SALLEY AND HIS SALLEY GAMBIT

Azath Salley’s detention has predictably been turned into a political bludgeon but the Salley issue strikes at the core of national security concerns. Here is a man who went to another country, and from foreign soil instigated a minority here to take up arms. This outrageous call to arms is recorded in black and white in the web space of a foreign publication, and despite lame denials, there is all the proof that Salley was not merely rabble rousing but trying to provoke armed rebellion.

No country would take this kind of provocation lightly, but in Salley’s case it is germane that his was a call to mutiny in a country that has gone through decades of a terrorist scourge.

Here we are on the path to recovery, and a scoundrel calls for another round of bloodletting, for no apparent reason other than the fact that he sees it is a good time to shore up his waning political stock.

That much has been acknowledged by his unlikely backers as well! They have said that he is a ‘firebrand’ who is seeking a political opening, which they observe, ‘is not a crime.’

It may not be a crime to propagandize for an armed putsch – but it’s treasonous, mutinous, and dastardly in a country that is yearning for peace and reconciliation, as opposed to violence and provocation.

Salley apologists say that he was fighting against provocation, and asserting the minority’s rights. This is what Tamil Tiger terrorists said, and they began their campaign in Tamil Nadu — so there is a danger here that anybody who has a nose for these things would smell a million miles away.

They say Salley is innocent – at worst, that he ‘shot his mouth off.’ Too bad then that he has to do so in foreign terrain that has a history of fomenting terrorism aimed at a peaceful neighbouring nation.

The argument that Salley’s detention in fact would radicalize youth out of empathy for his ‘predicament’, is so giggle-inducing as to qualify for the late night comedy scripts.

Salley is no Muslim emancipator or at the least a student rebel with an idealistic streak in the league of some of the early Tamil militant radicals, before they were swamped by Prabhakaran’s terrorists.

Who is Salley? At bottom he is a Colombo businessman on the make, and therefore has the political resonance, charisma or magnetism of a flagpole dug into lunar soil.

Any Muslim who is going to rally round the issue of the legitimate incarceration of a cynical political opportunist would have to refer himself to a head-shrink. On the other hand, if Salley is on the loose, his brand of rabble rousing from Tamil Nadu could have serious consequences. Also, the defence authorities are not wrong if they have thought on the lines of deterrence.

A post war recovery phase is no time for adventurers and shadowy operators who make calls to arms from foreign soil. That said, if there is no reason for the authorities to entertain any further apprehension against Mr. Salley, they will release him.

But nobody can take exception to the fact that Salley with his inflammatory rhetoric constitutes a security risk, at this juncture when we have barely washed the bad taste off our mouths from the terrible experience with the LTTE.

Cliche though it may be, discretion is said to be the better part of valour, and it is salutary to be on an Orange Alert at a minimum at this time of delicate post-war recovery, and therefore, deterrence should be the name of the game.

There is no place for those who try to fish in troubled waters, and that is the clear message. Salley does not have to physically have weapons of war in his possession. Mullahs and jihadists – for instance such as the Imam known as the Hook in London -- were indicted on grounds of fomenting anti state activity though there were no weapons found on their persons. Salley may not be a Hook type jihadist, but his rhetoric makes the cut. It is easy for armchair critics to pick holes, but defending the country is a tough ask, and it is not for the faint-hearted.