B.RAMAN
In a televised address to the nation on the afternoon of May 4,2009, the Maoist Prime Minister of Nepal, Pushpa Kamal Dahal, popularly known as Prachanda, dramatically announced his resignation in the wake of opposition to his decision the previous day to sack the 61-year-old Army Chief Gen Rukmangad Katawal following the General’s opposition to the demand of Prachanda for the integration of the members of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) raised by the Maoists during their days in the insurgency into the Army. Gen. Kul Bahadur Khadka, the No.2 in the Army, was asked by Prachanda to act as the Chief of the Army Staff (COAS) until further orders.
2. Before announcing his decision, Prachanda met with Katawal and Khadka separately first, then jointly, before seeking the approval of the Cabinet for sacking the COAS. His decision was opposed by the Communist Party of Nepal (United Marxist-Leninist) with 108 members in the Constituent Assembly, which decided to quit the ruling coalition Government. “We decided to withdraw our support to protest the Prime Minister’s unilateral decision,” CPN-UML General Secretary Ishwar Pokhrel said.
3.While the Nepali Congress and the Madhesi Peoples Party joined 17 other parties in opposing the sacking of the General , the Madhesi People’s Rights Forum (MPRF) with 51 members in the Assembly and some other smaller parties maintained an ambivalent attitude. The MPRF reportedly submitted a note of dissent disagreeing with Prachanda’s decision, but did not leave the coalition. The CPN-Maoist with 229 seats in the Constituent Assembly needed the crucial support from MPRF and other small parties to continue to enjoy a majority in the 601-member Assembly tasked to frame a new constitution for the country after it abolished its unpopular 240-year-old monarchy last year.
4. Prachanda’s action in unilaterally sacking the Army Chief despite strong opposition in the coalition Cabinet was nullified by the President Ram Baran Yadav, who faxed a special instruction to the Chief of the Army Staff "asking him to continue in his office in the capacity of CoAS as per the Interim Constitution, 2007, and the existing law".
5. The spokesman of the Maoists, Krishna Bahadur Mahara, who is the Minister for Information and Communication, told the media that the President’s order to the COAS to continue in office was tantamount to a "constitutional coup" and said that the Maoists would fight back with street protests. He said: "The President is... violating constitutional norms. The President's move has put the peace process in peril. Our party has taken the President's step as a constitutional coup and we will fight against it. The executive power to sack and appoint an acting army chief lies with the Government and not the President. We will stick to our decision. We don't have any plans to quit the Government."
6. Prachanda called the Attorney General Raghav Lal Baidya and senior Cabinet colleagues early on May 4 to discuss the constitutionality and consequences of the President's intervention. There was speculation that the Maoists might move for the impeachment of the President. After finding that they would not have the required support for such a move in the Constituent Assembly, he decided to resign.
7. It remains to be seen whether his resignation is a purely tactical move to confront the other members of the ruling coalition with the danger of serious political instability if they did not support his sacking of the Army chief or was forced by his realizing that there was no way he could have his way against the Army chief. Both the Army chief and Prajwal, the Commander of the seventh division of the PLA, were reported to have ordered the two forces under their respective command to remain in a state of alert to prevent any disturbance of law and order.
8. The peace accord reached by the various political parties before last year’s election to the Constituent Assembly had provided for the rehabilitation and integration of the members of the PLA and other Maoist cadres, including members of the people’s courts set up by the Maoists during their days in the insurgency. After Prachanda assumed office in August last year as the Prime Minister, differences surfaced over the interpretation of this principle. The Maoists treated rehabilitation and integration as synonymous and insisted that the only of rehabilitating the 19,000 members of the PLA was by integrating them into the Army, barring those physically unfit or unwilling to serve in the Army.
9. The Army and other political parties were strongly opposed to this. They held that rehabilitation and integration were two different processes. According to them, rehabilitation meant enabling the Maoist cadres to be gainfully employed, but not necessarily in the Army. While they were prepared to consider the integration of small numbers of the PLA into the Army if they were found to be professionally suitable, they were not prepared to agree to the wholesale merger of the PLA into the Army. Such an action would have resulted in about one-fourth of the Army consisting of indoctrinated Maoists, with their number steadily increasing with fresh recruitment.
10. Prachanda also wanted that the Maoists, who held officer-equivalent ranks in the PLA, should be given appropriate ranks in the Army. Thus, he reportedly wanted PLA commander Nanda Kishor
Pun “Pasang” to be made a Major General and many others to get the rank of Brigadiers. He also reportedly wanted that there should be no new recruitment to the Army for some years.
11. Neil Horning, an American expert on the Maoist movement of Nepal, who is himself believed to be sympathetic to the Maoists, wrote as follows is his blogspot on the controversy between rehabilitation and integration: “The mainstream parties, as well as the elite in the army, view army integration in an apocalyptic light. While integrating the PLA into the NA was agreed upon time and again in the course of peace negotiations, the Non-Maoist parties made their agreements under the assumption that the Maoists could not possibly win electoral victory, and would not be in charge of implementing the integration. They counted on returning to the long standing Nepali political habit of agreeing to a demand in negotiation and then reneging on it later when the opponent is not in a position to make a challenge. They are trying to do the same now by continually insisting that Maoists combatants be “rehabilitated” rather than integrated, but it is they who have lost their bargaining position. Yet, why can’t they let it happen in the first place? The Maoists don’t have more than 20,000 troops to integrate into the more than 90,000 currently in the Army. This would hardly make the army into a force at the Maoists’ beck and call. It’s not that the army would become the private force of the Maoists, but that it would cease to be a check on them. With at least 25 per cent of troops and officers being former Maoist partisans, the possibility of a reactionary coup becomes impossible. The troops needed to suppress the public would simply turn their weapons on the command. Therefore, the army would cease to be a check and social change would continue unabated.”
12. According to Kanak Mani Dixit, the Nepali political analyst, “at their large National Council conclave in the Kharipati outskirts of Kathmandu in late November 2008, the Maoists came to the conclusion that they were in government but did not control the state, for which the Nepal Army and the independent judiciary were found to be prime obstacles. It decided that the (Maoist) cantonments should not be disbanded until the new constitution is written.”
13. When the Maoists found that whenever they had a dispute with the Army over issues such as the ban on new recruitment which was disregarded by the COAS the judiciary was taking up a position, which was unfavourable to the Maoists, they also started talking of integrating the members of the former Maoists’ people’s courts into the judiciary.
14. The COAS went ahead with the new recruitment recruiting nearly 2800 persons to fill up existing vacancies in the Army and the PLA retaliated by making fresh recruitment to the PLA in violation of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement. Thus, Nepal under Prachanda as the Prime Minister saw the spectre of two parallel armies---- the state Army and the non-State PLA--- strengthening and preparing themselves for a future confrontation should the Maoists’ demand for total integration be turned down.
15. While the Chinese closely monitored the situation by interacting intensely with various political formations, India and the US reportedly cautioned Prachanda against a confrontation on this issue. Prachanda increasingly became unresponsive to the advice for moderation from India and the US and insisted on having his way.
16. It is not clear why Prachanda decided to force a confrontation with the COAS at this stage instead of waiting till September, when Gen.Katawal is due to superannuate. One possible reason for his hasty action is that Gen.Khadka, who is believed to be not opposed to the integration of the PLA into the Army, is due to superannuate in June. It is suspected that Prachanda wanted to make him the chief before his superannuation and give him a two-year tenure so that the integration of the PLA into the Army could be brought about without any further opposition from the Army. His plans were thwarted by the President.
17. What could happen now? The following are the possible scenarios:
· SCENARIO 1: A serious political crisis with violent demonstrations by the Maoists which results in one more compromise. The Chinese will try their best to see that the Maoist-led Government, which has effectively put down Tibetan activity in Nepali territory, remains in power.
· SCENARIO 2: A violent confrontation between the PLA and the Army leading to an army coup.
· SCENARIO 3: A new coalition without the Maoists, which will be unstable.
