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| PC’s tall talk coincides with Kandahar hijack day | | |
ABID SHAH
NEW DELHI, DEC 23: Ten years after the agonising hijacking of an Indian airliner to Kandahar – on the evening of December 24, 1999 to be exact – Union Home Minister P Chidambaram has inadvertently to say this: “Sooner than you think there may be another crisis like the hijack of IC 814 or another catastrophe like the Mumbai terror attack. Hence the time to act is now and I would spell the last words with capitals: N-O-W.”
Speaking before intelligence officials to mark the 122nd anniversary of the establishment of IB -- Intelligence Bureau – here today Chidambaram somehow ended up referring to the Kandahar hijack case albeit briefly. Yet this turned out to be on a day that has otherwise been fading from the collective memory despite the fact that the sad episode completes a decade today.
If the Home Minister’s today’s long talk before the community of intelligence gatherers is to be viewed in the backdrop of the Kandahar hijacking and that too when he says ten years after that that the time to act is now, there can hardly be an assurance that such sorry episodes are going to be lulled to become history.
Though Chidambaram warned against complacency yet he pointed out that the year now going by in a few days time has been terror free. But unlike on past occasions he unveiled a massive plan for facing terror through restructuring security and setting up a top body for this – National Counter Terrorism Centre or for short NCTC -- by the end of 2010 though American counter terror mechanism, according to him, could be placed in 36 months after September 11, 2001 WTC attack.
The Union Home Minister said that certain police and intelligence agencies would have to be subsumed into the new body or the NCTC and to raise resources he said that the task had to be done whether this called for “beg or borrow”. He dealt with various sorts of terror including those emanating from ideological positions. Yet he refrained from making a direct reference to Jammu and Kashmir from where three Pakistani nationals had to be released from jail a decade ago to be handed over to Taliban controlling Kandahar. And later one of them was held for the murder of Daniel Pearl and extradited to US.
Any talk about this might have gone against his pursuit to bring a solution to two-decade-long trouble in Kashmir that he intends to resolve through what he calls as “quiet diplomacy”. Instead, Chidambaram traced the rise of terror at a broader level from a point where the Cold War ended. He said, “…as the Cold War came to an end, we witnessed the emergence of another kind of war, namely, jihad. Jihad is a war or struggle against unbelievers and, currently, it is waged by a number of groups owing allegiance to Islam.
“Unlike the original Crusades, jihad is not fought like a conventional war. Jihad employs terror as an instrument to achieve its objectives. Such terror is directed against all and sundry, its victims are usually innocent people, and its goal is to overawe and overthrow the established authority. The tactics of the jihadis have been copied by militants belonging to other groups too, not excluding militants professing the Hindu faith.”
Polemical though this may sound, Chidambaram was precise in his assessment of mechanism to defend the country and its people against threat from terrorists. Yet one could not help miss the contradictions and coincidences of terror and its uses by warring political forces, if one is to go through the text of his long speech that was released by a Home Ministry spokesman here today.
It not only coincided with the day Kandahar hijacking becomes a decade old but also remains short of telling how law abiding alone are ending up fearing the law most while the potential violators remain undeterred as shown by Mumbai after Kandahar, leaving aside other may not be that grave incidents, and how far the steps that the Union Home Minister intends to take would lead to a change in this.
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