhile, ensured that the formidable military machine that he was ceding control over, would remain pliant to his designs. On September 21, he effected significant changes in the top military command structure. The pivotal post of Director-General in the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) – often described as the secret state within Pakistan -- was entrusted to Lieutenant-General Nadeem Taj, a close confidant who had served him as military secretary from virtually the very beginning of his tenure as the army chief.

Musharraf takes a political insurance policy

Keenly aware of the fragility of his political support, Musharraf then proceeded to remove all potential sources of inconvenient questions. A nationwide state of emergency was declared in November 2007, after which he proceeded to effect a massive surgical operation on the judiciary, removing all possible sources of dissent and bringing in judges who were less likely to entertain challenges to the political edifice he was constructing, on markedly dubious legal foundations.

When national and provincial elections were finally conducted, the PPP rode the sympathy wave created by Benazir’s assassination, to emerge as the largest single party at the federal level. But it was denied an absolute majority and had to enter into seemingly endless bargaining over constituting a government. The sticking point, ostensibly, was the insistence of the Pakistan Muslim League headed by Nawaz Sharief, (the PML-N) that a minimal condition for its association with the ruling arrangement would be a PPP commitment on reinstating all the judges dismissed by Musharraf. Now having assumed control of the PPP, as Tariq Ali described it, almost in the manner of a family heirloom, Zardari had evident reservations about allowing independent minds back into the portals of the country’s higher judiciary. That would have quite conceivably led to a reexamination of the entire foundations of his return to Pakistan and the reversed the remarkable revival in political fortunes that he was enjoying.

Sharief though, was smarting from the memory of the many humiliations he had suffered at Musharraf’s hands – first his ignominious ouster from premiership and imprisonment in 1999, his trial in 2000 and conviction for terrorism and “attempted hijacking” and the long years of banishment in Saudi Arabia. As recently as September 2007, he chose to preempt the Musharraf-Benazir negotiations and unilaterally reinterpret the terms of his exile by returning to Pakistan, only to be bundled out in double quick time and deep dishonour. It took an extraordinary political intervention by the Saudi ruling dynasty to secure his return in November, though his pathway towards resuming an elected role in politics remained blocked by judicial rulings.

The story of those deep intrigues still remains to be written. But the people of Pakistan could not have been happy with the games their politicians were playing, endlessly bickering over petty issues of personal concern, while delaying the formation of a civilian government, which had been the consuming passion of all for the many months preceding. Finally, the PPP and the PML-N agreed, just in time to salvage public trust, that they would constitute a government on the understanding that the judges would be reinstated and Musharraf’s future would be decided once they were installed in power.

To underline their very real resentments about Musharraf continuing in office on the basis of a dubiously engineered vote, PML-N ministers took their oath of office in March wearing black armbands. The gesture almost prompted a stormy riposte by Musharraf but it was a sign of the weak hand he had been left with, that he consented, in obvious ill-temper, to proceed with the swearing-in ceremony.

Within a mere six weeks of the taking the oath, all PML-N ministers quit the Federal Cabinet. Two deadlines had been set for the PPP leadership and Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani, to order the reinstatement of the judges. Both passed with no action.

Early in August 2008 though, the PPP and the PML-N found that they had a new basis for unity. After prolonged and still rather opaque negotiations, they resolved that they would jointly seek Musharraf’s removal as president, through impeachment if necessary. Zardari’s anxieties about the adverse consequences that could ensue from a confrontational course, had obviously been allayed by then. How this was accomplished is of course a matter that can only be guessed at, though the clues available are ample.

Late in August, two major U.S. newspapers reported that the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, the Afghan-born Zalmay Khalilzad, had been sharply upbraided by seniors in the U.S. State Department, for carrying out “unauthorised” contacts with Zardari. As U.N. ambassador, Khalilzad had little formal jurisdiction over Pakistan and yet, as U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Richard Boucher put it in an angry e-mail message, he had reportedly been offering “advice and help” to Zardari. Clearly infuriated that Khalilzad’s intervention had gone contrary to declared policy, Boucher demanded to know in what capacity he had offered “advice and help”: whether “government, private or personal”.

The contacts between the two men had been by all accounts, extensive. As The New York Times put it, they had spoken over telephone “several times a week for the past month”. It turned out moreover, that this was part of a pattern of deviant behaviour by Khalilzad, since he had in mid-2007, earned a “stern warning” from the second-ranking official of the U.S. State Department, Deputy Secretary John Negroponte, for carrying on freelance diplomacy with the Bhutto family. The flamboyant Khalilzad, a former oil industry operative and a charter member of the cabal of “neo-conservatives” that drives U.S. foreign policy, agreed then to fall in line, but three days later, was reported to have had a private dinner with Benazir.

The U.S. decides who in Pakistan is dispensable

Clearly, the U.S. foreign policy establishment, despite all the official noises emanating from the State Department, had decided by August 2008, that they could dispense with Musharraf, since Zardari offered the more promising opportunities for future engagements in Pakistan. Rather than risk the humiliation of impeachment, Musharraf chose shortly afterwards to resign. The war in Afghanistan, once his greatest assurance of continuing support from the U.S., had become by then, a millstone that he could no longer bear. And the U.S. for its part had evidently tired of Musharraf by then and was keen to explore other options.

