Don’t feed on the intolerance of Patna bombers

By Swapan Dasgupta

Had the bomb planted just beyond the secure D-area of Patna’s Gandhi Maidan actually exploded last Sunday during Narendra Modi’s Hunkar rally, the country could well have been suffering the fallout of a colossal tragedy. It was plain lucky that the explosion, which would inevitably have resulted in a stampede and ensuing acts of violence, didn’t happen. Yet, it is a commentary on the growing bitterness of politics that the significance of this close shave has been deliberately underplayed. Indeed, attention has been sought to be wilfully diverted from a sinister act of subversion.  

The expression of political differences that invariably happen in the long run-up to any general election is an indispensable part of democracy. The general election of 2014 has become doubly interesting because the battle of political parties has been peppered by a riveting clash of personalities.

The announcement of Modi as the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate happened on September 13—not that long ago. However, it has taken just 50 days for the political atmosphere to be electrified. Thanks to the energy generated by the supporters of Modi,  the country, it would seem, has been divided into those who support the Gujarat Chief Minister enthusiastically and those who oppose him with equal passion. Despite being the challenger, Modi has quite successfully managed to catapult himself into the centre-stage, to the point where he is now setting the agenda and invoking the editorial ire of The New York Times which gratuitously found his rise “deeply troubling to many Indians.”

Whether India, as an opinion poll suggested, cries out for a leader blessed with decisiveness and integrity is for voters to decide. The general election will also be the occasion for voters to give their verdict on other lofty questions such as the preferred economic path, dynastic rule and the divergent perceptions of the so-called idea of India. On the other hand, many voters may prefer to view the contest through the prism of localism and community identities.

It is improper to be judgmental about the thinking that leads individuals and communities to decide which side to back. There is nothing called the ‘right’ way of thinking; and the accusing finger of ‘false consciousness’ that Marxists love to point at those who disagree with them is based on the dubious premise that there is something resembling ‘true’ consciousness. An Indian election is fascinating precisely because the expressions of self-interest and national interest happen through so many different—often bizarre—routes.

Take the vastly different perceptions of those who support Modi. To a handful, he epitomises a viable alternative to statist economics; to others, he is a modern-day variant of Shivaji, crusading against a ‘Delhi Sultanate’; and to yet others, he is an Indian Bismarck capable of ruling a fractious country with decisive leadership. In Bihar, his appeal is often based on his backward caste status and the fact that he began life selling tea on a railway platform.  

Likewise, those who oppose Modi do so for vastly diverse reasons. Some are deterred by the 2002 riots in Gujarat, others question the viability of an economic model that is insufficiently mindful of entitlements, and the likes of Nitish Kumar and the Communists liken him to a fascist. Yet others dub him ‘authoritarian’ and are fearful that he invokes strong Muslim opposition.

The importance of the election campaign is that it allows all these range of perceptions to play out. Unfortunately this rich democratic tradition is seriously compromised by two strands. First, there is the belief that the failure of one side to prevail will involve the disintegration and death of India. Such heightened certitudes are based on the presumption that only one side has the monopoly of truth, wisdom and political power. It leads to equating opponents as enemies.

Secondly, there is the associated belief that all means are legitimate to prevent the other side from winning. It was possibly this misplaced rigidity, as much as security lapses, which gave those who have no faith in either India or democracy the space to undertake the serial bombings in Patna.

Nominally, the Indian Mujahedeen was responsible but those who chose to look the other way and pretended nothing happened must bear some moral blame. 

Sunday Times of Indioa, November 3, 2013

Vanzara: A Victim of Bleeding Hearts

By Swapan Dasgupta

The long letter of resignation from the Indian Police Service written by D.G. Vanzara from a prison in Mumbai to the Gujarat Government has, not unnaturally, triggered a political storm along predictable lines. However, before exploring its larger ramifications, a more fundamental question needs to be asked: What has been the record of the Indian state in coping with anti-democratic threats to its democracy?

The answer involves exploring the nature of counter-insurgency operations beginning from the Communist Party-led insurrection in 1948 to the handling of the jihadi terrorism today. This in turn prompts unearthing of a paradox which its is best to not shy away from. Democracy involves both the will of the people and the supremacy of the rule of law. Yet, even the most hardened democrats have, through bitter experience, been compelled to acknowledge an unpalatable fact which, ironically, enjoys a large measure of popular sanction: that the conventional rules of democracy are ineffective when dealing with people who have little respect for the democratic rules of the game.

