|
BYLINE
Fuse of Self-Destructive
Terrorism Gets Shorter
By M J AKBAR
GOVERNANCE IS the easy part
of being in power. You govern through systems. Systems are protected
by institutions. Institutions grind their way forward on hierarchy,
oiled by memory or precedence. When there is need for innovation,
change is sifted through a time-consuming committee. The end product
may not be brilliant, but it comes with minimal-risk insurance: it
will not do damage, and might even do some good.
India's bureaucracy may not
be the steel-frame of old. Corruption might have left it a brittle
plastic. But it serves. Very often the difference between a good and a
bad Minister — the titular head of the bureaucracy — is no more than
his or her ability to leave well enough alone. Lalu Prasad Yadav has
created a favorable reputation by the ingenious tactic of
non-interference. He lets the Railway Board get on with the job and
only appears on the scene when it is time to take credit. Give him
full marks. More has been destroyed by the deadly combination of ego
and incompetence than has been achieved in Government through genius.
As the Railway Board has proved, India could be much better off if
Ministers left Government on auto-pilot while they concentrated on
what they know best: spilling each other’s blood.
The difficult part of power
is leadership. Any term of office is divided between phases of
placidity and the roils of turbulence. If turbulence is not calmed it
develops quickly into a storm. Terrorism has become a raging
hurricane. The statistics are well known. There is no point wasting
space on them. But there is no leader who can challenge this storm,
manage its fallout and restore some balm to the jangled nerves of the
nation.
Dr Manmohan Singh and Mrs
Sonia Gandhi have, at best, the most banal phrases to offer. We do not
need a Prime Minister to tell us that terrorism is a grave threat.
That much wisdom is available from any taxi-driver, the familiar
source of political perspicacity sought by a visiting journalist
anywhere in the world. No one has yet written a speech for Mrs Sonia
Gandhi that takes us anywhere near a remedy to this terrible disease.
An answer must begin with a question: when did terrorism begin? Too
long ago, India is unique. Every faith has delivered its quota of
terrorists. The Nagas who challenged Indian unity were Christians. The
sister-regions of the Northeast gave us Hindu terrorists. Sikhs rose
in Punjab, and Muslims in Kashmir. The overwhelming majority of
Naxalites are Hindus.
And now some young
non-Kashmiri Indian Muslims are playing with dynamite. Some three
years ago, when President George Bush visited India, Dr Singh proudly
told his American mentor that Indian Muslims did not believe in
terrorism. As evidence he pointed to the absence of any Indian Muslim
name in the rolls of Al Qaeda.
If this was true, then what
has happened in the last three years? India has not been ruled by any
party that Muslims consider hostile to their interests. Congress has
been in power in Delhi. In fact, Indian Muslims believe that if they
had not mobilised to an unprecedented degree the Congress would never
have got enough seats in the last general elections to cobble together
a coalition. Indian Muslims claim a sort of ownership of the UPA
regime. Why have Dr Singh and Mrs Sonia Gandhi been unable to prevent
a spurt of despair within the community?
The Congress will not even
admit this question, so it is difficult to see how it can introspect
its way towards an answer. There are two principal reasons for the
renewed rise of Muslim despair. First, the community has not got the
justice it expected from the Congress. One fact will illustrate. While
those found guilty of terrorism in the Mumbai bomb blasts of 1993 have
been, rightly, punished through the legal process, those found guilty
of crimes against Muslims in the preceding riots have been left
untouched. The constables found guilty of state terrorism during the
awful riots in Mumbai after the Babri episode in the report of the
Justice Srikrishna Commission are wandering around, free. Dr Manmohan
Singh, Mrs Sonia Gandhi and Mr Sharad Pawar cannot "find" them.
The second major reason is a
sense of helpless hopelessness. The history of economic deprivation
long precedes the UPA Government, but its mistake was to believe that
it could fudge through its term as its predecessors had fudged through
theirs. Dr Singh should never have asked Justice Rajinder Sachar to
find out the truth if he wanted to do nothing about it. The truth has
become the ultimate betrayal, for the report is a devastating
indictment of Congress neglect of its most loyal constituency. Muslim
youth watched as Mr Arjun Singh reserved even more jobs for others,
and maintained an ultra-secular silence on reservations for Muslims.
As I have written before, other communities got jobs under Congress;
Muslims got enquiry commissions.
This was fuel for a fire
that could so easily mesh into an international conflagration. The
memory of riots, particularly in Mumbai and Gujarat, was equally
incendiary. Indian Muslims have had apostates and middlemen as
leaders. In the vacuum, a number of youth found it easy to drift
towards the malevolent attraction of evil. They convinced themselves
that virulent hate mail and unpardonable killing of innocents was the
means to display a destructive strength. This terrorism, of course, is
already hurting Indian Muslims far more than it damages their avowed
targets.
The Congress is twisting
this damaged psyche further with its cynical response to terrorism.
There is a suspicion, bordering on conviction, among Indian Muslims
that the Government of Dr Singh and Mrs Sonia Gandhi has offered
scapegoats in the form of students of the Jamia Millia University to
appease majority anger after the terrorist attacks on Delhi. We do not
know the full truth, but there is enough that is murky in the events
of 19 September when Delhi police surrounded and killed two students
of Jamia at Batla House, while two others apparently escaped. There
are questions galore, not least being the manner of the "escape": if
there was only one entrance, how could the two "escape"? Police have
shifted their version after every question. The "escape" now is meant
to have been through the rooftop. Did anyone see them in the daylit
skyline? Nor does anyone believe in the version offered of the death
of Inspector Mohan Chand Sharma. It was first put out that he had been
shot in the stomach. Then pictures were published of him walking after
being shot, with no evidence of a stomach wound. The latest theory is
that he died of a heart attack following loss of blood. One TV station
claimed that the autopsy report showed he had been shot from the back,
hinting at what is known as “friendly fire”. The UPA Government then
sought to demonise the community when they covered the faces of
suspects with the red, patterned, Arab headdress instead of the black
cloth normally used. Who got these headdresses from the market? Home
Minister Shivraj Patil, who claimed that he had personally supervised
these operations? Was he telling India that these suspects were linked
to Arab terrorism?
post your comments here
|