18. In my article dated April 28,2008, titled “Prachanda: From A Radical Maoist to A Lovable Mascot” available at http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/papers27/paper2684.html I wrote as follows: “Taking advantage of the popular uprising of 2006 against the widely-detested King, the Maoists entered the coalition Government, which replaced a Government of royalist stooges, and started dictating terms as to how the integration should take place. They themselves became one of the policy-makers to decide on the process of integration. The integration is taking place not on the basis of negotiations between the Government and the insurgents, but in response to diktats issued from time to time by the Maoists in return for their continued participation in the Government. They are all the time giving out discreet threats that if their diktats are rejected, they might quit the Government and revert to insurgency. The holding of the elections to the Constituent Assembly before the ground rules for integration were agreed upon and the victory of the Maoists in the elections----significant, but not spectacular as projected by sections of the media--- have led to a situation where the Maoists will be at the head of a Government which will take crucial decisions on the post-facto legitimisation of the terrorist infrastructure raised by the Maoists and on the ground rules for the integration of their ideologically motivated and well-trained cadres. The moment the Maoists assume leadership in the seats of power and decision-making, will it be possible to resist their demands? If the integration of over 3000 ideologically indoctrinated cadres of the insurgent army into the Nepal Army comes about, we will have to the west of us an army ideologically motivated by jihadi doctrines and to the east of us an army ideologically motivated by Marxism,
Leninism and Mao's Thoughts. There are two possible scenarios--- these fears turn out to be baseless and Prachanda turns out to be a genuine democrat and a genuine friend of India or Prachanda after the elections turns out to be different from Prachanda before the elections and takes Nepal on a road, which would be detrimental to our national interests. While hoping for the first scenario, we must be prepared for the second. “
19. In a subsequent article dated August 9, 2008, titled “RISE OF MAOISTS IN NEPAL: IMPLICATIONS FOR INDIA” available at http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/papers29/paper2802.html I wrote as follows: “Addressing the Nepal Council of World Affairs at Kathmandu on August 5, 2008, the Chinese Ambassador to Nepal Zheng Xianglin said: "Nepal is situated in a favorable geographical position in South Asia, and is a passage linking China and South Asia." That is the reason for the Chinese interest in Nepal----as a passage to South Asia and as an instrument for strengthening the Chinese presence in South Asia. China has a Look South policy to counter our Look East policy. As we try to move Eastwards to cultivate the countries of South-East Asia, it is trying to move southwards to outflank us. China is not a South Asian power, but it already has a growing South Asian strategic presence----- in Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. It is hoping to acquire a similar presence in Nepal with the co-operation of a Maoist-dominated Government.”
20. China would try its best to see that the Maoists stay in power. Their continuance in power in Kathmandu is important for stability in Tibet. In the past, we had supported the Maoists thinking that Prachanda would take a neutral line between India and China. These hopes are elusive. Should we facilitate the Chinese designs in Nepal by bringing about a political compromise which would enable the Maoists to continue in power or has the time come to work for a non-Maoist alternative? This requires serious examination in our policy-making circles. (4-5-2009)
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical studies, Chennai. He is also associated with the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )
Monday, May 4, 2009
Sunday, May 3, 2009
SUSPECTED INDIAN MONEY IN FOREIGN BANK ACCOUNTS
B.RAMAN
During the current election campaign, there has been a debate initiated by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on the action taken or not taken to identify the secret overseas bank accounts of Indian nationals and to bring the money back for use in our development projects. The BJP and the Congress (I) have been accusing each other of inaction in this regard.
2. The banking secrecy laws of countries such as Switzerland protect the secrecy of only the accounts of individual account-holders. Nations do not enjoy the protection of secrecy. Thus, while the Swiss Federal Government in Berne protects the secrecy of individual accounts, it has been publishing every year since the 1980s the total value of the deposits held in Swiss banks by residents of different countries.
3. The Government of India became aware of this in the 1980s when a Sindhi nationalist organization of Pakistan got hold of this annual statement, made an analysis of the deposits held by residents in Pakistan and came out with serious allegations against some Pakistani political leaders and military officers. Since then at least till I was in service in 1994, the Government of India was getting a copy of this annual statement giving the total value of the deposits held in Swiss banks by residents in India. The figure, however, did not include the value of the deposits held in Swiss banks by Indians residing abroad. It is my recollection that the total value of the deposits from India used to be much less than that from Pakistan. More money from Pakistan was flowing to secret Swiss bank accounts than from India.
4. The information that the equivalent of billions of rupees was held by residents in India in secret accounts abroad is, therefore, not a secret. What needed to be found out was the identities of the account holders and the modus operandi by which they were sending the money to the secret accounts. Since the Swiss laws protected individuals unless there was strong evidence that the deposits came from criminal proceeds, successive Governments in New Delhi could not make much progress in identifying these individuals.
5.In India, the collection of financial intelligence and the use of such intelligence to deal with organised crime groups, money-launderers and holders of secret overseas accounts were essentially handled by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI), the Enforcement Directorate and the Central Narcotics Control Bureau. There was no mechanism for a co-ordinated assessment of their intelligence, identification of gaps in their coverage and initiation of steps to fill such gaps.
6.This lacuna was sought to be filled up by P.Chidambaram, when he was the Finance Minister under Deva Gowda and Inder Gujral between 1996 and 1998 and his Revenue Secretary, M.R.Sivaraman, through the setting-up of a re-constituted Economic Intelligence Council chaired by the Finance Minister. During its first meeting on July 22,1997, it was reported to have set up a core group to monitor trends in financial crime and keep the Council informed. The Economic Intelligence Council, which used to act as a Joint Intelligence Committee to analyse and assess economic and financial intelligence and initiate follow-up action on it, used to meet regularly under the chairmanship of Chidambaram and Sivaraman was initiating the required follow-up action.
7. The Special Task Force for the revamping of the Intelligence Apparatus, under Shri G.C.Saxena, former head of the Research & Analysis Wing (R&AW),which was set up by the Government of the then Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee in 2000, found to its surprise that after Chidambaram and Sivaraman left office in 1998 the EIC and its core group had not met regularly and that many of the senior functionaries of the Government were not even aware of their being set up by Chidambaram. In its report, the Task Force included a separate chapter on economic and financial intelligence and made recommendations for revamping the machinery for the collection, analysis and assessment of the required intelligence.
8. Since the report of the Task Force has not been declassified and made available to the public, the public is not aware of the state of our financial intelligence set-up in 2000, the recommendations made by the Task Force to improve it and the action taken on them.
9. The attached annexure gives my observations on the state of financial intelligence in India as extracted from my book titled “Intelligence: Past, Present & Future” published by the Lancer Publishers of New Delhi in 2001. There have been some changes and improvements since then such as India becoming a member of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) etc. (3-5-2009)
( The writer is Additional Secretary (retired), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )
ANNEXURE
(Extracts from my book titled “Intelligence: Past, Present & Future” published in 2001 by the Lancer Publishers of New Delhi (www.lancerpublishers.com )
In the World Money-Laundering Chart prepared by the Clinton Administration, India was graded as a medium-high priority country, in a sliding scale of six grades ---high, medium high, medium, low medium, low and no priority. Amongst countries graded high were the USA itself, the UK, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, the Cayman Islands, Hong Kong, Singapore and Thailand.
In a report to the Congress on money-laundering in India during 1994, it said: "The Government of India continues to be effective in its effort to reduce currency flows through the underground hawala system, but drug-traffickers, arms smugglers and other criminals continue to use this traditional remittance system to return illicit proceeds to India from all parts of the world, including the US. A new policy on imports has not eliminated the flow of gold into India, a
long-time venue for money-laundering."
It added: " Invoice manipulation is also used to conceal money movements, usually through front companies based in Hong Kong, Singapore or the Middle East. Indian criminals evade their Government's currency restrictions by opening accounts in Nepalese banks and transferring the money into accounts in India or transporting monetary instruments back to India. Some Indian traffickers are also known to have channeled money to Nepal and transferred it to Hong
Kong, Singapore and Switzerland. India has criminalised money-laundering and adopted other controls, but, as the foregoing indicates, enforcement is largely ineffective."
