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| Towards a doctrine for internal security | | |
Harish Khare
There is a notion that all it takes is sturdy political will for the Indian state to defeat the increasingly lethal non-state actors. The result is ignorance about the nature of internal disorder.
OUR "HOW to react to a terror act" manual is now almost ready. A bomb or a series of bombs goes off in a crowded place, sometimes in a place of worship. Many deaths. Horrifying images, brought in by a frenetic media. The same day or early the next day the Congress president, Sonia Gandhi — accompanied by either Union Home Minister Shivraj Patil or Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee — air-dashes to the scene of the tragedy. The President of India issues a statement condemning the violence, the Prime Minister exhorts the people to remain calm and united and not to get provoked into any kind of communal retaliatory cycle. The Leader of the Opposition, L.K. Advani, or the former Prime Minister, A.B. Vajpayee, or sometimes both of them, deplore the fact that the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) has been taken off the statute shelf, and sometimes bemoan that the country has gone soft under the United Progressive Alliance dispensation. The various Foreign Offices across the world carefully use elegant language to condemn the "heinous crime." The media get into the play, waylay police officials and investigators, who somehow cannot resist the temptation of holding forth. More senior media "experts" get briefed on the possible involvement of the ISI, leading often to a slanging match with Pakistan. An animated debate ensues at home. The controversy is stoked; name-calling is encouraged — till some other issue makes a distracting call on our collective attention or another terrorist makes his presence felt.
Curiously enough, no one is ever made to pay a price. Not even a constable is fired. No political executive has ever been asked to resign — not for the Kargil incursion, not for the IC-841 hijacking, not for attack on Parliament House, not for the Sarojini Nagar blasts, not for the Mumbai blasts. Neither Mr. Advani nor Mr. Patil has ever been suspected of coming close to owning up any moral responsibility for the many terror acts all these years. Neither Mr. Vajpayee nor Dr. Manmohan Singh has thought of sacking his failed Home Minister.
Because of this cultivated tradition of non-culpability and non-accountability, the Indian security establishment has shied away from developing any doctrine of internal security. There has been virtually no attempt to define coherently the "enemy," the sources of our troubles, the instruments needed to deal with the designated "enemy," and the requisite administrative and political skills to thwart the "enemy's" game. If anything, we have been all too prone to point fingers at the "foreign hand," thereby absolving ourselves of any responsibility, administrative or political.
Since there has been no internal security doctrine, there has been little calibration of foreign policy with making India a safe place to live. Will a policy of confrontation with Pakistan, for instance, help us get the better of the terror-monger? Will a pro-United States stance annoy large sections of our society, thereby aggravating our security management? Can China or Bangladesh be dissuaded from aiding and abetting the insurgents in the Northeast?
This absence of a coherent internal security doctrine is somewhat incongruous because for over two decades we have allowed ourselves to believe that Pakistan was pursuing a strategy of "a thousand cuts." The Khalistani insurgency was attributed to Pakistani machinations; though, three of the most horrible breakdowns of order, the Nellie Massacre, the anti-Sikh riots, and, the anti-Muslim violence (Gujarat, 2002) could not be laid at Pakistan's doorstep. Nor are we in a position to blame Pakistan for the "Naxalite menace," a much more serious threat to internal order than even the insurgency in the Northeast.
And though our political leaders have cynically sought to use internal disorder and violence to advance their electoral agendas, they have shown a remarkable inability to stay the course. Mr. Advani came closest to developing a somewhat coherent internal security doctrine: in his world view, Pakistan was the source of all our trouble, and the only way to get a handle on our internal security problems was to "fix" Pakistan. For months and years he threatened to publish a White Paper on the ISI; for a brief while, between Pokhran II and Chagai, he publicly toyed with the idea of "hot pursuit"; but, then limited imagination stepped in. There was this experiment with "ceasefire" in Jammu and Kashmir, then talks with the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, then the Agra Summit fiasco, then Operation Parakram, and, finally, Islamabad January 6, 2004.
By the time the Vajpayee Government left office after a six-year innings, the security establishment was thoroughly confused as to the identity of the "enemy" and his local accomplices, if any. Whether it was an outbreak of wisdom or whether the old leaders simply lacked the stamina for sustained communal violence at home, or whether it was the countervailing pressure from the National Democratic Alliance partners, the BJP brass discovered that it would simply not work to designate "Muslims" as the "enemy." What is more, during its term, the Vajpayee Government, too, observed all those rites of "appeasement" that the sangh parivar had decried these many years.
The UPA Government, too, has not invented any coherent policy response to the challenge of internal disorder, except a commitment to do things differently than were done during the Vajpayee regime. The UPA's "secular" leadership understandably remains alert to the Muslim community's "sensitivities" and sensibly remains sceptical of any talk of a grammar of civil war. But at the same time, the Congress leaders lack conviction in their secular assertions and are forever on the backfoot when it comes to talking the inclusive rhetoric. This ambivalence was most visibly on display in the recent Vande Mataram controversy.
What is worse, the standoff between the two rival political formations and the resulting public discourse perpetuate a number of myths about the Indian state. When an Advani or a Vajpayee suggests that we have gone "soft" on terror, the assumption is that the state is omnipotent and omnipresent and that it has the fine-tuned instruments, the honed skills, the sophisticated ideas, the committed men and women, and the abundant resources to defeat every terror module and defuse every bomb. No Home Minister or Prime Minister has the self-assurance to tell the nation that there will be occasions when a terrorist will get the better of the policeman. Nor are things helped by cries of "intelligence failure" every time a bomb goes off in this or that small town. We continue to subscribe to a bogus notion that we have the entire wherewithal to defeat the increasingly lethal non-state actors, and all that it requires is sturdy political will (which has eluded various political leaders when in government).
The result is that the country remains untutored in the nature of our internal disorder, and what demands, if any, are to be made on the citizens by the state. Leadership means educating, mobilising and enlisting citizens in keeping at bay the enemies of a peaceful order. It also requires some display of wholesome impulses and moral leadership; "leaders" who traffic with criminals and other assorted muscle men cannot possibly hope to inspire the citizens to make "sacrifices."
These limitations of the political class can be overcome only if there is a consensus around a doctrine of internal security. Some elements of such a doctrine are obvious: (a) supremacy of the state; (b) inviolability of the national boundaries; (c) no group or individual has any claim higher than the nation's security; (d) no citizen or community would be denied equality before the law, under the constitutional compact; (e) no State government shall withhold honest and willing cooperation in going after the disruptionist, choking his finances, drying up his local support.
A consensus around such a doctrine of internal security would mean no community or group is suspected of lacking in patriotism or loyalty to the state. At the same time, it also ipso facto entails that the policeman will go after every suspect, irrespective of religious or caste. It means empowering the security forces to put their best professional foot forward.
It has been the unfortunate history of this country that outsiders have meddled in our internal affairs. Today as a democracy we have the advantage of garnering our collective energies and emotions in such a manner as to understand and defeat the outsider's mischief. We cannot conduct our internal political disputes and controversies so as to allow the outsider to take advantage of our fault lines.
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