For the U.S., the change of horses was, from the strategic point of view, long overdue. Early in October, a French diplomatic telegram came to light, which recorded the rather lugubrious observations of the British ambassador to Kabul. The U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, said the British diplomat in a conversation with French counterparts, was “destined to fail”. Seeking troop reinforcements from the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) would be counterproductive, since that would only multiply the range of targets for Afghan insurgents to aim their firepower at. Indeed, the foreign military forces on Afghan territory were part of the problem rather then the solution.

Karzai in this demi-official assessment, had lost all trust and could not be counted on to retrieve the rapidly deteriorating situation. Indeed, the most happy outcome for the west, would be for an “acceptable dictator” to assume absolute authority in Kabul in the next few years.

The gloomy message was underlined by the top-ranking U.S. military official, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, Admiral Mike Mullen, in remarks to the media early-October. “The trends across the board are not going in the right direction,” he said. ”I would anticipate next year would be a tougher year.” Citing an intelligence assessment which was in the final stages of preparation, Mullen spoke of the imminent possibility of a “downward spiral” in the situation “unless there were rapid, major improvements”. These included curbing the booming heroin trade -- the most important source of funds for the insurgency – significantly devolving power to the district and provincial chiefs, and choking off the flow of militants from safe havens in Pakistan.

From the time in September 2001, that Musharraf was compelled to sign on to the U.S. war project in Afghanistan and to enroll himself as an accessory in the destruction of the Taliban regime that Pakistan had been singularly responsible in creating, he had shown ample signs of ambivalence. On the one hand, he was highly responsive to western demarches that he crack down on known Al-Qaeda operatives in his country and had offered significant logistical support in the capture and extradition of key figures such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and Ramzi bin al-Shibh. At the same time, he hardly made a secret of his deep disdain for the Afghan regime, despite the explicit and oft-repeated U.S. belief that Karzai was the man that it trusted to bring order to Afghanistan.

Musharraf’s behaviour in this respect has been described as “schizophrenic”, though to be fair to him, he probably was responding with as much consistency as he could muster, to conflicting pressures. Illustratively, in July 2006, he denied in a series of public statements that there were any Taliban cadre sheltering in Pakistan and accused Karzai of being manipulated by India. Shortly afterwards, he declared in a televised speech that the Taliban indeed, were a presence in Pakistan, though less so than in Afghanistan. In September that year, three days after signing a peace agreement with the Waziristan tribes, he paid a visit to Kabul at short notice, where he told a gathering of Afghan parliamentarians that “the best way to fight the common enemy (the Taliban) (was) to join hands, trust each other and form a common strategy”.

Barely civil

Shortly afterwards, Musharraf and Karzai who both happened to be in New York for the U.N. General Assembly, engaged in a bruising verbal battle in public, questioning each other credentials and capabilities. When they met a few days later in Washington DC, under the gaze of U.S. President George Bush, they reportedly avoided shaking hands. Karzai put forward his single-point demand: that Musharraf arrest the Taliban leaders sheltering in Pakistan, rather than make deals with them. Having barely extricated himself from a bruising military encounter with the Waziristan tribes, Musharraf was in no mood to listen. And Bush reportedly, was anxious not to be seen taking sides. An earlier demand from Karzai for the arrest and extradition of Taliban leaders sheltering in Pakistan was rebuffed with the accusation that Indian intelligence agencies, operating on Afghan soil, were engaged in a campaign of sabotage and destabilisation in the Baloch region of Pakistan.

The idea of a “peace jirga” involving Pakistan and Afghanistan was proposed at the Washington meeting, on Karzai’s initiative. By all accounts, Musharraf was lukewarm, but acceded to the proposal under U.S. pressure. The idea of adapting the jirga, or traditional assembly of Pashtun tribes to the cause of building bridges between two neighbouring States, each facing problems of internal turmoil and external tutelage, was a novel one. But it continued to encounter Pakistan’s indifference.

It is not difficult to see that the process of tribal consultations across borders runs contrary to the centralising tendency of a state dominated by the military. To be of any consequence, these consultations must be accompanied by a commitment that cross-border solidarities, of tribe or ethnicity or language, would be given significant room, setting up a force potentially antithetical to the centralising state. With the persistent trouble it was facing in Baluchistan compounded by the turmoil in Waziristan, there was ample reason for Islamabad to worry about yielding greater room for tribal communities to determine the contours of relations with Afghanistan. Aside from the insecurity engendered by recent experience, the process also seemed to necessitate a dilution of the concept of “strategic depth” – a doctrine that military administrations in Pakistan have in particular been committed to, as an antidote to the sense of siege the state has suffered from the moment of its birth.

Under relentless prodding from Washington, the peace jirga was finally scheduled for the early part of August 2007. In the days before the event, three heavyweight leaders of Islamic political parties in Pakistan – Fazlur Rahman, Samiul Haq and Qazi Hussain Ahmad – all of Pashtun extraction, decided to stay away. The tribal chiefs of Waziristan soon followed suit. Before setting off for Kabul, Pakistan delegates were extensively briefed by senior officials of the federal government in Islamabad and the provincial government in Peshawar, and told that they were under no circumstances to yield the moral ground. Any attempt to place the blame on Pakistan for the situation in Afghanistan, they were told, would have to be firmly rebuffed.