However, the final report on the subject for 2000 prepared by the Clinton Administration and released after Mr.Bush Jr assumed office on January 20,2001, said as follows: "The hawala (or hundi) alternative (or parallel) remittance system continues to be a key factor in money laundering and other financial crimes committed in and associated with South Asia. It is closely related to the "black" or "off the books" economies in the region. The size of the underground economies in South Asia are estimated to be 50 to 100 percent the size of the "white" or "documented" economies.
"Hawala operates on trust and connections ("trust" is one of several meanings associated with the word "hawala"). Customers trust hawala "bankers" or "operators" (known as hawaladars) who use their connections to facilitate money movement worldwide. Hawala transfers take place with little, if any, paper trail; and, when records are kept, they are usually kept in code. Contrary to various media reports, hawala is an ancient system; it was the primary money transfer mechanism used in South Asia prior to the introduction of Western banking. Today, hawala continues to be used for many legitimate transfers for cultural and financial reasons; and it also often operates in conjunction with Western banking operations.
"Dubai, India and Pakistan form a "hawala triangle" responsible for significant international money laundering activities that go far beyond South Asia. While interdiction of non-bank money laundering systems, such as hawala, is difficult enough in itself, this difficulty is sometimes compounded by ineffective money laundering countermeasures in Dubai and the other Emirates."
It further added: "Money laundering is a growing concern in India because of its large population and emergence as a regional financial center. The hawala (or hundi) alternative remittance system reportedly is used by criminals to launder money generated from drug trafficking, alien smuggling, corruption, and financial fraud.
"The Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act (NDPSA) of 1985,amended in 1988, calls for the tracing and forfeiture of assets that have been acquired through narcotics trafficking, and prohibits attempts to transfer and conceal those assets. This legislation seems to have the effect of criminalizing drug money laundering. The Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973, Chapter XXXIV (sections 451-459) establishes India's basic framework for confiscating the proceeds of
crime. The Criminal Law Amendment Ordinance (CLAO) of 1944 allows for the attachment and forfeiture of money or property obtained through bribery, corruption, criminal breach of trust, or theft, and of assets that are disproportionate to an individual's known sources of income.
"The Indian Parliament continues to consider draft legislation that would explicitly criminalize money laundering, impose reporting requirements on financial institutions and intermediaries, and provide for seizure and confiscation of assets related to the proceeds of crime. The Bill was referred to a select committee of the upper House of India's Parliament, which has made certain recommendations. These are currently under review by the executive branch.
"The GOI does not have a financial intelligence unit (FIU); and legislation currently before the Parliament does not call for the establishment of an FIU. The Central Economic Intelligence Unit (CEIB) is the Government of India's (GOI) lead organization for fighting financial crime. Other organizations such as the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence, Customs and Excise, and the Reserve Bank of India also play a role in the enforcement of India's anti-money laundering laws.
"India is a party to the UN 1988 Drug Convention, and is a member of the Asia/Pacific Group on Money Laundering. The GOI should adopt comprehensive anti-money laundering legislation, and create an FIU that would analyze suspicious transactions reports and cooperate with FIUs from other countries."
While India is not a member of the FATF, it is a member of the Asia/Pacific Group on Money Laundering (APG), which has its own Secretariat. Its objective is to ensure the
adoption, implementation and enforcement of internationally accepted anti-money laundering standards as set out in the recommendations of the FATF. The other members are: Australia, Bangladesh, Chinese Taipei, Fiji Islands, Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Pakistan, Republic of Indonesia, Republic of Korea, Republic of the Philippines, Samoa, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand, USA and Vanuatu.The following attend its meetings as observers: Brunei, Canada, Cook Islands, Macau, China, Nepal, Burma, Vietnam, the ASEAN Secretariat, the Asian Development Bank, the Commonwealth Secretariat, the Egmont Group of Financial Intelligence Units of the World, the FATF Secretariat, the International Development Law Institute, the IMF, the Interpol, the Offshore Group of Banking Supervisors, the South Pacific Forum Secretariat, the UN Office of Drug Control and Crime Prevention, the World Bank and the World Customs Organization.
In March, 2000, the APG started a project for establishing a regional Financial Intelligence Unit, which would initially cover Fiji, Cook Islands, Vanuatu and Samoa. The Cook Islands, Vanuatu and Samoa have already set up their own FIUs. Fiji was in the process of doing so.
In India, the collection of financial intelligence and the use of such intelligence to deal with organised crime groups are essentially handled by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI), the Enforcement Directorate and the Central Narcotics Control Bureau. There was no mechanism for a co-ordinated assessment of their intelligence, identification of gaps in their coverage and initiation of steps to fill such gaps.
This lacuna was to be filled through the setting-up of a re-constituted Economic Intelligence Council chaired by the Finance Minister. During its first meeting on July 22,1997, it was reported to have set up a core group to monitor trends in financial crime and keep the Council informed.
The fight against money-laundering in India is complicated by the following factors:
·
The politician-criminal nexus.
·
The lack of effective control over contributions to political parties and election expenses. This enables criminal elements to use their contributions to the political process as a safe channel for money-laundering and for gaining political influence to incapacitate the intelligence and investigating agencies so that they cannot effectively act against them.
·
The flourishing Hawala Triangle constituted by India, Pakistan and Dubai. While the search for an entente cordiale between the States of India and Pakistan has proved elusive since 1947, there is an entente cordiale between the criminal worlds of the two countries, interacting with each other either directly or through the intermediary of their counterparts in Dubai. No study in depth has been made of this entente cordiale or, if it has been, the public has not been told of its conclusions.
There is thus a lack of the required political will to deal with this problem in an effective manner by strengthening the capabilities of the intelligence and investigating agencies and letting them function without any political interference. There has also been a lack of interest on the part of our legislators in this subject, which has a vital bearing on our national security, economic well-being and fight against terrorism and Pakistan's proxy war.
Since the NSC Secretariat is designed to function as the nerve-centre overseeing all aspects relating to our national security, it should have an oversight role in respect of the collection, assessment and utilisation of financial intelligence and evaluation of the performance of the agencies responsible for these tasks too.
During the current election campaign, there has been a debate initiated by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on the action taken or not taken to identify the secret overseas bank accounts of Indian nationals and to bring the money back for use in our development projects. The BJP and the Congress (I) have been accusing each other of inaction in this regard.
2. The banking secrecy laws of countries such as Switzerland protect the secrecy of only the accounts of individual account-holders. Nations do not enjoy the protection of secrecy. Thus, while the Swiss Federal Government in Berne protects the secrecy of individual accounts, it has been publishing every year since the 1980s the total value of the deposits held in Swiss banks by residents of different countries.
3. The Government of India became aware of this in the 1980s when a Sindhi nationalist organization of Pakistan got hold of this annual statement, made an analysis of the deposits held by residents in Pakistan and came out with serious allegations against some Pakistani political leaders and military officers. Since then at least till I was in service in 1994, the Government of India was getting a copy of this annual statement giving the total value of the deposits held in Swiss banks by residents in India. The figure, however, did not include the value of the deposits held in Swiss banks by Indians residing abroad. It is my recollection that the total value of the deposits from India used to be much less than that from Pakistan. More money from Pakistan was flowing to secret Swiss bank accounts than from India.
4. The information that the equivalent of billions of rupees was held by residents in India in secret accounts abroad is, therefore, not a secret. What needed to be found out was the identities of the account holders and the modus operandi by which they were sending the money to the secret accounts. Since the Swiss laws protected individuals unless there was strong evidence that the deposits came from criminal proceeds, successive Governments in New Delhi could not make much progress in identifying these individuals.
5.In India, the collection of financial intelligence and the use of such intelligence to deal with organised crime groups, money-launderers and holders of secret overseas accounts were essentially handled by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI), the Enforcement Directorate and the Central Narcotics Control Bureau. There was no mechanism for a co-ordinated assessment of their intelligence, identification of gaps in their coverage and initiation of steps to fill such gaps.
