By Praful Bidwai
Ultimately, it wasn’t superior firepower, high-tech communications, sophisticated interception methods or commando training that explains how one of the Mumbai attackers was arrested alive at Girgaum Chowpatty. The key to that spectacular feat lies in the remarkable presence of mind and great courage shown by the city’s policemen in overpowering Mohammed Ajmal Amir Iman (Kasab) with nothing more than lathis after his accomplice Abu Ismail was killed.
Assistant Sub-Inspector Tukaram Ombale caught and held on to the barrel of Kasab’s powerful gun and pounced on the man even as he took a burst of fire, allowing his colleagues to disarm and arrest him. Ombale died, but his act of exemplary bravery ensured that a key participant in the attack would live to tell the tale.
Kasab’s arrest is a rare, if not unique, event in the annals of anti-terrorist operations anywhere. His interrogation has produced invaluable evidence about the preparation for the November 26 attack, and its planning and execution. Kasab must be put on trial in a scrupulously fair manner and with full respect for his right to legal defence. Maharashtra’s legal aid machinery should draft a lawyer of unimpeachable competence to defend him to dispel the impression that his conviction is a foregone conclusion merely because of the attack’s enormity and barbarity. His guilt must be proved beyond doubt and on the highest norms of criminal law.
After Kasab’s disclosures to the police, there can be little doubt that Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba carried out the attack after putting a large number of recruits through rigorous training and ideological-political indoctrination for almost a year. The Pakistani media has since verified Kasab’s identity and home address, and interviewed his father in Faridkot village in Okara district in Pakistan’s Punjab. The international community has confirmed LeT’s involvement through the ban imposed on its sister organisation, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, by the United Nations Security Council under Resolution 1267 pertaining to al-Qaeda/Taliban.
LeT is not just another jehadi extremist group. It has had a special relationship with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI), which protects it. Unlike other extremist groups such as Jaish-e-Mohammed, which are Deobandi in orientation, LeT follows the Salafist doctrine and doesn’t believe in fighting governments in Islamic countries. LeT doesn’t actively oppose the Pakistan Army’s anti-Taliban-al-Qaeda operations at the Western border with Afghanistan.
It’s not clear if the ISI or its “rogue” elements were behind the Mumbai plot or gave it logistical support. But it’s reasonably plain that the attackers’ main motive was to provoke a military response from India, which would lead to tension and a troops build-up at the India-Pakistan border. This would create a rationale for moving 100,000 Pakistani troops from the Western border—where they have faced considerable pressure from combined US-Pakistan operations since September—and redeploying them at the Indian border. Reduced pressure on al-Qaeda-Taliban fighters will allow them to regroup and eventually overrun large swathes of Afghanistan and Pakistan’s tribal agency areas
Secondarily, the Mumbai attackers’ motive was to increase disaffection among Indian Muslims and provoke a possible backlash against them—to further polarise the communal divide and help extremism. Mercifully, this hasn’t happened—despite, not because of, the Sangh Parivar. The attacks have triggered unprecedented Hindu-Muslim unity and a spirited condemnation of terrorism by an overwhelming majority of India’s Muslim social and religious organisations.
If India retaliates militarily to the Mumbai attacks, it would play straight into the hands of LeT and other extremists. Letting up pressure on the Taliban at the Afghanistan border would further destabilise Pakistan, which is already in a precarious condition, to the point of unravelling its state—with potentially disastrous consequences for India.
The Indian government has done well by acting with restraint and using diplomatic rather than military means to deal with the crisis. On December 11, External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee underscored this approach in Parliament. In response to an interjection demanding an attack on Pakistan, he said: “That is not the point. That is not the issue. I am making it quite clear that that is not the solution. Let us be very clear and frank that that is no solution.”
Let’s understand the meaning of the military option, which is advocated stridently by hawkish “strategic experts” and by Bharatiya Janata Party MPs such as Mr. Arun Shourie. Mr. Shourie wants India to target Pakistan’s vital installations and keep Pakistan “preoccupied”, presumably through covert action, with its “own problems in Balochistan, in Gilgit, Baltistan and in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir”. He said: “Not an eye for an eye; but for an eye, both eyes. For a tooth, (the) whole jaw.” In other words, disproportionately massive retaliation!
