Shame on India for surrendering before terror

Events of a quarter century ago are rarely remembered, especially in a country like India where the masses have a poor sense of history and the classes have a loathing for the past.

Yet, at times, it is necessary to recall events if only to highlight how our national resolve has weakened in direct proportion to the strengthening of our economy. Politically convenient and socially fashionable bunkum about India as a soft power has left the Indian state looking vulnerable as never before.

This is most evident from the response of both society and authority to terrorism. Instead of standing up and daring those who use guns and bombs to terrorise us, we meekly surrender, thus exposing ourselves to further violence.

But it wasn’t always like this. In February 1984, an Indian diplomat, Ravindra Mhatre, posted at our mission in Birmingham, was kidnapped by members of the then UK-based Jammu & Kashmir Liberation Front. The government of India had till then faced other hostage situations — Indian Airlines flights had been hijacked to Pakistan — but nothing quite similar.

Within hours of the kidnapping, the abductors issued their list of demands, which included one million pounds in cash and the release of Maqbool Butt, the JKLF’s co-founder, who was lodged in Delhi’s Tihar jail after being sentenced to death for killing personnel of Indian security forces.

There were hectic efforts to goad Mrs Indira Gandhi, then prime minister, into agreeing to negotiate a deal with Mhatre’s abductors. But Mrs Gandhi remained unmoved and her message was unambiguous: No talks, no deal.

On February 6, Mhatre’s body was found in a lane. He had been shot dead after the JKLF realised it was futile to expect a swap. A grim-faced Mrs Gandhi struck back.

Maqbool Butt was executed five days later on February 11 after then President Zail Singh was told to spurn his mercy petition. The JKLF leaders in Birmingham panicked and fled Britain; it’s another matter that British courts failed to fetch justice to Mhatre.

Cynics would say Mrs Gandhi’s tit-for-tat policy did not yield long-term results. That is a fallacious argument, not the least because it overlooks certain crucial facts. Between 1984 and 1989, the JKLF’s cadre were on the run with their top leaders in jail.

Mrs Gandhi had based her decision on the simple principle that a country as large as India could absorb the loss of one official but it couldn’t countenance the threat posed by terrorists. It worked - till VP Singh came to power and appointed Mufti Mohammed Sayeed as his Home Minister.

On December 8, 1989, Rubaiya Sayeed, the mufti’s daughter, was kidnapped in Kashmir by JKLF gunmen who demanded the release of five senior ‘commanders’ from prison. VP Singh capitulated and Jammu and Kashmir has never been the same again; nor has the government been able to stand firm before terrorist demands.

It irreparably broke the national spirit and the will of the government, as was demonstrated during the week-long saga of shame that followed the hijacking of IC-814 to Kandahar, which ended with our setting free three Pakistani terrorists.

The reason why these events from the past are important to recall and remember is to contextualise the astonishingly timid surrender by the government of Orissa before the Maoists who abducted the collector of Malkangiri district and a junior engineer, 26 years to the month after Mhatre’s kidnapping by terrorists of another ideological persuasion.

The Maoists initially made 14 demands, including the immediate halt to counter-insurgency operations, withdrawal of central paramilitary forces, release of five of their senior comrades in prison and cancellation of agreements with multinational corporations. They also named their own choice of negotiators. T

he government meekly complied without even bothering to look into the implications of grovelling before Maoists whose depredations the prime minister has repeatedly described as the “biggest threat to India’s national security”.

It is immaterial how the Malkangiri story ends. It is equally irrelevant whether the government later claims that it had to act in a pragmatic, responsible manner. Any justification of the shameful and shaming surrender by the state is so much poppycock and nothing more than that.

Chief minister Naveen Patnaik need not have hastened to appease those waging war on the state; he should have dared the Maoists to do their worst. Surely India could have absorbed the loss of two men to secure the safety of more than a billion people?