6.This lacuna was sought to be filled up by P.Chidambaram, when he was the Finance Minister under Deva Gowda and Inder Gujral between 1996 and 1998 and his Revenue Secretary, M.R.Sivaraman, through the setting-up of a re-constituted Economic Intelligence Council chaired by the Finance Minister. During its first meeting on July 22,1997, it was reported to have set up a core group to monitor trends in financial crime and keep the Council informed. The Economic Intelligence Council, which used to act as a Joint Intelligence Committee to analyse and assess economic and financial intelligence and initiate follow-up action on it, used to meet regularly under the chairmanship of Chidambaram and Sivaraman was initiating the required follow-up action.
7. The Special Task Force for the revamping of the Intelligence Apparatus, under Shri G.C.Saxena, former head of the Research & Analysis Wing (R&AW),which was set up by the Government of the then Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee in 2000, found to its surprise that after Chidambaram and Sivaraman left office in 1998 the EIC and its core group had not met regularly and that many of the senior functionaries of the Government were not even aware of their being set up by Chidambaram. In its report, the Task Force included a separate chapter on economic and financial intelligence and made recommendations for revamping the machinery for the collection, analysis and assessment of the required intelligence.
8. Since the report of the Task Force has not been declassified and made available to the public, the public is not aware of the state of our financial intelligence set-up in 2000, the recommendations made by the Task Force to improve it and the action taken on them.
9. The attached annexure gives my observations on the state of financial intelligence in India as extracted from my book titled “Intelligence: Past, Present & Future” published by the Lancer Publishers of New Delhi in 2001. There have been some changes and improvements since then such as India becoming a member of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) etc. (3-5-2009)
( The writer is Additional Secretary (retired), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )
ANNEXURE
(Extracts from my book titled “Intelligence: Past, Present & Future” published in 2001 by the Lancer Publishers of New Delhi (www.lancerpublishers.com )
In the World Money-Laundering Chart prepared by the Clinton Administration, India was graded as a medium-high priority country, in a sliding scale of six grades ---high, medium high, medium, low medium, low and no priority. Amongst countries graded high were the USA itself, the UK, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, the Cayman Islands, Hong Kong, Singapore and Thailand.
In a report to the Congress on money-laundering in India during 1994, it said: "The Government of India continues to be effective in its effort to reduce currency flows through the underground hawala system, but drug-traffickers, arms smugglers and other criminals continue to use this traditional remittance system to return illicit proceeds to India from all parts of the world, including the US. A new policy on imports has not eliminated the flow of gold into India, a
long-time venue for money-laundering."
It added: " Invoice manipulation is also used to conceal money movements, usually through front companies based in Hong Kong, Singapore or the Middle East. Indian criminals evade their Government's currency restrictions by opening accounts in Nepalese banks and transferring the money into accounts in India or transporting monetary instruments back to India. Some Indian traffickers are also known to have channeled money to Nepal and transferred it to Hong
Kong, Singapore and Switzerland. India has criminalised money-laundering and adopted other controls, but, as the foregoing indicates, enforcement is largely ineffective."
However, the final report on the subject for 2000 prepared by the Clinton Administration and released after Mr.Bush Jr assumed office on January 20,2001, said as follows: "The hawala (or hundi) alternative (or parallel) remittance system continues to be a key factor in money laundering and other financial crimes committed in and associated with South Asia. It is closely related to the "black" or "off the books" economies in the region. The size of the underground economies in South Asia are estimated to be 50 to 100 percent the size of the "white" or "documented" economies.
"Hawala operates on trust and connections ("trust" is one of several meanings associated with the word "hawala"). Customers trust hawala "bankers" or "operators" (known as hawaladars) who use their connections to facilitate money movement worldwide. Hawala transfers take place with little, if any, paper trail; and, when records are kept, they are usually kept in code. Contrary to various media reports, hawala is an ancient system; it was the primary money transfer mechanism used in South Asia prior to the introduction of Western banking. Today, hawala continues to be used for many legitimate transfers for cultural and financial reasons; and it also often operates in conjunction with Western banking operations.
"Dubai, India and Pakistan form a "hawala triangle" responsible for significant international money laundering activities that go far beyond South Asia. While interdiction of non-bank money laundering systems, such as hawala, is difficult enough in itself, this difficulty is sometimes compounded by ineffective money laundering countermeasures in Dubai and the other Emirates."
It further added: "Money laundering is a growing concern in India because of its large population and emergence as a regional financial center. The hawala (or hundi) alternative remittance system reportedly is used by criminals to launder money generated from drug trafficking, alien smuggling, corruption, and financial fraud.
"The Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act (NDPSA) of 1985,amended in 1988, calls for the tracing and forfeiture of assets that have been acquired through narcotics trafficking, and prohibits attempts to transfer and conceal those assets. This legislation seems to have the effect of criminalizing drug money laundering. The Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973, Chapter XXXIV (sections 451-459) establishes India's basic framework for confiscating the proceeds of
crime. The Criminal Law Amendment Ordinance (CLAO) of 1944 allows for the attachment and forfeiture of money or property obtained through bribery, corruption, criminal breach of trust, or theft, and of assets that are disproportionate to an individual's known sources of income.
"The Indian Parliament continues to consider draft legislation that would explicitly criminalize money laundering, impose reporting requirements on financial institutions and intermediaries, and provide for seizure and confiscation of assets related to the proceeds of crime. The Bill was referred to a select committee of the upper House of India's Parliament, which has made certain recommendations. These are currently under review by the executive branch.
"The GOI does not have a financial intelligence unit (FIU); and legislation currently before the Parliament does not call for the establishment of an FIU. The Central Economic Intelligence Unit (CEIB) is the Government of India's (GOI) lead organization for fighting financial crime. Other organizations such as the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence, Customs and Excise, and the Reserve Bank of India also play a role in the enforcement of India's anti-money laundering laws.
"India is a party to the UN 1988 Drug Convention, and is a member of the Asia/Pacific Group on Money Laundering. The GOI should adopt comprehensive anti-money laundering legislation, and create an FIU that would analyze suspicious transactions reports and cooperate with FIUs from other countries."
While India is not a member of the FATF, it is a member of the Asia/Pacific Group on Money Laundering (APG), which has its own Secretariat. Its objective is to ensure the
adoption, implementation and enforcement of internationally accepted anti-money laundering standards as set out in the recommendations of the FATF. The other members are: Australia, Bangladesh, Chinese Taipei, Fiji Islands, Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Pakistan, Republic of Indonesia, Republic of Korea, Republic of the Philippines, Samoa, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand, USA and Vanuatu.The following attend its meetings as observers: Brunei, Canada, Cook Islands, Macau, China, Nepal, Burma, Vietnam, the ASEAN Secretariat, the Asian Development Bank, the Commonwealth Secretariat, the Egmont Group of Financial Intelligence Units of the World, the FATF Secretariat, the International Development Law Institute, the IMF, the Interpol, the Offshore Group of Banking Supervisors, the South Pacific Forum Secretariat, the UN Office of Drug Control and Crime Prevention, the World Bank and the World Customs Organization.
In March, 2000, the APG started a project for establishing a regional Financial Intelligence Unit, which would initially cover Fiji, Cook Islands, Vanuatu and Samoa. The Cook Islands, Vanuatu and Samoa have already set up their own FIUs. Fiji was in the process of doing so.
In India, the collection of financial intelligence and the use of such intelligence to deal with organised crime groups are essentially handled by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI), the Enforcement Directorate and the Central Narcotics Control Bureau. There was no mechanism for a co-ordinated assessment of their intelligence, identification of gaps in their coverage and initiation of steps to fill such gaps.
This lacuna was to be filled through the setting-up of a re-constituted Economic Intelligence Council chaired by the Finance Minister. During its first meeting on July 22,1997, it was reported to have set up a core group to monitor trends in financial crime and keep the Council informed.
The fight against money-laundering in India is complicated by the following factors:
·
The politician-criminal nexus.
·
The lack of effective control over contributions to political parties and election expenses. This enables criminal elements to use their contributions to the political process as a safe channel for money-laundering and for gaining political influence to incapacitate the intelligence and investigating agencies so that they cannot effectively act against them.