Musharraf opted out of attending the jirga, sending Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz instead and staying back amidst frenetic speculation about his intent to declare a state of emergency. The mounting speculation only died down when the Pakistan president disavowed the idea, amidst expressions of disapproval from Washington. Shortly afterwards he decided to accept Karzai’s invitation to address the closing session of the jirga in Kabul. From Washington, a spokesman of the State Department put out the statement that the Bush administration was “pleased” at the decision.

Pakistan’s schizoid policy

In the hours before the Pakistan president’s arrival, the jirga had been debating, beyond the florid speeches and the routine expressions of good intent, how best to operationalise a credible truce in the border region between the two countries. Curiously, according to a report put out by the Afghan news agency, Pajhwok, the Pakistan delegates at one stage tabled a proposal that two Indian consulates – of the four opened in Afghanistan since the ejection of the Taliban – be shut down. The Afghan delegates protested that these demands were in breach of agreed rules of non-interference. And when Musharraf finally appeared before the closing session of the jirga, he came with a virtual mea culpa. In breach of the rules framed for Pakistan’s delegates, Pakistan’s president, with his Afghan counterpart nodding vigorously in agreement, read out the following lines from a prepared text: “There is no doubt Afghan militants are supported from Pakistan soil. The problem that you have in your region is because support is provided from our side.”

This was another revelation of Musharraf’s uniquely schizoid style. And however well intended he may have been, there has been little change since then, in strategic realities in the two countries. In the midst of all the chatter at the jirga, though, there were views expressed that salvation for the region lay in nothing less than the withdrawal of all alien forces. It was a demand that the dominant political parties in Balochistan and the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan soon afterwards amplified.

The U.S. forces have seemingly paid no heed. Shortly after Khalilzad and Zardari had presumably at one of their secret parleys, worked out their deal to oust Musharraf, U.S. air and ground forces stepped up their activity in the Waziristan region of Pakistan. There was a symmetry here between U.S. actions immediately after Musharraf’s ouster and actions just after he was voted to a full-term in the presidency in the infamously rigged referendum of 2002. As a recent work of reportage on Pakistan puts it: “The timing hardly seemed fortuitous. On May 1, 2002, only twenty-four hours after the controversial and flawed referendum that extended Pervez Musharraf’s presidency for an additional five years – with the tacit approval of Washington – Pakistan officials acknowledged that a small number of U.S. ground forces had been given reluctant permission to operate inside Pakistan”.

Every change of regime in Pakistan is in other words, merely a way-station in the growing assertion of U.S. military suzerainty in the region.

With civilian rule restored in Pakistan though, the U.S. would have little reason to expect a clear field for their military operations. The newly installed provincial government in the North-west Frontier Province for instance, is committed to a new approach to bringing peace to the trouble border with Afghanistan, other than the heavy-handed military tactics favoured by the U.S. The chief minister of NWFP, Asfandyar Wali Khan and the provincial chief of the ruling Awami National Party, Afrasiab Khattak – both scions of major political dynasties in the region – have indicated that they will open negotiations rather than risk a further escalation of hostilities.

There are indications also, that the Pakistan military has begun to respond with something approaching alarm to the impunity with which U.S. forces have been crossing the border. Late September, Pakistan forces fired what they claimed were warning shots at two U.S. army helicopters that were flying perilously close to the border.

Perhaps the most hopeful sign though, is that a new dynamic seems to be developing between the Pakistan military and the newly installed civilian leadership, as a response to the challenge posed by growing U.S. military overlordship. Contrary to earlier practices, when elected civilian leaders were denied access to security information that the army deemed its exclusive preserve, the Pakistan military brass recently delivered an extensive briefing on the war scenario to a joint session of both houses of the Pakistan National Assembly. The military leadership, though angered at what it called the persistent vilification of the ISI, also undertook to support the effort to evolve a new consensus on the security challenges facing Pakistan.

Things fall apart

How far this new mood of consensus will go is anybody’s guess. Since May 2008, casualties among U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan have consistently outstripped the toll in Iraq. Afghan civilian deaths meanwhile, have multiplied, increasingly as a consequence of misdirected attacks by U.S. and allied forces. Each such incident elicits a volley of protests from the Afghan national government, followed by a commitment from the foreign forces that investigations would duly be conducted. And as virtually foretold from the moment the inquiries are launched, the finding, finally, is that the occupying military forces acted “appropriately”.

The reasons why the border with Pakistan is now bristling with insurgency against the Karzai regime, owe entirely to the architecture of the western plan for Afghanistan. Because it did not want the retrieval effort in one failed state to end in a situation of two failed states, the west connived in the early phase of its military campaign in Afghanistan, with Pakistan’s strategy of withdrawing most assets invested in the Taliban regime, or at least all that could be salvaged. This withdrawal was part of an agreed compact by which Musharraf sought in the cataclysmic defeat of his country’s strategic ambitions, a pretence – even if a very thin one – that the country was well-served by the war in Afghanistan.