Between 1967 and 1972, to take one example, West Bengal was thrown into panic and disarray by the activities of Left-wing splinter groups who were collectively referred to as the Naxalites. The Naxalite movement, inspired by Mao Zedong’s reckless Cultural Revolution led to educated and semi-educated youth waging a campaign against all symbols of state power. In practice, it meant killing petty landlords in villages, traffic policemen in the cities and targeting people such as venerable Vice Chancellors. The Naxalites failed to dislodge the state apparatus or even create institutions of dual power but they steered Bengal into a state of near anarchy whose effects are still being felt.

The Naxalities didn’t believe in the ballot; for them political power came out of the barrel of the gun. It was pretty useless to appeal to them to test their ideas in the marketplace of democratic politics. Consequently, Indira Gandhi, helped in no small measure by Siddhartha Shankar Ray and a handful of stermined police officers were forced into acknowledging that force would have to be met by force. That this approach involved the temporary suspension of the rule of law and the judicial process was undeniable. The fight was taken to the Naxalites and their sympathisers are before long the movement was crushed.

As Governor of Punjab in the mid-1980s, and with the blessings of Rajiv Gandhi, Ray emulated this approach in Punjab which was in the throes of the Pakistan-inspired Khalistan movement. He was again fortunate in having at his disposal some police officers who were prepared to take the fight into the enemy camp. Instilling fear into the heart of the insurgent was a central feature of this strategy and although the methods used were harsh and attracted outrage from the human rights industry the outcome was entirely satisfactory for both Punjab and India.

In subsequent years, this approach was used in Andhra Pradesh by the governments of N.Chandrababu Naidu and—after some initial hesitation that proved very costly—by T. Rajasekhar Reddy. The result was that the Maoist insurgents were thrown back into the jungles of Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand. Chief Minister Raman Singh attempted to pursue a similar strategy, with local improvisations, in the Bastar region which the Maoists had converted into a ‘liberated’ zone. Unfortunately, he was hamstrung by the fact that a partisan Centre did not extend the cooperation necessary to deal with a national threat. No wonder that the Maoists have successfully taken refuge behind not-so-innocent do-gooders and human rights bodies to provide them the cover for their politics of murder. What could have been handled within the existing parameters of the Indian experience has been allowed to assume menacing proportions due to partisan considerations.

Since 1993, India has been faced with the threat of jihadi terror. This is not entirely a domestic movement and is linked with a wider religion-based terrorism that the whole world. Coping with this menace involves not merely a sophisticated intelligence network but also a pro-active approach aimed at neutralising the terrorist network before they have had an opportunity to inflict damage. Above all it requires political will that gives policemen the necessary self-confidence to do what is necessary. As a DIG in Gujarat, Vanzara led the way in securing Gujarat against terrorists who were determined to avenge what they perceived as the injustice to Muslims in 2002. That, in the process, he cut corners may well be true. What is important, however, is to recognise that he wasn’t waging a private war; he was protecting a state against terror.

Today, such a man is languishing in prison for the past six years for having done his duty. The charges against him are not that he allegedy organised encounter killings against innocents: the deaths of a criminal gun-runner and a terror squad with links to the Laskkar-e-Taiba does not warrant either national mourning or the victimisation of a daring policeman.

Vanzara’s resignation was born of despair and a legitimate perception that he has been made a fall guy for defending the country using all means at his disposal. His case may be used to take political potshots at Narendra Modi, but it is important to realise that the only ones who are gloating are those who would rather celebrate the human rights of terrorists rather than the right of Indians to live in security. 

Deccan Chronicle/ Asian Age, Sept 6, 2014

Morality of terror? There isn’t any

By Swapan Dasgupta

The lazy journalist, it is often said, invariably equates his taxi driver with the aam aadmi. I must confess to falling back on the oldest shortcut in the trade on my journey from Central London to Heathrow airport on the day after two fanatics decapitated a British soldier in mufti on a busy street in Woolwich.

The taxi driver turned out to be an Afghan living in Britain since 1999. A Moscow-trained specialist in drip irrigation from Mazhar-e-Sharif, he was an ethnic Tajik who had fled the Taliban. He was a middle-class Afghan who has been reduced to driving taxis in a country that had no real use for his expertise.

So, I asked, as he helpfully re-tuned his radio to a station devoted to Bollywood music, what did he think of yesterday’s killing in Woolwich. “They are crazy people”, he burst, “and they make our lives miserable. They destroyed Afghanistan with their jihad and now they want to destroy Britain.”

