COUNTER TERRORISM, INDIA AND HUMAN RIGHTS

The attacks in Chattisgarh by the Maoist rebels have caught the Indian Congress leadership in a tailspin. Terrorism is not alien to India, but after a brutal -- what was called a ‘barbaric’ Indian government crackdown – by a well known Indian journalist Mr. Bernard De Mello --- the Maoists are still a potent force, and are capable of wreaking damage of the kind they did earlier this week killing 24 people in an ambush attack.

What would be India’s appraisal of counter-terrorism activity in this backdrop? India has by all reckoning been one of Sri Lanka’s detractor nations as far as the UN Human Rights Council Resolutions of 2012 and 13 went. The Indian political establishment has professed concern about human rights and accountability in Sri Lanka, in concert with other signatories to the resolution, notably the United States.

But yet, the Indian record is far from squeaky clean, to put it by way of glorious understatement -- and now, the Chattisgarh attack drives home the point.

It’s time therefore that India became a party to a regional re-appraisal of how counter terrorism operations are conducted. Before that, perhaps the Indian political establishment should reconsider its stand on human rights vis-a-viz counter-insurgency, in the aftermath of terrorist attacks.

This is important, particularly from the point of view that terrorism in the modern day and age never quite ceases. The Maoist ambush is one case in point, but look at the work of the Tamil Tiger rump the world over and the work of terrorist sympathizers and terrorists in all but name, aimed at perpetuating in a different form, the terrorism that earlier wreaked havoc on the ground.

The opposite editorial page for instance documents the work of the Tamil Tiger Transnational operation, which is of course little more than a joke in real terms. Notwithstanding that, the fact that they have a free run in countries such as the United States where the LTTE is banned, is clear indication enough that a terrorist operation generally morphs into something different when the active terrorist phase is over, or is in some kind of temporary abeyance.

Nobody advocates barbarism or torture or the breaking of backs, in infiltrating and prying open terror cells in the job of rooting out terror. But, as the Indians are now only too well aware, counter-terror techniques can lapse into the unorthodox, and the barbaric and brutal, unbeknownst even to the political or bureaucratic establishment – and yet, the results could be rather unspectacular, and the Chattisgarh attacks go to show.

The Indian political establishment could also probably do well to ascertain what causes the outbreak of terrorism in so many diverse and far flung locations within the Indian union territory. Terrorism is terrorism, but legitimate rebellion may sometimes have deep-rooted economic causes. The FARC for instance is now the process of negotiating a deal with the Colombian government to improve the lives of rural dwellers and the chronically poor in urban ghettos.

In India, there are different brands of empathy for terror, and in the state of Tamil Nadu for instance, perhaps it would be the Indian Centre that would be the first to admit to the fact that terrorist sympathizers there are motivated by parochial petty party political reasons alone.

However terrorism is terrorism, and there is only one way to fight it, and it is time that India joined the regional actors against terrorism rather than work at cross purposes with them by intervening in so called human rights issues in Sri Lanka for instance. The Indians to a very great extent have been in principle -- within the umbrella of SAARC – in favour of cracking down on terror, but when political imperatives have intervened in terms of coalition politics etc., there has been the conspicuous deviation from this policy. The Chattisgarh attacks show that the Indian bureaucracy and political leadership needs to be ‘on the ball’ i.e.: unwavering and focused, and on the same page as terrorism fighters throughout the sub-continent, and the extended Asian region.