·
The flourishing Hawala Triangle constituted by India, Pakistan and Dubai. While the search for an entente cordiale between the States of India and Pakistan has proved elusive since 1947, there is an entente cordiale between the criminal worlds of the two countries, interacting with each other either directly or through the intermediary of their counterparts in Dubai. No study in depth has been made of this entente cordiale or, if it has been, the public has not been told of its conclusions.
There is thus a lack of the required political will to deal with this problem in an effective manner by strengthening the capabilities of the intelligence and investigating agencies and letting them function without any political interference. There has also been a lack of interest on the part of our legislators in this subject, which has a vital bearing on our national security, economic well-being and fight against terrorism and Pakistan's proxy war.
Since the NSC Secretariat is designed to function as the nerve-centre overseeing all aspects relating to our national security, it should have an oversight role in respect of the collection, assessment and utilisation of financial intelligence and evaluation of the performance of the agencies responsible for these tasks too.
Friday, May 1, 2009
CAN THERE BE A TERRORIST-CAUSED CHERNOBYL?
INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM MONITOR---PAPER NO.521
B.RAMAN
Most of the writings and debates on possible weapons of mass destruction (WMD) threats arising from Al Qaeda, the Taliban and other jihadi organisations have been focussing on the possible danger as a result of the terrorists getting hold of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal. The Pakistanis themselves have been dismissing talk of such a danger as unwarranted and asserting that the physical security of their nuclear arsenal is so tight that no terrorist can get hold of it. The Americans too---at least outwardly---give the impression of being satisfied with the physical security measures taken by Pakistan.
2.The writings and debates are too narrowly focussed on the physical security of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal and on the danger of Al Qaeda benefiting from the expertise of sympathetic Pakistani nuclear scientists----serving and retired. While this aspect should be of equal concern to the US and India, there are other aspects, which should be of greater concern to India and other regional countries such as China, Iran, Afghanistan and the Central Asian Republics (CARs) than to the US and the rest of the Western world.
3.The danger of the terrorists getting hold of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal will arise only if the terrorists capture power in Pakistan after defeating the Army. Despite the recent deterioration in the situation in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) as a result of the increase in the activities of the Pakistani Taliban, the danger of their defeating the Army and capturing power seems low at present.The Taliban has a capability for making the entire Pashtun tribal belt in the North-West Frontier Province and in the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) ungovernable and totally under its Wahabi influence and political writ. An embryonic Islamic Caliphate in thePashtun belt on both sides of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border is a worrisome possibility.It also has the capability for organising spectacular acts of suicide and non-suicide terrorism in the non-Pashtun areas of Pakistan, including in Islamabad, Rawalpindi,Karachi and Lahore, as it has already demonstrated on many occasions.
4. But it does not have the capability to defeat the Pakistan Army in the non-Pashtun areas and capture power in Islamabad.The Pakistan Army is not like the Afghan Army, which on its own cannot resist the Taliban Army. The Afghan Army of the 1990s, consisting largely of the Mujahideen trained to figth against the Soviet troops in the 1980s,could not resist the capture of Kabul by the Taliban in September,1996. The post-9/11 Afghan National Army (ANA) would not be able to resist on its own a Taliban advance into Kabul should the NATO forces be withdrawn from Afghanistan.
5. The Pakistan Army is different. It is strong, well-trained,well-equipped and well-motivated. It might have closed its eyes to the depredations of the Taliban in the Pashtun belt as it had done in the past to the depredations of various tribal extremist groups in the areas adjoining the Afghan border so long as they did not threaten the unity and territorial integrity of Pakistan and were prepared to assist the Army against India, when necessary as in 1947-48 and 1965.Ever since Pakistan became independent in 1947, no Government in Pakistan has had effective political and military control over the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). Successive Pakistani Governments chose to avoid a confrontation with the tribal extremistsin the FATA.
6.If the Pakistan Army today does not show the same concern as the rest of the world over the Taliban running amok in the FATA and in the Malakand Division of the NWFP, it should not be a matter for surprise.If, from time to time, it makes a pretense of acting against the Taliban it is more out of concern over the alarming reactions in the West than due to fears over any danger of their overrunning Pakistan.
7.If the Pakistani Taliban tries to overrun the rest of Pakistan and to capture power in Islamabad as its Afghan counterpart did in Kabul in 1996 and is trying to do so again now, the Pakistan Army will ruthlessly crush it. In view of this I would rate as low at present the danger of the Taliban, with or without the help of Al Qaeda,capturing power in Islamabad and taking control of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal.
8. I would divide Pakistan's nuclear capability into three groups and grade the likely threats to them from the Taliban and other jihadi groups as follows:
(a). The nuclear arsenal consisting of its stockpile of nuclear weapons: Their physical security is very tight with American inputs into strengthening it and with US monitoring of the state of physical security. Threat low unless and until the Taliban captures power in Islamabad.
(b).Sensitive nuclear establishments such as the Kahuta uranium enrichment plant and the Khusab plutonium facility. Their physical security is equally tight, but there are no American inputs and monitoring. Threat low to medium.
(c). Other nuclear establishments such as the Chashma nuclear power station constructed with Chinese assistance and the one at Karachi and the various sites in the NWFP and Balochistan where nuclear waste is stored: Their physical security has not received much attention either from the Pakistanis themselves or from the Americans.Moreover, since the Chinese are associated with some of them, they would not like the US to have any role in their physical security.Threat medium to high.
9. The greatest danger in my view is the Taliban and other jihadi groups attacking one of these less guarded facilities falling in the third group. They have the capability to target them in order to create panic in the Pakistani population and demonstrate their prowess in the non-Pashtun areas of Pakistan.
10. India and other regional countries should have strong reasons to be worried over this possibility because the environmental and health hazards arising from a terrorist attack on these facilities would affect not only Pakistan, but also its neighbours. A terrorist-caused Chernobyl is a danger of greater possibility than the terrorists capturing the nuclear arsenal.
11. It is in India's interest to nudge the US into taking more interest in the physical security of these establishments in order to prevent such an event. The present counter-terrorism co-operation between India and the US is more tactical than strategic in the form of exchange of intelligence regarding plans for a terrorist strike and extension of mutual legal assistance in the investigation of terrorist attacks as in the case of the Mumbai terrorist attack of November 26,2008. The only strategic co-operation is in respect of cyber and maritime security. To one's knowledge, there is very little interaction of a substantial nature relating to WMD security as a result of developments in Pakistan.
12. The Barack Obama Administration and whatever Government comes to power in New Delhi after the present elections should realise that the security and welfare of their people are closely tied to developments in Pakistan. There is a need for more intense and sustained interactions on this subject between the political leaderships and the professional experts of the two countries than has been the case at present. Among the various steps that could be considered are the setting-up of a hotline between the political establishments and the intelligence chiefs of the two countries and a joint monitoring group to monitor closely the developments in Pakistan.
13. At present, India's focus has been on making the US co-operate against the activities of the anti-India terrorist groups and their infrastructure in Pakistani territory. This should continue, but this should not be the only subject of co-operation between the two countries. It is necessary to expand it to cover likely threats to Pakistan's nuclear establishments. We should not allow the development of such wider interactions to be inhibited by complexes arising from past unpleasant experiences with the US. (1-5-2009)
( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat,Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical studies, Chennai. E- mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )
B.RAMAN
Most of the writings and debates on possible weapons of mass destruction (WMD) threats arising from Al Qaeda, the Taliban and other jihadi organisations have been focussing on the possible danger as a result of the terrorists getting hold of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal. The Pakistanis themselves have been dismissing talk of such a danger as unwarranted and asserting that the physical security of their nuclear arsenal is so tight that no terrorist can get hold of it. The Americans too---at least outwardly---give the impression of being satisfied with the physical security measures taken by Pakistan.
2.The writings and debates are too narrowly focussed on the physical security of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal and on the danger of Al Qaeda benefiting from the expertise of sympathetic Pakistani nuclear scientists----serving and retired. While this aspect should be of equal concern to the US and India, there are other aspects, which should be of greater concern to India and other regional countries such as China, Iran, Afghanistan and the Central Asian Republics (CARs) than to the US and the rest of the Western world.