“If they asked me for advice”, he went on, “do you know what I would tell the British Government? I would tell them that you can’t reform these people because their minds are full of half-baked nonsense. There is just one solution: just shoot them.”

London’s taxi drivers are always full of certitudes but even by the exacting standards of the Daily Mail this was going a bit too far. Today’s Britain is so overwhelmingly obsessed with ‘human rights’ that the deportation of a hateful jihadi who entered the country on false pretexts and who has since been subsidised by welfare payments has been endlessly delayed because of fears that Jordan (a country from which he is a fugitive) uses torture to extract information.

Or take the case of a guy named Anjem Choudary, a trained lawyer who was the main inspiration for a group called Al Muhajiroun which has subsequently been banned for its hateful and murderous Islamism. This gentleman, a favourite of BBC talk shows which need a “balancing” voice is said to subsist on welfare payments that come from the earnings of decent individuals. To put it another way, the British state actually pays for Choudary to motivate young British Muslims into jihad and even helpfully provides him a platform to broadcast his demands for the destruction of tolerance and the British way of life. If this isn’t an example of liberal self-flagellation, I don’t know what is.

Since the Woolwich murder, there have been calls in Britain for less tolerance of those who disregard the basic rules that govern public life in a democracy. Pressure is being put on universities to be less indulgent towards students’ Islamic societies that misuse the pluralism of institutions of higher learning for the promotion of murder and sectarian conflict. There have also been calls on the free media to be more circumspect in providing the oxygen of publicity to the overground voices of the underground.

The last issue is a tricky one. There are many supporters of terrorism and jihad who mask their real intentions with clever arguments and diplomatic silence. To demands for outright condemnation of jihadi atrocities, they invariably fall back on the “roots of terrorism” argument. The real culprit, they proclaim grandly, is the British policy of persecution of Muslims in Afghanistan and Libya, its deep links with the US and its friendship with “racist Zionists” who are out to annihilate the Palestinian people.

“Leave us in peace” one of the Woolwich killers hollered at passers-by while flaunting his bloody hands and blood-covered machete. In his mind, he was the victim and the British state the oppressor.

Last week, I heard the very same arguments on Indian TV. Following a perfunctory condemnation of the Maoist massacre of a Congress yatra in the Bastar region of Chhattisgarh, they would invariably shift tack and talk with poetic indignation on the brutality and even the criminality of the Indian state. Just as the London-accented jihadi will invoke Palestine, Chechnya, Afghanistan and even Kashmir, these well-heeled individuals will romanticise those who are fighting for the rights of India’s tribals against rapacious corporate houses and their politician friends. Whether it is the massacre of 75 CRPF jawans in a carefully-planned ambush, the decapitation of a tribal policeman in Jharkhand and the orchestrated massacre of political activists last week, the notes of the theme song are common.

The feigned victimhood has been carefully crafted. The overground friends of the terrorists have systematically drawn a moral equivalence between a democratic way which, despite all its many imperfections rests on the will of the people, and an armed struggle that takes Mao Zedong’s infamous assertion of political power flowing from the barrel of the gun as its inspiration. The jihadis are not really fighting for either the Palestinian or the Kashmiri but for a the establishment of a medievalist political order. Likewise, the Maoists couldn’t give a damn about indigenous peoples and poverty: their single-minded goal is the creation of liberated zones that will be used as launch pads for the capture of political power.

Both sets of political predators need what Lenin called ‘useful idiots’ to enlarge the arena of struggle. They are the poets and wordsmiths of murder. And not only do we tolerate them, we accord them social sanction. Perhaps we are the real idiots. Maybe we should employ taxi drivers as counter-insurgency experts. They have the right instincts.

Asian Age/ Deccan Chronicle, May 31, 2013 

PARDON CRY SMACKS OF LAW FOR PRIVILEGED

By Swapan Dasgupta

The British Empire, it has been suggested by at least one historian, was built on the principle of “Ornamentalism”—an innovative euphemism for pomp, splendour and pageantry. When it came to rewarding the distinguished men (women rarely featured) who served the Empire, the authorities were more than mindful that India is extremely status-conscious. One of the perquisites of loyalty, apart from Knighthoods and Rai Bahadur/ Khan Bahadur titles, was the privilege of being exempted from personal appearance in the civil courts.