The militant tendencies were transferred to Pakistan’s northern areas, to greatly add to the restiveness of the Pashtun tribes there. Afghanistan meanwhile, approaches meltdown, since the leadership that the west had anointed for what it fancifully calls the “democratic transition”, has carved up the country into a multitude of personal fiefdoms. Rather than attend to the rigours of building up a genuine sense of national solidarity, the west opted for a confederacy of the same warlords – Rashid Dostum, Abdul Rasool Sayyaf, Mohammad Mohaqiq, Ismael Khan, Karim Khalili, and numerous others – whose ouster by the Taliban was greeted by the people of Afghanistan in the mid-1990s as a form of deliverance.

Denied authority in most of the country, Karzai himself has decided, according to authoritative assessments, to cultivate his own fiefdom in the southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar – currently Afghanistan’s most fertile breeding grounds for illicit opium. A loss of image in the west, the risk that he may be seen as a patron of the lethal trade in narcotics, is for Karzai, clearly a lesser danger than being overwhelmed by the confederacy of warlords that the U.S. military intervention has created.

It is increasingly clear, though, that peace can only be restored in Afghanistan through a process that fosters real sentiments of social solidarity and restores the benign face of the old allegiances of tribe and ethnicity. This is a process that would necessarily have to accommodate cross-border (or extra-territorial) ties of community and kinship. It would in that sense, work against the centralising logic of a modern nation-state, especially one that has remained for long years under military management. If the current gloomy prognoses by the U.S. intelligence agencies are to be taken at face value, things are likely to get much worse before they get better. That prognoses would be equally applicable to Pakistan too. And since no nation is an island, that is a forecast that all countries in South Asia need to pay heed to. There is little room for complacency. And the repercussions of a “business as usual” approach to neighbourhood relations, especially for the largest country in the region, may well be unacceptably high.

“War” on terror: losing sight of strategic fundamentals

If “war” is the appropriate description for the struggle against terror that the country is now engaged in, then it is a war that differs very significantly from the conventional understanding.

Four attacks in major cities in as many months – the latest being the Delhi serial blasts of September 13 -- may represent an escalation, but the war really began from well before. The precise date is a matter of almost arbitrary choice: by one mode of reckoning, the attacks on Srinagar’s legislative assembly building on October 13, 2001, and on India’s parliament on December 11, 2001, could be deemed the formal start of hostilities. On another scale, the war began on October 29, 2005, when middle-class markets in Delhi were gutted on the eve of a rare conjunction when Diwali and Eid-ul-fitr were celebrated on the same day.

Lethal explosions, striking random and indiscriminate terror in teeming urban milieus, have since been recurrent events. On July 11, 2006, the suburban train system of Mumbai – the lifeline of the country’s greatest metropolis -- was torn up as evening rush hour began, in the kind of meticulously deadly serial bombing the city had seen before in March 1993. Over 200 people with no concern other than getting on with their lives in the best tradition of Mumbai, were killed in those attacks.

There have since, been bombings with serious loss of life in Malegaon, Hyderabad (at three distinct venues on two separate dates), Jaipur, Bangalore, Ahmedabad and Delhi. Three bombs went off in court-room compounds in different cities of Uttar Pradesh on November 23, 2007, killing ten. And punctuating this litany of atrocities has been the occasional, narrowly averted tragedy, as in Surat, where a number of bombs were discovered on July 28, that just failed to detonate.

Each of these are resilient cities that for all their signs of urban blight, still manage to accommodate the vastness, the complexity and generosity of India. And the people in these cities, responding with immense fortitude to adversity, have shown that their spirit is not easily subdued.

The victims of terrorism deserve justice and they deserve considerably more than the political vaudeville that is being served up by the BJP, as the principal opposition party, and the Congress, as the principal constituent of the ruling coalition at the centre. Expectedly, the BJP has responded to the recent sequence of attacks with shrill invective, demanding summary justice for terrorists and damning the Congress for its vacillation. And unlike in earlier conjunctures, when the Congress proved firm enough in its convictions to withstand the pressure, this time around it has buckled. Clearly, it has suffered a failure of will and has sought preemptive protection against the propaganda device that the BJP is almost certain to deploy – that Congress-led governments have been negligent of the security of the common citizen, having repealed two anti-terrorism statutes in under a decade.

The government’s intent was conveyed in the report of an ambiguously empowered body called the Administrative Reforms Committee, headed by Veerappa Moily, an active duty politician who has served as chief minister of Karnataka. This is a committee that has in several earlier conjunctures come up with formulae to bail the government out of thorny dilemmas. This time around, it has proposed a range of legal measures – not as a distinct enactment, but as amendments to an existing law on the prevention of “unlawful activities”.

The official view now seems to tilt strongly towards creating a specially empowered agency under the central government’s jurisdiction, to investigate and prosecute terrorism cases. This agency would be vested with powers under a special statute, allowing for preventive detention for a defined period of time.

The BJP needless to say, remains unconvinced, and has fielded some of its most voluble spokesmen to argue that punitive, rather than preventive, clauses should really be the essence of the new law. These provisions would enable the handing out of swift justice in cases of terrorism. And in this respect, the admissibility of confessions made before the police as legal evidence, is really where the focus should be.