3.The danger of the terrorists getting hold of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal will arise only if the terrorists capture power in Pakistan after defeating the Army. Despite the recent deterioration in the situation in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) as a result of the increase in the activities of the Pakistani Taliban, the danger of their defeating the Army and capturing power seems low at present.The Taliban has a capability for making the entire Pashtun tribal belt in the North-West Frontier Province and in the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) ungovernable and totally under its Wahabi influence and political writ. An embryonic Islamic Caliphate in thePashtun belt on both sides of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border is a worrisome possibility.It also has the capability for organising spectacular acts of suicide and non-suicide terrorism in the non-Pashtun areas of Pakistan, including in Islamabad, Rawalpindi,Karachi and Lahore, as it has already demonstrated on many occasions.
4. But it does not have the capability to defeat the Pakistan Army in the non-Pashtun areas and capture power in Islamabad.The Pakistan Army is not like the Afghan Army, which on its own cannot resist the Taliban Army. The Afghan Army of the 1990s, consisting largely of the Mujahideen trained to figth against the Soviet troops in the 1980s,could not resist the capture of Kabul by the Taliban in September,1996. The post-9/11 Afghan National Army (ANA) would not be able to resist on its own a Taliban advance into Kabul should the NATO forces be withdrawn from Afghanistan.
5. The Pakistan Army is different. It is strong, well-trained,well-equipped and well-motivated. It might have closed its eyes to the depredations of the Taliban in the Pashtun belt as it had done in the past to the depredations of various tribal extremist groups in the areas adjoining the Afghan border so long as they did not threaten the unity and territorial integrity of Pakistan and were prepared to assist the Army against India, when necessary as in 1947-48 and 1965.Ever since Pakistan became independent in 1947, no Government in Pakistan has had effective political and military control over the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). Successive Pakistani Governments chose to avoid a confrontation with the tribal extremistsin the FATA.
6.If the Pakistan Army today does not show the same concern as the rest of the world over the Taliban running amok in the FATA and in the Malakand Division of the NWFP, it should not be a matter for surprise.If, from time to time, it makes a pretense of acting against the Taliban it is more out of concern over the alarming reactions in the West than due to fears over any danger of their overrunning Pakistan.
7.If the Pakistani Taliban tries to overrun the rest of Pakistan and to capture power in Islamabad as its Afghan counterpart did in Kabul in 1996 and is trying to do so again now, the Pakistan Army will ruthlessly crush it. In view of this I would rate as low at present the danger of the Taliban, with or without the help of Al Qaeda,capturing power in Islamabad and taking control of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal.
8. I would divide Pakistan's nuclear capability into three groups and grade the likely threats to them from the Taliban and other jihadi groups as follows:
(a). The nuclear arsenal consisting of its stockpile of nuclear weapons: Their physical security is very tight with American inputs into strengthening it and with US monitoring of the state of physical security. Threat low unless and until the Taliban captures power in Islamabad.
(b).Sensitive nuclear establishments such as the Kahuta uranium enrichment plant and the Khusab plutonium facility. Their physical security is equally tight, but there are no American inputs and monitoring. Threat low to medium.
(c). Other nuclear establishments such as the Chashma nuclear power station constructed with Chinese assistance and the one at Karachi and the various sites in the NWFP and Balochistan where nuclear waste is stored: Their physical security has not received much attention either from the Pakistanis themselves or from the Americans.Moreover, since the Chinese are associated with some of them, they would not like the US to have any role in their physical security.Threat medium to high.
9. The greatest danger in my view is the Taliban and other jihadi groups attacking one of these less guarded facilities falling in the third group. They have the capability to target them in order to create panic in the Pakistani population and demonstrate their prowess in the non-Pashtun areas of Pakistan.
10. India and other regional countries should have strong reasons to be worried over this possibility because the environmental and health hazards arising from a terrorist attack on these facilities would affect not only Pakistan, but also its neighbours. A terrorist-caused Chernobyl is a danger of greater possibility than the terrorists capturing the nuclear arsenal.
11. It is in India's interest to nudge the US into taking more interest in the physical security of these establishments in order to prevent such an event. The present counter-terrorism co-operation between India and the US is more tactical than strategic in the form of exchange of intelligence regarding plans for a terrorist strike and extension of mutual legal assistance in the investigation of terrorist attacks as in the case of the Mumbai terrorist attack of November 26,2008. The only strategic co-operation is in respect of cyber and maritime security. To one's knowledge, there is very little interaction of a substantial nature relating to WMD security as a result of developments in Pakistan.
12. The Barack Obama Administration and whatever Government comes to power in New Delhi after the present elections should realise that the security and welfare of their people are closely tied to developments in Pakistan. There is a need for more intense and sustained interactions on this subject between the political leaderships and the professional experts of the two countries than has been the case at present. Among the various steps that could be considered are the setting-up of a hotline between the political establishments and the intelligence chiefs of the two countries and a joint monitoring group to monitor closely the developments in Pakistan.
13. At present, India's focus has been on making the US co-operate against the activities of the anti-India terrorist groups and their infrastructure in Pakistani territory. This should continue, but this should not be the only subject of co-operation between the two countries. It is necessary to expand it to cover likely threats to Pakistan's nuclear establishments. We should not allow the development of such wider interactions to be inhibited by complexes arising from past unpleasant experiences with the US. (1-5-2009)
( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat,Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical studies, Chennai. E- mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )
Thursday, April 23, 2009
PAK TALIBAN: FROM A BUNCH OF SUICIDE BOMBERS TO A CONVENTIONAL ARMY
INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM MONITOR---PAPER NO.520
B.RAMAN
Like the Neo Taliban of Afghanistan, the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has evolved in less than a year from a bunch of suicide bombers to a conventional army capable of set-piece, stand and fight battles with the Pakistani Army and para-military forces. This conversion has been facilitated by the recruitment of a large number of retired Pashtun ex-servicemen living in the Pashtun tribal belt in the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and in the Malakand Division of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP). The Swat Valley and the Buner District, less than a hundred kms from Islamabad, which was occupied by the TTP earlier this week without any resistance from the local security forces, form part of the Malakand Division.
2. The agreement signed earlier this year by the coalition Government in the NWFP headed by the Awami National Party (ANP) with Sufi Mohammad of the Tehrik-e-Nifaz-a-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM), which is a constituent unit of the TTP, for the introduction of Sharia courts covers the entire Division, consisting of seven districts and not just Swat. Now that the agreement, despite strong criticism from abroad, has been got approved by Prime Minister Yousef Raza Gilani by the National Assembly and signed by President Asif Ali Zardari, the TNSM has lost no time in expanding its control to areas of the Malakand Division outside Swat. The occupation of the Buner district is the beginning. The occupation of the other districts will follow.
3. What should be of great concern to both India and the US is that the TTP, which was seen till recently as merely a collection of young suicide bombers with limited capability for territorial control and dominance through conventional forces, has started demonstrating that it has evolved into a conventional army, which can fight, occupy and administer territory. Thus, the TTP has evolved into a mirror image of the Neo Taliban. It shares with the Neo Taliban its objective of fighting for the defeat of the US-led NATO forces in Afghanistan. At the same time, it has its own independent agenda of expanding its territorial and ideological dominance to other areas of the Pashtun belt in the NWFP initially and then to non-Pashtun areas. The Neo Taliban does not approve of this independent agenda, but does not oppose it actively.
4. The Pakistan Army headed by Gen. Ashfaq Pervez Kayani, its Chief of the Army Staff (COAS), has shown neither the will nor the inclination to counter the advance of the TTP and then roll it back. It is not Kayani’s worries about what could happen on the Indian border, which have come in the way of a vigorous response to the TTP’s military advance. It is his worries over the continuing loyalty of the Pashtun soldiers, who constitute about 20 per cent of the Army, and of the Frontier Corps and the Frontier Constabulary, which are responsible for his anxiety and keenness to make peace with the TTP. The Frontier Corps and the Frontier Constabulary consist predominantly of Pashtun soldiers recruited in the FATA and the NWFP, officered by deputationists from the Army. These units have been showing less and less inclination to fight the TTP. They have been either avoiding a confrontation with the TNSM and the TTP or in some cases just deserting and surrendering to the TTP units.