Independent India has often made a fetish of repudiating the legacy of Empire. There is a sneer that invariably accompanies the invocation of the ‘colonial legacy’, despite the endurance of Lord Macaulay’s Indian Penal Code. In practice, however, our present-day rulers appear unwilling to dispense with the more iniquitous facets of Empire, particularly when it comes to privileges for the well-connected and the loyal.

Nothing highlights this more than the contrived outrage in rarefied circles of Delhi and Mumbai over the conviction of actor Sanjay Dutt under the Arms Act by the Supreme Court and his consequent five-year jail sentence (of which he has to serve some 42 months).

That many Bollywood producers whose films starring Sanjay are at a midway stage will be deeply upset by the apex court judgment is understandable. There is also likely to be considerable sympathy for his family and the deep embarrassment to his sister who represents a Mumbai constituency for the ruling Congress Party in the Lok Sabha. In addition, there are those who lament the misfortune that has hit the son of Sunil Dutt and Nargis, both highly regarded public figures. The case of Sanjay Dutt is indeed tragic.

Appreciating and sympathising with a personal tragedy is one thing but extending it to the realms of public policy is altogether different. This crucial distinction, plus the principle of ‘equality before law’ appears to have escaped the understanding of stalwarts such as Press Council chairman Justice Markandeya Katju and some other political and personal friends of Sanjay. With his penchant from going from the sublime, Katju has even suggested that Sanjay’s stellar role in popularising Gandhi-giri through a popular Bollywood film should be taken into consideration in judging the quantum of punishment. Sections of the political class have cited Katju’s pseudo-judicial opinion to argue for a pardon.

And the Law Minister Ashwini Kumar who, strictly speaking should not be commenting on individual cases, has let it be known that the Governor of Maharashtra K. Sankaranarayan “will use his discretionary power when there will be an appeal to him. He has the power to pardon”. Since the Governor is a political appointee who has served the Congress Party well in the past, the Law Minister’s use of the term “will” (as reported in Indian Express of March 23) assumes enormous significance. There is an inescapable suggestion that a pardon for Sanjay Dutt is pre-determined.

The law, as Mr Bumble famously said, “is an ass”. It may also be unmindful of the “quality of mercy”; but the scales of justice are held blindfolded. There can’t be one standard for Sanjay Dutt and another for the others convicted in the same case. If Sanjay is to be spared the ordeal of serving time in jail, a corresponding degree of generosity must be the norm for the others, including the 10 who have been awarded life imprisonment and Yakub Memon who is to hang.  

It is important to recall the magnitude of Sanjay’s offence. He is not being punished because he happens to be a star and the son of famous parents. His offence is grave because he used his privileged position to arrange a safe venue for a cache of arms and explosives that had been received from Pakistan by the underworld to organise the serial blasts in March 1993 that killed 257 innocent people and seriously injured another 713. What Sanjay did was not merely brandish an AK-56 assault rifle and a 9mm revolver before a mirror and pretend he was Rambo. He directly facilitated a massacre of monumental proportions, an offence that was no less serious than the massacre by Pakistan-trained terrorists on November 26, 2008.

In fairness, as the Public Prosecutor has pointed out, Sanjay should have been prosecuted under the stringent TADA. Instead, the CBI, for reasons that don’t need too much probing, dropped the charges under TADA and prosecuted him under the Arms Act where conviction involves a lesser quantum of punishment. Now that the punishment has been sanctioned by the highest court, there is a clamour to spare him all further punishment.

In 1994, shortly after Sunjay had first been arrested for his role as a facilitator in the Dawood-organised act of terrorism, I met Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray who told me ominously of an impending “civil war” in India. Having heard him out, I gently asked him why, in that case, was he pleading for leniency for Sanjay. In his inimitable style, Thackeray retorted: “What that boy needs is three tight slaps.”

In a normal case of truancy, three tight slaps delivered by the Tiger himself may have done the trick. But Sanjay wasn’t guilty of bunking school or whistling at a passing girl. He knowingly participated in the logistics of mass murder. The Establishment may see this as akin to rash driving, but are we obliged to forget? 

Sunday Pioneer, March 24, 2013

Victimisation bogey eroding India's peace

By Swapan Dasgupta

It is probably absolutely grotesque to even suggest that any Indian, apart from a handful of the totally demented, would derive satisfaction over the blasts in Hyderabad that killed 15 people on Wednesday evening. Yet, at the risk of sounding wilfully outrageous, I would venture the suggestion that there exists a band of people who will argue that “the country had it coming”.