Using its current anti-terrorism icon – Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi -- as principal propagandist, the BJP also argued the case that states should be allowed the freedom to enact anti-terrorism laws of their own, on the lines of the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA). The BJP has a grievance that a closely analogous law it has enacted in Gujarat, called the GUJCOCA, is yet to receive central government assent.

These are partisan battles that go back a long way and involve much political opportunism. The substantive point though, is that the two anti-terrorism statutes that the BJP today makes much of – the Terrorism and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act of 1987 (TADA) and the Prevention of Terrorism Act of 2002 (POTA) – have been instruments of State terror and victimisation of the vulnerable, rather than credible instruments of justice. Convictions secured under TADA were a dismally low proportion of the total number of cases lodged. And the only significant case prosecuted under POTA – the 2001 attack on India’s Parliament compound – ended in fiasco, with some of the country’s most senior lawyers arguing the case for the accused in the Supreme Court and denouncing the Delhi Police for flagrantly concocting evidence.

To allow confessions made to the police as evidence in terrorism trials would do little else than arbitrarily empower an already lawless and unaccountable police force. It would deepen institutional prejudices against the religious minorities and enlarge the scope for criminal collusion between police forces all over the country and the agents of majoritarian mayhem and disorder, such as the Bajrang Dal. What the country needs clearly, is not a more powerful police force or a judiciary that has the authority to dispense summary justice. Without a firm reiteration and institutionalisation of the long-forgotten verity of equality before the law, the war against terrorism may well be lost even before it is joined.

War against terror and the new lawlessness

“Made for media” investigations are creating a public hysteria and betraying the cause of justice


Investigations into the recent terrorist attacks in India, with all the media spectacle they afford, have done little else than fuel public hysteria. The process of the law has been wilfully shredded while a case is made for broader powers of detention and investigation for the police. As contradictions in the official narrative on terrorism and its protagonists become manifest, public confidence will inevitably be eroded. And if a united and well-informed people are the only guarantee of public security, then the heavy-handed approach in evidence today seems designed to open the door towards greater terror.


Two days after the deadly September 13 bombings that struck busy commercial areas in Delhi, an editorial in the country’s largest circulated English daily pronounced a rather sombre assessment, while also sounding a call to action: “We are at war. The string of blasts (in Delhi) .. which killed 30 people and injured 90 is the fourth attack by terrorists on a major Indian city in the span of four months”. The people of India, the newspaper advised, should get used to the idea of surrendering some of the liberties they had got accustomed to. This was a necessary, short-term sacrifice, since the enemy they faced was an even greater threat to human freedom.

On September 19, the Special Cell of the Delhi Police, with the electronic media providing real-time coverage, raided a fourth-floor flat in a tenement in Batla House, a crowded south-eastern suburb of the city, neighbouring the campus of the Jamia Millia Islamia university. The “encounter” resulted in the killing of two youths, Bashir alias Atif, aged in his mid-twenties and Sajid, aged in his mid-teens. Another person of twenty and odd years, Mohammad Saif, was taken captive. And to square the account, since the supposed intelligence report that led to the police raid had identified five known terrorists hiding out, the Delhi Police admitted with great regret, that two of their quarries had escaped their cordon.

Beyond this summation of results from the dramatic swoop on terrorism, a tale emerged of the Batla House operation that verged on unimaginative fantasy. As reported in one of Delhi’s newspapers, the team of the Delhi Police “Special Cell”, numbering about 60 – all draped in bullet proof vests – entered the “fifth-floor flat” at 10:15 that morning, accompanied by commandos of the National Security Guard. In the vanguard of this expedition into the unknown was Inspector Mohan Chand Sharma of the Special Cell, who went knocking on all the doors in the tenement. As the report puts it: “Around 10:30 a.m., the door to (flat number) L-18 opened and Sharma was shot thrice”. A gun-battle ensued in which the Delhi Police fired 22 rounds to register two kills and one capture. Eight rounds in all were fired by the opposing side.

Inspector Sharma was carried away to a nearby hospital where he died hours later, reportedly of a cardiac arrest occasioned by severe bleeding. As the day’s events were reported in another of city’s newspapers, Delhi’s police commissioner pronounced in his press briefing that evening, that Inspector Sharma and his team had “cordoned off” the area that morning. Armed policemen “took positions” around the building at 10:30 that morning and a half-hour later, “another team went up to the flat on the fourth floor”. This team was fired upon, following which the gun-battle ensued.

Yet another newspaper had it that the Special Cell squad under Inspector Sharma “barged into” the fourth-floor flat, “following credible inputs” about the presence there of a person “whose physical appearance tallied” with descriptions of a senior operative involved in the July 26 serial bombings in Ahmedabad. The Special Cell had in this version, been helped by the Intelligence Bureau and by the police departments in Gujarat and Maharashtra in “developing” vital information leading to the raid.

The Delhi police, despite losing an officer in the operation, were exultant. As reported in the local press, Atiq, killed in the encounter, was “a key Indian Mujahideen functionary who played a major role in the Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad (and) Delhi serial blasts”.

