Terrorism Combat

The clich� ‘is India soft in combating terrorism’ can now easily be replaced by ‘can India combat terrorism at all’? By any reckoning and by a variety of reasons, some in India’s control and some not, the dice appears loaded against her.

Let us examine the complexities. India cannot alter geography, sharing a 4057- kilometre porous border with Communist China in her east whose interest is to keep India down, both politically, militarily and from becoming an economic rival. On the west are traditional rivals Pakistan with whom India shares a 2,900-kilometre often hostile border. Both countries are long standing allies and for China, Pakistan has come handy in keeping India bottled up in south Asia. India can do as little about the China-Pakistan all weather friendship as it could about the China-Pakistan nuclear non-proliferation agreement, details of which are slowly but continuously emerging.

“The Pakistan-China axis is an old one and we have to be na�ve to believe that the two are not acting in unison. Please read AQ Khan’s latest revelations,’’ says G Parthasarathy, former Indian high commissioner to Pakistan and an analyst not known to mince his words.

China’s quiet but steady plans of increasing its military capabilities on the Indo-China border are on the radars of Sinophiles. Recent reports from the Pentagon have confirmed that China has successfully deployed long range CSS-5 missiles close to the Indian border while also having developed contingency plans to move airborne forces to the region at very short notice.

For India this is a matter of serious concern, given the somewhat fragile relationship between the two countries which saw a border war in 1962 in which India’s political class was exposed as having no knowledge of either warfare or the terrain that the battle was to be fought.

That battle has left permanent scars as successive Indian governments — with the exception of Indira Gandhi in the early seventies — have simply refused to react to Chinese provocations including border incursions passing them off as ‘routine’, a throwback to the disastrous days of ‘Hindi-Chini bhai bhai’ and the Bandung spirit, all of which was thrown out of the window in 1962 never to come back again.

China’s top envoy Sun Yaxi told the Indian media a couple of years ago that all Arunachal Pradesh or south Tibet as he calls it, is Chinese territory, reiterating publicly what their diplomats have been saying across the table.

In its annual report to the US Congress titled “Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China,” officials from the American department of defence have stated that “Beijing remains concerned with persistent disputes along China’s shared border with India and the strategic ramifications of India’s rising economic, political, and military power”. It is little surprise that Beijing is diplomatically opposing the proscription of Jaishe Mohammed as a terrorist group even though India has supplied mountains of evidence to back their claim.

What India can control, it is unable to do so. The cross-border terror exported by Pakistan-based ISI-sponsored militant groups and their attacks on the Indian mainland in the last decade or so — including the November 2008 savagery in Mumbai — does not seem to have an endgame.

Much of India’s inability is counter terror or attacks on its installations can be directly attributed to its own internal contradictions. India’s response to the Mumbai attacks, for instance, have degenerated into a farce. Not only has it not been able to provide a list of the attackers by frequently going wrong on their names and whereabouts, recent Wikileaks revelations suggest India was not even serious about extraditing one of the main accused in the attack and that its protest was at worst a mock, at best a mere formality to keep up pretenses.

It is little wonder that the case appears to have gone off peoples’ radars except for the three Americans killed in the attack and whose representatives appear determined to drag the ISI and top Pakistani army brass to their New York courts. But by far the biggest security threat to India emanates from its inability to reform security systems. The police has not been modernised and its system of investigation and information collection belongs to the days of the colonial raj where the sophistication to take a case to its logical conclusion remained strictly limited.

The police and security systems are putty in the hands of politicians and the civil bureaucracy who have no intention of letting go of their powers to control the police. “It is a well known fact that policemen are forced to do the bidding for politicians and their stooges. They are compelled to run errands,’’ says former CBI joint director NK Singh, one of the petitioners before the Supreme Court, whose PIL has sought to know why police reforms proposed in 1977 continue to gather dust.

The other bane of security: vote bank politics. By accusing the police of being unduly harsh on minorities which has been revealed in some instances but not all, security forces have been put on the back foot. Top police officers say that it is routine after every blast for the authorities to say ‘there should be no harassment of minorities’. That has led to its own repercussions.

In Delhi, since the 2008 Batla House encounter and as a matter of policy, the Delhi Police has not arrested any ISI agent or Pakistani module. Result: chances of terror attacks have gone up considerably in India’s capital.

Analysts say if the moment of suspects is to be judged by their community, we may as well forget about fighting terror. Above all, the lack of an aware political leadership has come in the way of India being unable to safeguard its flanks. Political instability and coalition politics have contributed directly to the state of security in the 1990s when in the days of United Front governments, national security was given the least priority, the saving of the government being the first.