Such a perverse response had, in fact, been articulated by some ultra-radical and ultra-liberal European and West Asian intellectuals after the 9/11 attacks. To them, the world was shaped by a clash between a series of Muslim grievances (that, apart from Palestine and Bosnia, also included Kashmir) and the smugness of the West-Zionist alliance. India, predictably, was lumped with the latter.

We are yet unclear as to whether the terrorist module that carried out the bombings was driven by the determination to extract revenge for the execution of convicted terrorist conspirator Afzal Guru. If the ever-smiling Home Minister’s suggestion that certain cities had been alerted to the possibility of a terrorist attack after Afzal’s hanging is true, it would seem that the likelihood of the Hyderabad attack being a tit-for-tat incident should not be entirely discounted—at least at this stage of the inquiry.

Whenever an incident like the Hyderabad bombings take place, the political class and the voluble media rush to point an accusing finger at flat-footed policemen and an over-politicised intelligence apparatus. The exasperation with the state apparatus is perfectly understandable. There is enough evidence to indicate that India’s policing priorities are horribly skewed. There is an over-emphasis, for example, on VIP security which leads to police deployment in all the wrong places. There is also a needless preoccupation with political intelligence, including election management. And finally, there is the preoccupation with using the police and intelligence agencies to settle political scores—the latest being attempts to ‘fix’ Gujarat politician Amit Shah and the bid to manufacture an imaginary phenomenon called “Hindu terror” that can be used as a stick to beat the BJP with.

That these distortions need urgent correction is by now well acknowledged and even appreciated by police officers, including those who grudgingly dance to the tune of the ruling dispensation for the sake of career advancement. Leader of Opposition (Rajya Sabha) Arun Jaitley made a passionate plea in Parliament last Friday of the importance that must be attached to the de-politicisation of the police, particularly the wings that are involved in counter-terrorism. It is hoped that he plays a role in incorporating the promise to professionalise the law and order machinery in the manifesto of the NDA for 2014.

A series of incidents, including terrorism, the safety of women and investigations of financial crimes, have served to place police reforms on the political agenda. However, the battle against terrorism isn’t merely about having alert beat constables, tech-savvy officers and a single-minded determination to get to the bottom of each and every terrorist crime. The term ‘roots of terrorism’ has been discredited by the inclination of do-gooders and human rights entrepreneurs to locate terrorist motivation in the imagined sense of hurt of the perpetrators. Yet, if the baggage of indignation is removed from the need to also explore the larger environment, there is a case for understanding why a city such as Hyderabad has become a breeding ground for every conceivable act of treachery.

Assume, as is being hinted, that the initial finger of suspicion points to the Indian Mujahedeen, it is important to understand that the rebellion of a small section of Muslim youth has its origins in the political mindset of separatism that is so widespread in the ghettos. The political ideology of IM that prompts it to take recourse to exploding lethal bombs to cause maximum hurt to the ‘other’ didn’t emerge in a vacuum. It was an inevitable consequence of a rhetoric (and we have seen enough evidence of that in recent months) that seeks to distinguish Muslims from ‘Hindustan’. Some of it is born of plain nostalgia for a time when Moghuls and their successors ruled the state. But the poisonous element is injected by the invocation of victimhood—the preposterous claim that the Indian state is driven by a single-minded desire to beat the Muslim community into submission.

The political use that has been made of the Batla House encounter in various Muslim-dominated localities around the country is an example. Egged on by radical human rights activists and even Vice Chancellors who have donned a political mantle, this incident has been used to fuel the impression of institutionalised targeting of Muslim youth. Read with the unexpected mob fury that was witnessed in Mumbai as a reaction to the clashes in Assam, the victimhood syndrome is contributing to a steady deterioration of inter-communal harmony all over the country. Even West Bengal, which has been relatively spared of the sectarian virus for decades, witnessed belligerent attacks on Hindus in South 24 Parganas.

In the case of West Bengal, the media was forced to take note of the destruction of nearly 200 homes by a mob after social media took up the cause relentlessly. But this ostrich-like behaviour isn’t going to make the problem go away. There is a need to first sensitise Indians of a disturbing phenomenon. The ways to cope with it emerge in due course. Denial is exacerbating the problem. 