It did not take long for troubling inconsistencies to emerge in the official narration. Two fact-finding teams visited the Jamia Nagar area within two days of the encounter – one involving the Delhi-based voluntary group, Anhad, and members of the academic community of the Jamia Millia Islamia university; the other involving the advocacy groups, Janahastakshep and the Peoples’ Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR). Residents of the neighbourhood, in testimony to these teams, recounted that as soon as the police action began, the area was cordoned off for all locals, though it was soon saturated with broadcast vans of Delhi’s many news channels. The caretaker of the flat where the dreaded terrorists were holed out, testified that they had in accordance with procedures introduced in Delhi, registered with the local police station on August 21, well after the Ahmedabad bombings. This suggested either great audacity or extreme insouciance, or the troubling third possibility, of innocence.

Finally, the tenement in which the shooting took place, was a four storey structure, abutted on both sides by much smaller structures. The fourth-floor flat where the killing took place had only one door, which opened onto the only staircase in the building. The police could have easily cut off all escape routes and secured the surrender of the flat’s occupants. And once the shooting began, there was no way that two persons holed up in the flat could have effected an escape.

Suggesting that information, like much else in the country, is in danger of ghettoisation, these questions were first raised solely in the Urdu press. On September 22, the Coordination Committee of Indian Muslims, described as a “coalition of 11 organisations formed to take up the perceived harassment of Muslims in the country” called into question the entire police narrative and demanded an independent judicial inquiry. Three days later, the academic community of Jamia, led by Vice Chancellor Mushirul Hasan took out a massive peace march through the campus, resolving with complete unanimity to set up a fund for the legal defence of students swept up in the terrorism dragnet. On September 26, the Janahastakshep-PUDR team formally released its findings, underlining the demand for a judicial probe.

The Delhi Police, to their credit, did make an effort to answer these questions. In flat contradiction to the general assessment, they insisted that the tenancy verification obtained by Atif and Sajid was forged, since the counterpart document did not exist in the concerned police station. As for the escape of two suspects in Batla House on the day of the encounter, the Delhi Police put out a plea of injured innocence: that it would be unfair to query them too closely on a matter placed on public record only as a gesture of good faith and accountability.

Finally, of course, there was the expected questioning of the patriotism of all who dared to challenge an operation that had resulted in the death of a heroic police officer: “It is the irony of this country that they (sic) continue to sympathise with the terrorists despite the death of a policeman in this operation”.

If the Batla House encounter remains a mystery, the links connecting the supposed protagonists of the serial bombing in Jaipur on May 13, Ahmedabad on July 26 and Delhi on September 13, have been portrayed variously over time and with disturbing inconsistencies. At the centre of the narrative is the Students’ Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), a once obscure body of uncertain provenance, vaguely believed to be affiliated to the Jamaat-e-Islami-e-Hind, banned in 2001 and except for a brief interlude following the change of government at the Centre, an outlaw organisation ever since. As a fine investigative article has recently documented, every notification renewing the ban on the organisation for the maximum period allowed under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, has been a virtual copy of the earlier one. No additional evidence, in other words, has been produced to support the ban, other than whatever was in the original notification of 2001.

When Safdar Nagori, the SIMI general secretary, was arrested in March 2008, a security analyst well-known for his feverishly speculative commentary, observed that “SIMI cadre have been involved in almost every Islamist terror strike since (2000), ranging from the Mumbai serial bombings of 2003 and 2006 to attacks in Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and Delhi”.

Despite the seeming certainty behind this pronouncement, obviously inspired by driblets of information leaked by the intelligence agencies, a tribunal constituted to review the extension of the ban, held on August 5, that there simply was no evidence connecting SIMI with terrorism. The Central Government on that occasion, secured a face-saving stay from the Supreme Court on the application of this ruling. Media comment was muted and the public, still under the pall of fear spread by the Jaipur, Bangalore and Ahmedabad bombings, remained indifferent to finer points of legality and fairness.

The pursuit of the terrorists picked up momentum with the mid-August arrest of Abu Bashar Qasmi, a 25-year old cleric, snatched from his home in Azamgarh district of Uttar Pradesh by four men who came visiting on the pretext of exploring a matrimonial alliance. Taken immediately to Gujarat, he was identified by the state police as the man behind July’s Ahmedabad attacks. He also reportedly, confessed to an undefined role in the Jaipur bombing.

On August 24, the Rajasthan police announced the arrest of Shahbaz Husain, a computer software expert who ran a small business in Lucknow. As the Lucknow-based civil rights campaigner Sandeep Pandey recalls, the house that Shahbaz shares with his parents, was raided by about 50 personnel of the Anti-Terrorism Squad of Rajasthan Police. Apart from impounding a computer, the raiding party took away all the literature they could find, as also some currency and a cheque made out in favour of Shahbaz’s business. The next day, the same team revisited and compelled Shahbaz’s father, Abdul Moid, to sign two blank sheets of paper.

Pandey visited the local police station the following day to ask what possible use the blank sheets of paper would be put to, only to be unceremoniously turned out. Press reports that he later saw, blazoned the claim of the Rajasthan Police that sophisticated electronic chips and circuits of bombs resembling those used in Surat had been found in Shahbaz’s premises.