5. According to reliable sources in the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), it is pressure from an alarmed Kayani to reach an accommodation with the TNSM and the TTP, which set in motion the negotiations with Sufi Mohammad and the developments that have followed. The Army and the para-military forces have already conceded territorial control to the TTP in the FATA and in the Malakand Division of the NWFP. By re-locating his forces and by reducing the Army’s presence in these areas already under the domination of the TNSM and the TTP, Kayani is reportedly hoping to prevent an ingress of the Pakistani Taliban into other parts of the NWFP and beyond.
6. The objectives of the TTP are presently limited to ideological unity of all Muslims in Pakistan based on the Sharia and the ethnic unity of all the Pashtuns in the Af-Pak region to wage a relentless jihad against the US-led NATO forces till they vacate Afghanistan. It has the motivation and intention to extend its ideological influence to non-Pashtun areas too, but is not yet in a position to establish territorial dominance in those areas. The Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) of Altaf Hussain apprehends that the TTP wants to set up a strong presence in Karachi, which has the largest Pashtun community in Pakistan after Peshawar.
7. Confronted with the worsening ground situation in the NWFP and with the danger of a possible collapse of the strategy of President Barack Obama even before it was taken up for implementation, the US is acting like a cat on a hot tin roof. There have been understandable cries of alarm not only from Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State, and Robert Gates, the Defence Secretary, but also from White House spokesmen. Cries of alarm and the preparation of yet another national intelligence estimate on Pakistan alone will not help. What is urgently required is a national intelligence estimate on US policy-making towards Pakistan, which has been leading it from one critical situation to another.
8. A study of the course of US policy-making would show how those Pakistani leaders who are toasted one day as frontline allies against extremism and terrorism turn out to be either accomplices of terrorism or capitulators to terrorists and extremists the next day. Pervez Musharraf belonged to the first category. Zardari belongs to the second. Despite nearly 60 years of close US interactions with the political and military leaderships in Pakistan, the US has not been able to acquire any enduring influence over policy-making circles in Islamabad. The US has very little to show in terms of changed policies in Islamabad in return for its unending pampering of successive regimes in Islamabad with the injection of more and more money and military equipment. The time has come to stop pampering, but there is a reluctance in the Obama Administration---as there was in the preceding Bush Administration--- to do so due to fears that a stoppage of US assistance and pampering may result in a failed state with the control of its nuclear arsenal falling into the hands of the jihadis.
9. Unfortunately, the situation in Pakistan has reached a stage where the outcome---ultimate jihadi control of the State and its nuclear arsenal--- may be the same whatever the US does----whether it continues pampering or stops doing so. It is a thankless dilemma. It is easy to criticize the US strategy or the lack of it, but difficult to suggest a viable alternative. The starting point of an alternative strategy has to be a cordon sanitaire around the areas already under the control of the TTP and a crash programme for the economic development of the Pashtun areas not yet controlled by the Taliban. Obama’s plans to spend billions of dollars in the areas of the FATA already under the control of Al Qaeda and the Taliban would produce no enduring results except to waste the US taxpayers’ money. This money should be better spent on immunizing those areas where the influence of the Taliban has not yet spread.
10. An equally important point of the strategy should be to step up the US Predator strikes in the FATA and to extend them to Swat in order to keep the Al Qaeda and Taliban elements running for cover all the time and make it difficult for them to plan new strikes and get them executed.
11. The third point of the strategy should be to restore to the Intelligence Bureau of Pakistan its original role of primacy as the internal intelligence and internal security agency of Pakistan. Over the years, the IB has been reduced to the position of a powerless appendage of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and its top ranks militarized through the induction of serving and retired military officers. This has to be reversed.
12. These are medium and long-term measures, which would take time to produce results. The questions requiring an immediate response is how to protect Pakistan from itself. How to stop the advance of the Taliban? How to confront it ideologically? For this purpose, the US needs objective allies in Pakistan. It has none so far. It has been working through opportunistic allies in the army and the political parties. They will accept all the money from the US, but will not produce results.
13. The objective allies have to be found in the Pashtun community. All the talk in Washington DC about their being good Taliban and bad Taliban is ridiculous. But there are good Pashtuns and bad Pashtuns. The US should urgently identify the good Pashtuns and encourage and help them to take up the fight against the Taliban ideologically. After the elections in Pakistan in March last year, I had pointed out that the ANP, which came to power in Peshawar, was a party of good Pashtuns and that the US should work through it, forgetting its past links with the Communists in Afghanistan and the erstwhile USSR. I was given to understand that a couple of ANP leaders did visit Washingtin DC, but beyond that nothing further was done. Now the ANP-led Government in Peshawar has conceded ideological victory to the TNSM in Swat. Despite this, the US should persist with cultivating it and other good Pashtun elements in parties such as the Pakhtoonkwa Milli Awami Party (PMAP) of Mehmood Khan Achakzai. They constitute the progressive component of the Pashtun community and they need to be strengthened and encouraged to counter the Taliban. The present US policy of depending on repeatedly failed elements in the Army and in the mainstream political parties is not working. The regional Pashtun forces have to be encouraged to take up the fight against the Taliban.
14. The survival of Al Qaeda in the FATA and the rise and spread of the TTP are due to support from large sections of the Pashtun community. The resistance to them has to come from the Pashtun community. It cannot come from the likes of Zardari, Gilani and Kayani. ( 24-4-2009)
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, the Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )
B.RAMAN
Like the Neo Taliban of Afghanistan, the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has evolved in less than a year from a bunch of suicide bombers to a conventional army capable of set-piece, stand and fight battles with the Pakistani Army and para-military forces. This conversion has been facilitated by the recruitment of a large number of retired Pashtun ex-servicemen living in the Pashtun tribal belt in the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and in the Malakand Division of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP). The Swat Valley and the Buner District, less than a hundred kms from Islamabad, which was occupied by the TTP earlier this week without any resistance from the local security forces, form part of the Malakand Division.
2. The agreement signed earlier this year by the coalition Government in the NWFP headed by the Awami National Party (ANP) with Sufi Mohammad of the Tehrik-e-Nifaz-a-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM), which is a constituent unit of the TTP, for the introduction of Sharia courts covers the entire Division, consisting of seven districts and not just Swat. Now that the agreement, despite strong criticism from abroad, has been got approved by Prime Minister Yousef Raza Gilani by the National Assembly and signed by President Asif Ali Zardari, the TNSM has lost no time in expanding its control to areas of the Malakand Division outside Swat. The occupation of the Buner district is the beginning. The occupation of the other districts will follow.
3. What should be of great concern to both India and the US is that the TTP, which was seen till recently as merely a collection of young suicide bombers with limited capability for territorial control and dominance through conventional forces, has started demonstrating that it has evolved into a conventional army, which can fight, occupy and administer territory. Thus, the TTP has evolved into a mirror image of the Neo Taliban. It shares with the Neo Taliban its objective of fighting for the defeat of the US-led NATO forces in Afghanistan. At the same time, it has its own independent agenda of expanding its territorial and ideological dominance to other areas of the Pashtun belt in the NWFP initially and then to non-Pashtun areas. The Neo Taliban does not approve of this independent agenda, but does not oppose it actively.
4. The Pakistan Army headed by Gen. Ashfaq Pervez Kayani, its Chief of the Army Staff (COAS), has shown neither the will nor the inclination to counter the advance of the TTP and then roll it back. It is not Kayani’s worries about what could happen on the Indian border, which have come in the way of a vigorous response to the TTP’s military advance. It is his worries over the continuing loyalty of the Pashtun soldiers, who constitute about 20 per cent of the Army, and of the Frontier Corps and the Frontier Constabulary, which are responsible for his anxiety and keenness to make peace with the TTP. The Frontier Corps and the Frontier Constabulary consist predominantly of Pashtun soldiers recruited in the FATA and the NWFP, officered by deputationists from the Army. These units have been showing less and less inclination to fight the TTP. They have been either avoiding a confrontation with the TNSM and the TTP or in some cases just deserting and surrendering to the TTP units.
