We have a blunderbuss like Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde claiming that he had information about the possibility of a terror strike, but no answers on why something pre-emptive – even getting police forces ready to deal with the consequences – was not done.
Even if there had been no intelligence, any one with reasonable mental intelligence could have surmised after the hanging of Afzal Guru that something was round the corner.
But, instead, we had the Home Minister talking foolishly about the BJP and RSS running terror camps – exactly what Pakistan would have wanted to hear. Shinde merely confirmed to eager Pakistani ears that there are enough home-grown terror groups in India. So when the ISI unleashes its own dogs of terror, we can’t easily point a finger at them.
But this is not just about Shinde’s failures either. If reports that the BJP has called a bandh in Andhra to protest against the terror strike are true, that is even more irresponsible. A bandh serves no purpose at a moment of tragedy.
Point 1: You cannot fight terror if the country’s principal political parties are at war or trying to score political points against one another. Even assuming Shinde was right about the Sangh running terror camps, all he had to do was build the evidence, arrest and prosecute the guilty. Can you fight terror by seeking to make political capital out of it and making mindless remarks about Saffron terror, and then apologising for it?
The second issue where India is failing is in the area of centre-state cooperation. As Firstpost has already argued today, there is a strong case for setting up a National Counter-Terrorism Centre (NCTC) so that we can bring our combined resources together to fight terror.
But this can’t happen in our federal system where law and order is a state subject. To fight terror, you need to get the states on board since it is also manifestly in their interest to cooperate. No state in India is actually immune to terror.
Here, once again, the finger of accusation must point more towards the centre. States are deeply suspicious about the centre ability to be evenhanded when it comes to dealing with non-Congress-ruled states. This is the prime reason why they won’t cooperate on NCTC.
Consider the centre’s poor record on cooperation with states.
First, it will send former intelligence officials and Congress time-servers to be governors of opposition-ruled states. People like HR Bhardwaj in Karnataka and Kamla Beniwal in Gujarat have had daggers drawn with state governments. A former National Security Advisor in Governor of Bengal. How are states supposed to work in cooperation with the centre when governors cannot be trusted by elected governments?
Second, if the states appear to have blocked the NCTC, the centre is not exactly playing honest broker in the game. Many bills legislated by opposition-ruled states for dealing with organised crime and terrorism have been blocked by the centre.
A report in The Indian Express last February noted that “more than 20 bills have been kept hanging in states where the BJP is in power, some for more than two years now. These have been kept pending either by the governor, who actually cannot withhold consent, or by the President, whose approval is necessary for the Bill to become law.”
Among the bills were at least two to counter terrorism. One is GUJCOC (Gujarat Control of Organised Crime) in Gujarat and the other is MPTDACOC (MP Terrorism and Disruptive Activities and Control of Organised Crimes) in Madhya Pradesh. Both are bills these states consider vital to deal with terror groups.
The centre claims there is no need for these laws since its own Unlawful Activities Prevention Act is good enough. But do we have great faith in UAPA? There have been 11 terror strikes since 26/11 in India, and UAPA has been a miserable failure. In any case, why deny states their own stronger laws? It is worth noting that the existence of UAPA did not stop the centre from allowing Maharashtra to have its own MCOCA (the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act). GUJCOC is almost a replica of MCOCA, but it’s no-go just because Gujarat is run by the BJP’s Narendra Modi. Ditto for Madhya Pradesh.
Point 2: By playing politics with laws legally passed by state legislatures, especially BJP-ruled ones, the centre has essentially defeated itself on NCTC. It is largely up to the Centre to allay this mistrust by ensuring that state initiatives are not bottled up either by lackey governors or by the central government. How can the states buy into NCTC, if this law is used as another instrument to target the political opposition? The centre routinely uses the Intelligence Bureau (IB) to spy on its political rivals; the CBI is often used for targeting opposition parties. Which state CM in his right mind will then expect the NCTC to be used any better?
The third issue is one of playing politics with terror. And here, the Congress, the BJP and the other opposition parties are all guilty. The net result is a complete demoralisation of the police force, which then learns to live with politics and does not do its job.
When a police official is killed by terrorists in Batla House, Congress General Secretary Digvijaya Singh goes around telling Muslims that it may have been a fake encounter. It is one thing to assure a fair investigation, quite another to pretend that nobody in the police force was killed by militants.
In the run-up to 26/11, the BJP and the Shiv Sena were targeting Anti-Terrorism Squad Hemant Karkare for unearthing one Hindu terror module in connection with the Malegaon blasts. Karkare was reinstated as a hero only when he was martyred during 26/11. This, in fact, led other communal elements to throw another red herring in our paths by claiming that since the BJP and Sena had targeted Karkare, it was not Pakistan-trained terrorists, but someone else who may have been behind 26/11.
The situation is not any different with the other opposition parties that depend on vote-banks of various kinds. Politicians in Punjab and Tamil Nadu have tried to stall the executions of Balwant Singh Rajaona and Rajiv Gandhi’s killers a vote-bank issue.
A member of Mulayam Singh’s party offered a multi-crore reward for any Muslim who would bump off the Danish cartoonists who allegedly defamed the Prophet. Congress and Left politicians routinely deny there is any infiltration in Assam from Bangladesh – primarily to guard their Muslim vote bank. BJP politicians want to pretend that the infiltration is excessive (which it might be, but no one can stop demography).
Point 3: If political parties are going to adjust their positions on security issues based on vote-bank considerations, how is it possible to have any sensible approach to terrorism measures?
The bottomline: India’s politicians have made it impossible to deal with terror. The UPA government at the centre is more guilty than most in politicising terror and alienating rival politicians and states from coming together to tackle terror from a common platform.
Right now, India needs a unifier as Home Minister, and a Congress party that will not play politics with opposition-ruled states.
A crass political player like Sushil Kumar Shinde is not helping matters.
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