With Shahbaz’s firm implication in terrorism, an elaborate chain of linkages began to be drawn between the Jaipur and Ahmedabad blasts. Nagori, Shahbaz and Qasmi were all reportedly, members of a secretive cell that underwent explosives training in camps as far afield as Kerala and the jungles of Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh. Brooding over the whole conspiracy was the presence of Mohammad Altaf Subhan -- later identified as Abdul Subhan Quereshi, and variously described by the alternative names, Taufeeq and Tauqeer, by which he was allegedly known in jihadi circles -- a computer hardware specialist missing from his home in Mumbai’s distant suburb of Mira Road, since 2006.

Subhan is supposed to have been the technical brain behind the ingeniously designed bombs and the e-mail messages -- replete with graphics and intense Islamic religious symbolism -- that had been sent out celebrating each terrorist strike in the heart of urban India. When Delhi was gutted by three simultaneous bombings in September, Subhan was the name on every investigating agency’s lips. Working its way through the chain that connected Subhan with Qasmi and Shahbaz, the Delhi police quickly identified the other links in the terrorism plot, all from Uttar Pradesh: Abdul Rajib, Mujib, Alamjed Afridi and Qayamuddin. Acting in concert with their Gujarat counterparts, the Delhi police secured access to Abu Bashar Qasmi for a round of interrogation.

In just over a day, the script was radically rewritten. As the encounter at Batla House began, concurrent media commentary had it that the interrogation of Qasmi had led to the identification of the tenement and that the prize catch, Subhan, was holed out there. When the dust settled, Subhan remained as elusive as ever, though the Delhi Police still claimed it had cracked not merely the Delhi bombings, but also the Jaipur and Ahmedabad attacks. Atif became, in the new narrative, the master terrorist.

Symptomatic of the shoddiness of their media briefings, as also the casualness (if not contempt) with which the police treats the public information function, one of Delhi’s leading newspapers carried stories cheek by jowl on its front page, which flat out, contradicted each other. The top story that day quoted the Delhi Police Commissioner claiming exclusive ownership over the Batla House raid and denying that Qasmi’s presence in the city – courtesy the Gujarat Police -- had anything to do with it. Right below this news-report, was a commentary which provided the following narration: that Bashir alias Atif and his accomplices in the Delhi bombings were identified after a major Intelligence Bureau operation targeting the communications system of the Indian Mujahideen (IM); that Jamia Nagar (the broader neighbourhood in which Batla House is a part) was identified as the most likely refuge he had been afforded by SIMI; and that his safe-house, “could only be located when Qasmi was brought to New Delhi and driven around the Jamia Nagar area on Thursday night”.

The final twist in the story came on September 24, with the arrest of five in Mumbai. In just a matter of days, the Nagori-Qasmi-Shahbaz chain of culpability, was history. The Mumbai Police now definitively identified 31-year old Sadiq Sheikh, a resident of the Cheetah Camp slum sprawl near the city’s north-eastern suburb of Chembur, as the inspiration and the mentor for all the terrorist actions of the preceding months. Four others were arrested alongside, including a computer software expert, an alleged car thief, and supposed specialists in bomb making and in rigging the circuitry for explosive devices.

A few days afterwards, a number of retired police officials with high name-recognition – Kiran Bedi, Prakash Singh, Ved Marwah – reacted in alarm to the contrary and competitive narratives from various police agencies. Loyalty to the khakhi they had worn, determined that they would not question any of the actions taken by the police, though they found ample reason to question the words employed. The discordant voices that were emerging from the police, they feared, would only lend strength to clever defence attorneys in securing the judicial exculpation of terrorism suspects. Marwah’s comment, in conclusion, was that the key issue was of building “political consensus” and avoiding “political one-upmanship”.

Public scrutiny over the investigations into terrorism has been loose, in part, because political reactions have been sharply polarised, and in large measure, opportunistic. The principal opposition party, the BJP, has along with its allies, responded with a predictable, almost conditioned, reflex, to the recent wave of bombings: denouncing the incumbent government for its ineptitude and demanding a special law appropriate to the magnitude of the threat.

The debate on the legal underpinnings of what is now called a “war” against terrorism will presumably rage on for long, with all its partisan resonances. But the reality of the “war” as waged in India, has been that the law is immaterial. Public criticisms of the enforcement agencies have been muted even on the rare occasions that they are voiced. This has created the climate in which a new culture of lawlessness has flourished.

Since the 2005 attack on the makeshift temple built over the ruins of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, lawyers in the state of Uttar Pradesh have been taking an aggressive stance against terrorism suspects. Faizabad began the practice in 2005, when its bar association resolved that none among its members would ever defend a terrorism suspect. This shredding of the fundamentals of natural justice was eagerly emulated by bar associations in Varanasi in 2006, and Lucknow and Barabanki in 2007. A new dimension was added to this mode of ostracism, when three suspects behind an alleged plot to kidnap Congress leader Rahul Gandhi were assaulted by a group of lawyers, as they were produced before a Lucknow court in November 2007.

If ghettoisation is not already the reality in India’s justice system, these events will ensure that it is an accomplished fact. When Aftab Ansari, an electricity board employee from Kolkata, was picked up from his home by Uttar Pradesh police and accused of being a key player in the courtroom blasts of November 2007, Mohammad Shoaib of Lucknow was the only lawyer who stepped up to defend him. Ansari was discharged in February this year after three weeks of detention and torture. Seemingly having failed to extract a confession from him, the police admitted rather lamely, that it was an innocuous case of mistaken identity.

