The politicisation of national security

If anyone wants to understand why India remains so pathetic in its response to counter terror, one only has to witness the manner in which the Indian political class has reacted to the recent sessions court judgement on the Batla House encounter case. The court found Shahzad Aslam guilty of killing Delhi police special cell inspector MC Sharma in 2008. The Delhi police had accused Aslam of being a member of the Indian Mujahideen group and of being involved in the 2008 Delhi blasts which killed 26 people.

The civil society has every right to express their displeasure over the judgement and take whatever follow-up legal action that is available to them. But the way the Indian political class and, in particular, the Congress party has politicised this issue from the very beginning is a testament not only to the moral bankruptcy of India’s grand old party but also to the fundamental contradictions in the nation’s approach to fighting terrorism.

Even as the UPA has always officially maintained that the encounter was genuine, sections of the Congress party have done all that is necessary to muddy the waters. Digvijay Singh, who is working really hard to keep himself in the headlines after being thrown out of Madhya Pradesh by the voters for his poor performance, had expressed doubts in 2010 over the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) probe into the encounter and talked about the alleged “police excesses” and “miscarriage of justice”.

He later on suggested that he had wanted a judicial probe but was overruled by the prime minister and then home minister, P Chidambaram. The present external affairs minister, Salman Khurshid, went a step further by suggesting that Congress president Sonia Gandhi had cried while seeing the pictures of the encounter.

It was hoped that the court verdict would at least put an end to this inane display of crocodile tears but Singh refused to budge and continues to argue even now that the encounter was fake. The Congress officially has sought to downplay this by suggesting that these are Singh’s own views but clearly that is not enough.

Singh is one of the most influential general secretaries of the Congress party and if he feels that a government led by his party is not being honest about the incident then he should resign and expose his government. And if the Congress feels that Singh is exceeding his brief, then he should be sacked. But Congress wants to have it both ways. The government does one thing and the party sings another tune — that’s the way the Congress has tried to fool the nation for the past nine years. But the way national security is being endangered with such antics will have grave consequences for the nation long after Digvijay Singh and the Congress are gone.

India’s response to terrorism has always been inadequate but the competitive politicisation of national security will only ensure that India’s adversaries can be rest assured that if nothing else, India’s feckless politicians will be there to give them succour. The governance deficit is affecting every sphere of society — and internal security is no exception. No consensus exists across the political spectrum on how best to fight terrorism and extremism.

The opposition Bharatiya Janata Party is interested in making terrorism a primarily Muslim issue to generate Hindu votes. The ruling Congress, on the other hand, has not allowed an open discourse on Islamist extremism to take place for fear of offending Muslim sensibilities. Such vote-bank politics have created an environment in which political and religious polarisation has been so complete as to render effective action against terrorism impossible.

India had long claimed to be detached from al-Qaeda or any international terror plot — even though it has the second largest Muslim population in the world.
This, of course, has turned out to be false: every major Islamist urban terror cell in the country since 1993 has seen a preponderance of Indian nationals.

India is fast emerging both as a target and a recruitment base for organizations like al-Qaeda, and attacks are being carried out with impunity by home-grown jihadist groups, trained and aided by organisations in neighbouring Pakistan and Bangladesh. Much like al-Qaeda, the most prominent terrorist group in India today, the Indian Mujahideen, is a loose coalition of jihadists bound together by ideological affiliations and personal linkages, with its infrastructure and top leadership scattered across India.

India’s response to a terrorist event follows a predictable pattern: the government pledges to bring the perpetrators to justice while the opposition denounces the government’s counter-terrorism policy without offering any constructive solutions. Media coverage surges for a few days but soon reverts to discussions about Bollywood stars’ latest foibles. India faces a structural problem given its location in one of the world’s most dangerous neighbourhoods — south Asia — which is now the epicentre of Islamist radicalism with India’s neighbours harbouring terrorist networks and using them as instruments of state policy. India began dealing with the threat of terrorism long before it reached western shores.

The terror saga in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir is more than three-decades old. The threat spiked beginning in the early 1990s; Mumbai witnessed multiple terror strikes in 1993, and then in November 2008, the jihadists, aided and abetted by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), openly confronted the might of the Indian state in full glare of the global media.

Rather than working out a comprehensive national response to fighting terrorism and extremism, political brinkmanship has become the norm in today’s Indian polity where nonsensical tweets are replacing serious policy. If the present trends are not nipped in the bud, Indians will continue to suffer and the nation’s politicians will continue to be gravely irresponsible.

The author teaches at King’s College, London