This is an insane prescription. Any India-Pakistan conflict is liable to escalate into a nuclear war. In South Asia, nuclear weapons have manifestly failed to prevent conventional war and promote sober conflict management—in Kargil, and in the scary 2002 eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation. In Nuclear Armageddon, there are no winners—only mega-deaths.
Even a limited nuclear exchange will kill millions of civilians in both India and Pakistan and cause economic and environmental damage that will set us back by decades. A single Hiroshima- or Nagasaki-type bomb dropped on a big city will kill 8 to 20 lakh people. And India and Pakistan both have scores of such bombs, indeed even more powerful ones.
In every conceivable war-gaming scenario—and many credible ones exist—, an India-Pakistan conflict has one inevitable outcome: full-scale war, in which Pakistan won’t hesitate to use nuclear weapons if it fears loss of territory or outright dismemberment. This is certain to invite nuclear retaliation from India, with consequences that are too horrifying even to contemplate.
Besides, no leader, whether Prime Minister Manmohan Singh or President Asif Ali Zardari, has the moral right or political mandate to sacrifice millions of civilians. Only communal extremists with apocalyptic visions like RSS chief KS Sudarshan believe that nuclear war is acceptable. He recently told an interviewer: “Whenever the demons (Asuri powers) start dominating this planet, there is no way other than war…I know it will not stop there. It will be a nuclear war and a large number of people will perish. But … it is very necessary to defeat the demons and there is no other way. And let me say with confidence that after this destruction, a new world will emerge, which will be very good, free from evil and terrorism.”
It’s both absurd and dangerous to imagine that the threat of war can compel Pakistan into acting decisively against extremist groups. Indeed, it will respond more irresponsibly and with greater bellicosity. Its military leadership probably deludes itself that it can hold its own against India for a prolonged period with the arms it has stockpiled from the aid given by the US.
The idea of “surgical strikes” against terrorist training camps is equally harebrained. LeT camps are makeshift affairs, and hence poor candidate-targets for strikes. Any strike, however “limited”, will invite armed conflict, whose effects cannot be contained. Pakistan isn’t Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, which the US could attack without fear of resistance because it crippled all military communications. Even covert operations, which will require the creation of a new monster—”India’s own ISI”—will trigger military escalation, with terrible consequences.
However, there are alternatives. Dr. Manmohan Singh outlined in a two-pronged approach: galvanising international opinion for effective action against terrorism, and persisting with diplomatic pressure on Pakistan. Domestically, he also promised radical reform of internal security arrangements. External pressure, especially through the US and UK, has already led to some tangible results in the shape of a ban on JuD. But India must develop a broader multilateral approach to avert getting drawn into Washington’s parochial plans for the region.
The best multilateral strategy would be to press Pakistan through UN Security Council Resolution 1373, under which sanctions can be imposed on a state that fails to “deny safe haven to those who finance, plan, support, or commit terrorist acts…” and violates its duty to “refrain from providing … support… to entities or persons involved in terrorist acts…”.
Bilaterally, India can achieve a great deal by sharing with, and confronting, Pakistan with incontrovertible evidence about LeT’s role in the Mumbai attacks, and acting demonstrably to defuse suspicions about its own covert operations in Balochistan and Afghanistan.
While revamping India’s internal security system, the Singh government should have followed the sage advice of Chief Justice KG Balakrishnan against “increasing governmental surveillance over citizens” and using “questionable methods such as permitting indefinite detention of terror suspects…coercive interrogation techniques and the denial of the right to fair trial”, and his plea for “substantive due process”.
Regrettably, the government has done the very opposite by having a law passed which replicates most of the obnoxious provisions, including detention without charges for 180 days, of the discredited, draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act—except for making confessions to the police admissible as evidence. The National Investigative Agency Act too is full of flaws, including overcentralisation of powers, and their illegitimate extension to areas affected by insurgency and Left-wing extremism. These Acts must be undone.-
- IPA
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