In April, Mohammad Shoaib, undoubtedly in recognition of the commitment and courage he had shown in taking up an unpopular case, was retained as defence lawyer for Mohammad Tariq Kazmi and Mohammad Khalid Mujahid, arrested in Barabanki, and accused of complicity in the courtroom bombings. According to a narration he presented at Hyderabad on August 22, before a “Peoples’ Tribunal” on the application of the anti-terrorism laws, he faced a persistent pattern of obstruction at all levels of the police hierarchy. The case papers were not furnished as required by the law and the jail superintendent in Barabanki defied repeated judicial summons to produce the accused. Finally, the magistrate went to the jail to read out the charges to the two accused.

In April, when Shoaib went to the Barabanki court to argue his clients’ case for bail, he was threatened by the president of the local bar association and told very clearly that he was putting life and limb at risk. Shoaib withdrew but took up the brief again when he found that the families of the accused had no other recourse. He had meanwhile, approached the Allahabad High Court for a writ holding that the delinquency of the bar associations of Faizabad, Varanasi, Lucknow and Barabanki, posed a clear and present danger to the administration of justice. He is yet to secure a hearing from the High Court.

Meanwhile, Shoaib suffered a full-blown physical assault in court-room premises in Lucknow on August 12, when appearing for Naushad, a casual labourer from Bijnore district who faces charges of being a soldier in the armies of the jihad. The following day, Shoaib sent a formal complaint to the local police chief and went in person to the district judge to hand over his report of the assault he had suffered from legal luminaries in Lucknow. He suffered an even more grievous physical attack that day.

A similar lesson in the new principles of the rule of law was imparted to the lawyer Noor Mohammad in April, when he went to the Dhar district court in Madhya Pradesh to defend a group of Muslim youths who had been accused of running a terrorism training camp in the district. Noor Mohammad was at the “Peoples’ Tribunal” on August 22, to provide a harrowing account of the humiliation he had suffered. And the only remonstrance he heard from the bench as he was being roughed up in full view of the presiding judge, was that the disputants needed to take their dispute settlement process elsewhere, lest the violent assault against a lawyer within the courtroom be construed as a case of contempt.

Serial bombs that target vital nodes of a city’s civic life, are intended to produce the kind of effect on an average citizen’s psyche as “shock and awe”, the war doctrine recently implemented by the U.S. in Iraq. The purpose is to create a real life montage of simultaneous destruction, that would be so enveloping in its scope, as to defeat popular loyalty to a regime. The wider lesson it seeks to impart is that the average citizen cannot count on duly constituted political authorities for protection, and would need to assume the right to self-defence. Applied across a wide social expanse, this would become the recipe for a descent into the law of the jungle, a “war of all against all”.

That the people of India have defied this calculus despite repeated provocation, is tribute to the resilience of their faith in a democratic order. But nothing can be taken for granted. Those who have directly suffered from terrorist atrocities need recognition for their fortitude and this can only come through pursuing the perpetrators with all the determination and fairness that the law mandates. And this is where the police force in India has repeatedly let down the people it is mandated to protect: it has picked up innocent people and subjected them to endless torture merely for the sin of possessing names that suggest allegiance to a particular faith; and it has failed to proceed against threats to public order and blatant acts of terror, merely because the perpetrators happen to belong to the faith that is supposedly, the unique cultural identity of the Indian nation.

Speaking at the Hyderabad tribunal, the well-known civil rights defender, Suresh Khairnar, described the public inquiry he had conducted, alongside a retired judge of the Bombay High court, B.G. Kolse-Patil and ten others, into the “encounter” in Nagpur in June 2006, in which a potential terrorist strike against the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) headquarters in Nagpur was thwarted and its intending authors killed. He described the mass of fishy circumstances that the inquiry came across and the suspicious reluctance of the Nagpur police commissioner to meet with the team. The inquiry concluded in the light of all the information available, that the encounter was “fake” and required a “fair probe” in the national interest.

Similar ambiguities, Khairnar recalled, surrounded a bomb blast in the district town of Nanded in Maharashtra, in April 2006, in which the fabricators of the explosive device – both known members of a Hindu extremist organisation – were killed. Unsurprisingly, this incident did not receive any of the nation-wide coverage that the Nagpur incident did. 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.

On August 24 this year, just as major breakthroughs were being claimed in the investigations into the Jaipur and Ahmedabad bombings, an explosion in Kanpur in a private residential premise, killed two identified cadre of the Bajrang Dal – charter members of the Hindutva brigade with a history of involvement in lethally riotous behaviour – while they were fabricating a bomb. The police registered their suspicions over the incident, but chose evidently not to follow up. And the media simply lost interest, since it did not fit into a master narrative on jihadi terrorism.

Obviously though, the hamhanded and cynically biased investigations into incidents of terrorist violence are succeeding where all the bomb blasts have failed. They are actually fostering the widespread belief, at least among the country’s largest religious minority, that the institutional discrimination they suffer is being ever more deeply imbedded in the context of the “war on terror”. If a united and well-informed citizenry is the prime requirement for a successful defence of civil society, the official investigations may well be creating the optimal conditions for the reverse outcome.