India has to hold many crosses. Cyber war for instance. Officially, the likelihood of a Chinese cyber-strike has been played down, but say experts, could be a big mistake.� A recent investigation by software security firm McAfee has revealed that as cyber-attacks rise globally, India is emerging as an easy hunting ground. It has other implications as well because the vulnerability not just poses a threat to the government, military, and infrastructure, it also carries a huge risk for international businesses that have outsourced IT operations or bought software in India. 

“That India is under-prepared is well known, and experts often raise concerns about how the government’s IT systems could be crippled in a war. While that threat is valid, I think the real worry is someone attacking the IT systems of the private sector,’’ Shivarama Krishnan, an IT security expert told the media recently.� 

Says Gen. Shankar Roy Chowdhary, former army chief and Rajya Sabha member, “When we talk of state being soft on terror, the implication is that the government succumbs to pressure. It’s an ineffectual state. It’s ineffectual because it’s ineffective. It’s ineffective because it’s inefficient.’’ Sadly, that is a face off which the Indian establishment is not ready to take on.

A flawed model

When people say that India is not a security conscious nation, they are probably missing the woods for the trees. It would be difficult to find another example of a nation rated as the second largest growing economy in the world also being among the most security slack countries in the world. Pulp analysts are wont to tell us that policing is so inadequate and the issue of peoples’ alienation so overwhelming that we may as well forget about saving ourselves from being blasted out of existence by a thoughtfully planted RDX at some supposedly safe public place.

The situation is far more complex. For a vast democracy such as India, the challenges of maintaining security is enormous — and prickly. The policing system is archaic and very short on resources. Just visit the local police station (thana) and judge for yourself whether it has the firepower to take on heavily armed and trained professional terrorists or the sophistication of intelligence to be able to bust a plot at the planning stage. At least three major terror plots were nipped in the bud in the US and UK in the last one year. That happened through sustained shadowing, decoding and interception. In one case in the UK, a group of suspects were sitting around the drawing board making plans when the police stormed in and picked them up, with all evidences intact. It is little surprise that US has not been hit since 9/11 while Britain has tightened security in a way that has made movement of suspects extremely difficult.

In India, policing is geared towards VIP security leaving the common citizenry hapless against terror attacks. In Delhi, since most VIPs live in heavily guarded elitist NDMC with their offices in close proximity, there is little concern as to what happens to the common citizenry. All encompassing police reforms on the table since civil servant Dharamvira proposed them in 1977 have been gathering reams of dust. The political class is not willing to let go of the police as an instrument to further their petty interests, a fact noted in abundant measure by the Dharamvira committee. Unless that happens and the police made more accountable, sophisticated and resourceful, India is going to be repeatedly embarrassed and its innocents killed and maimed. 

The police today is a caricature of the classical colonial police where native Indians could only be reined in with the help of brute force. This image — reinforced in daily TV grabs of police manhandling victims in various parts of the country — is hardly conducive to getting it crucial inside dope against those sponsoring terror.

Notwithstanding an aggressive media campaign, it is doubtful if members of the public are going to act as volunteers of information to a police which continues to be trapped in its pre-1947 mode. In the absence of timely and actionable intelligence, it is also difficult to make a fool proof case in a court of law. The number of alleged terrorists who have been let off by the courts only demonstrate that gathering information and putting it together to build up a sound case requires a sophistication not yet in evidence.

Should we have more stringent laws? That debate lends itself to other subterranean issues. TADA and POTA were seen to be too harsh and hence scrapped. So effectively what we have are 19th century legislations concerning law and order. Are they sufficient to match the wits, guile and daring of modern day anarchists? Your guess is as good as mine.

India’s geographical position makes it a special case. Hemmed in by two vast military oligarchies China and Pakistan — who also happen to be allies — it has roughly two fronts to tackle. If Pakistan by its own admission has been sending in terrorists to India, China’s provocative postures and hyperactive cyber militants have hacked into as many sensitive websites as they possibly can. 

The biggest challenge is to maintain the very delicate balance between intelligence and democracy. In non-elected governments, collecting information is easy, torture and tapping being two time tested sources of information. In democracies, no one can - and should - be harassed. There are well laid out procedures which are time consuming and which need resources. Unless India works on these two aspects, its security is going to be compromised. For a nation that seeks to lead the world in economic change, that is hardly a good sign.