Sunday Pioneer, February 24, 2013

Terrorists must pay for their sins

By Swapan Dasgupta

        As someone who has always had ethical problems with the death penalty, I may be forgiven for not 'celebrating' the execution of Afzal Guru for his involvement in the attack on Parliament in December 2001. At the same time, it is undeniable that Afzal received a full and fair trial, and there was nothing knee-jerk in last Saturday morning's executive decision to carry out the sentence. Indeed, those who maintained that there was absolutely no need to wait for such a long time before carrying out the sentence after the Supreme Court upheld it in  2005, have a strong case. By dithering over the decision for more than seven years, as the file meandered from the table of one babu to another, the Government can quite rightly be accused of wilfully politicising the issue.

        Actually, there are reasonable grounds for the belief that the UPA Government lacked the moral resolve to implement the judicial verdict speedily. True, there may have been some individuals who had moral qualms. But those were very few in number. The real hesitation stemmed from the belief that somehow the death sentence on Afzal would be viewed as an example of minority targeting in some parts of the country. Certainly, there  are separatists in Jammu and Kashmir who will use the execution of Afzal to provoke anti-India feelings. The Government will have to use both tact and effective policing to cope with the problem.

         That there will be a small political fallout from Saturday morning's execution in Tihar Jail is undeniable. Since both Ajmal Kasab, the only one of the 26/11 butchers who was brought before a court of law, and Ajmal Kasab, who conspired in the attack on Parliament, happened to be Muslims, there will be those who will see in the two death sentences evidence of an anti-Muslim bias of the Indian political and judicial establishments. Such puerile but potentially inflamatory logic will even have a few takers among those who believe that India is an appropriate place to wage a holy war. These fanatics won't be the ones to appear on TV chat shows but they will be the ones who will craftily disseminate their poisonous message inside the ghettos and among those Muslims who feel that life has short-changed them.

        For the political class as whole, the emergence of a motivated fifth-column is a challenge. The technology of terrorism is such that it takes only a handful of individuals to create fear and devastation. Certainly this was the case with the Indian Mujahedeen which was responsible for many  terrorist outrages a few years ago. However, as events in the aftermath of 26/11 showed, a purposeful counter-terrorism outfit, guided by strong political direction, is in a position to keep the situation well under control. As Home Minister of India, Shivraj Patil was an unmitigated disaster. His successor, P.Chidambaram, on the other hand, addressed his responsibilities with single-minded commitment and played a major role in curbing the terrorist threat.

        The question that is uppermost in the minds of most Indians today is: can Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde live up the exacting standards set by Chidambaram? The initial assessments of him have not been rosy. Apart from his penchant for casual utterances, he appears to have, of late, been preoccupied with scoring political points against the BJP on the 'Hindu terrorism" question. After the execution of Afzal this issue is almost certain to be further highlighted, if only to demonstrate that there was no pre-mediated targeting of minorities.

        I am not one of those who believe that 'Hindu terror" is an oxymoron. There were tiny groups of fanatics in the mid-2000s that believed that the only way to fight jehadi terror was through retribution. Some of these loonies have been caught and some of them are reportedly still at large. Breaking up these so-called Hindu terror modules is an important task before the police forces of the states and the Central investigating bodies. However, if the Centre decides that 'Hindu terror' is a delicious handle to score political points against the RSS and BJP, the outcome will not be a happy one.

        On many occasions, politicians have maintained that terrorism knows no religion. Academic studies of the phenomenon may not confirm this over-simplistic thesis. Religion has played a role in motivating individuals to undertake direct action against those they perceive as their enemies. However, as a philosophy governing policy, the principle of terrorism as a phenomenon separate from religious beliefs is unexceptionable. The job of the state is to guard against violent threats to fellow citizens, irrespective of whether the potential mischief-makers are inspired by theology, politics or dementia. In the eyes of the law, an offence is an offence regardless of what has prompted it.

        Most Indians believed Afzal deserved the death penalty because he was involved in a heinous conspiracy to attack the most important symbol of Indian democracy. His faith was irrelevant in determining whether he should be given clemency or made to pay for his crime. If politicians cutting across party lines stick to this line of reasoning, any adverse fallout resulting from his hanging will be short-lived. If, on the other hand, nervous politicians, fearful of any adverse impact on community support, decide that this is the time to swing to the other extreme and target some other group, it will open the floodgates of sectarian bitterness.

To a minusculity, Afzal will be a martyr, just as the assassins of Indira Gandhi were martyrs and Nathuram Godse an oracle. In a country as large and diverse as India, there will always be a fringe. The important thing is to be focussed on the fact that an overwhelming majority of India believes that terrorists must pay a heavy price for their actions.

Sunday Pioneer, February 10, 2013