5. According to reliable sources in the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), it is pressure from an alarmed Kayani to reach an accommodation with the TNSM and the TTP, which set in motion the negotiations with Sufi Mohammad and the developments that have followed. The Army and the para-military forces have already conceded territorial control to the TTP in the FATA and in the Malakand Division of the NWFP. By re-locating his forces and by reducing the Army’s presence in these areas already under the domination of the TNSM and the TTP, Kayani is reportedly hoping to prevent an ingress of the Pakistani Taliban into other parts of the NWFP and beyond.
6. The objectives of the TTP are presently limited to ideological unity of all Muslims in Pakistan based on the Sharia and the ethnic unity of all the Pashtuns in the Af-Pak region to wage a relentless jihad against the US-led NATO forces till they vacate Afghanistan. It has the motivation and intention to extend its ideological influence to non-Pashtun areas too, but is not yet in a position to establish territorial dominance in those areas. The Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) of Altaf Hussain apprehends that the TTP wants to set up a strong presence in Karachi, which has the largest Pashtun community in Pakistan after Peshawar.
7. Confronted with the worsening ground situation in the NWFP and with the danger of a possible collapse of the strategy of President Barack Obama even before it was taken up for implementation, the US is acting like a cat on a hot tin roof. There have been understandable cries of alarm not only from Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State, and Robert Gates, the Defence Secretary, but also from White House spokesmen. Cries of alarm and the preparation of yet another national intelligence estimate on Pakistan alone will not help. What is urgently required is a national intelligence estimate on US policy-making towards Pakistan, which has been leading it from one critical situation to another.
8. A study of the course of US policy-making would show how those Pakistani leaders who are toasted one day as frontline allies against extremism and terrorism turn out to be either accomplices of terrorism or capitulators to terrorists and extremists the next day. Pervez Musharraf belonged to the first category. Zardari belongs to the second. Despite nearly 60 years of close US interactions with the political and military leaderships in Pakistan, the US has not been able to acquire any enduring influence over policy-making circles in Islamabad. The US has very little to show in terms of changed policies in Islamabad in return for its unending pampering of successive regimes in Islamabad with the injection of more and more money and military equipment. The time has come to stop pampering, but there is a reluctance in the Obama Administration---as there was in the preceding Bush Administration--- to do so due to fears that a stoppage of US assistance and pampering may result in a failed state with the control of its nuclear arsenal falling into the hands of the jihadis.
9. Unfortunately, the situation in Pakistan has reached a stage where the outcome---ultimate jihadi control of the State and its nuclear arsenal--- may be the same whatever the US does----whether it continues pampering or stops doing so. It is a thankless dilemma. It is easy to criticize the US strategy or the lack of it, but difficult to suggest a viable alternative. The starting point of an alternative strategy has to be a cordon sanitaire around the areas already under the control of the TTP and a crash programme for the economic development of the Pashtun areas not yet controlled by the Taliban. Obama’s plans to spend billions of dollars in the areas of the FATA already under the control of Al Qaeda and the Taliban would produce no enduring results except to waste the US taxpayers’ money. This money should be better spent on immunizing those areas where the influence of the Taliban has not yet spread.
10. An equally important point of the strategy should be to step up the US Predator strikes in the FATA and to extend them to Swat in order to keep the Al Qaeda and Taliban elements running for cover all the time and make it difficult for them to plan new strikes and get them executed.
11. The third point of the strategy should be to restore to the Intelligence Bureau of Pakistan its original role of primacy as the internal intelligence and internal security agency of Pakistan. Over the years, the IB has been reduced to the position of a powerless appendage of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and its top ranks militarized through the induction of serving and retired military officers. This has to be reversed.
12. These are medium and long-term measures, which would take time to produce results. The questions requiring an immediate response is how to protect Pakistan from itself. How to stop the advance of the Taliban? How to confront it ideologically? For this purpose, the US needs objective allies in Pakistan. It has none so far. It has been working through opportunistic allies in the army and the political parties. They will accept all the money from the US, but will not produce results.
13. The objective allies have to be found in the Pashtun community. All the talk in Washington DC about their being good Taliban and bad Taliban is ridiculous. But there are good Pashtuns and bad Pashtuns. The US should urgently identify the good Pashtuns and encourage and help them to take up the fight against the Taliban ideologically. After the elections in Pakistan in March last year, I had pointed out that the ANP, which came to power in Peshawar, was a party of good Pashtuns and that the US should work through it, forgetting its past links with the Communists in Afghanistan and the erstwhile USSR. I was given to understand that a couple of ANP leaders did visit Washingtin DC, but beyond that nothing further was done. Now the ANP-led Government in Peshawar has conceded ideological victory to the TNSM in Swat. Despite this, the US should persist with cultivating it and other good Pashtun elements in parties such as the Pakhtoonkwa Milli Awami Party (PMAP) of Mehmood Khan Achakzai. They constitute the progressive component of the Pashtun community and they need to be strengthened and encouraged to counter the Taliban. The present US policy of depending on repeatedly failed elements in the Army and in the mainstream political parties is not working. The regional Pashtun forces have to be encouraged to take up the fight against the Taliban.
14. The survival of Al Qaeda in the FATA and the rise and spread of the TTP are due to support from large sections of the Pashtun community. The resistance to them has to come from the Pashtun community. It cannot come from the likes of Zardari, Gilani and Kayani. ( 24-4-2009)
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, the Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )
THE APPROACHING END OF A DREADED TIGER
B.RAMAN
( Written at the request of the “Hindustan Times” , New Delhi )
The decisive defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which is ferociously fighting probably its last battle in a small piece of land (about 20 sq. kms) with little chance of winning it, is partly due to the follies of Prabakaran, its chief, during the last four years and partly due to the determined and ruthless manner in which the Sri Lankan Armed Forces have carried out their operations.
2. Among his follies, one could mention his split with Karuna, the legendary conventional fighter from the Eastern Province and his followers, his increasing reliance on terrorism after the desertion of the conventional fighters led by Karuna and his working for the defeat of Ranil Wickremasinghe, former Prime Minister, in the Presidential election in November, 2005, which was won by Mahinda Rajapaksa.
3.During its existence, the LTTE had developed a capability for conventional warfare as well as for spectacular acts of terrorism. Its best conventional fighters came from the Eastern Province and many of its suicide terrorists from the Northern Province. Unhappiness among the conventional fighters that the suicide bombers from the North were accorded greater importance and honours by Prabakaran led to their desertion under Karuna’s leadership. Karuna helped the Sri Lankan Army in its operations against the LTTE.
4. Deprived of the strong conventional capability, the LTTE increasingly relied on terrorism and intimidatory attacks by its small fleet of aircraft in its fight against the Armed Forces. Its reliance on terrorism at a time when the international community was developing a policy of zero tolerance for terrorism after 9/11 deprived it of even the little public and political support which it had enjoyed in the West. The European Union countries declared it a terrorist organization and took vigorous action to stop its gun running.
5. No Sri Lankan leader was more sympathetic to the aspirations of the Tamils than former President Chandrika Kumaratunge and Wickremasinghe. The latter was prepared to concede in a large measure the political demands of the LTTE within a federal set-up. If Prabakaran had responded positively to the gestures from Wickremasinghe, the latter would have enabled the LTTE to retain control of the territory which it had occupied and given it a measure of autonomy in return for the LTTE giving up its demand for an independent Tamil Eelam.
6. Prabakaran, who had an inflated belief in his own prowess and in the perceived invincibility of the LTTE, spurned his gestures and worked for his defeat in the Presidential elections. His calculation that Rajapaksa would be a weak and indecisive President, whose Sinhalese extremism would further polarise relations between the Sinhalese and the Tamils, proved terribly wrong.
7. Rajapaksa turned out to be one of the strongest and clear-headed Presidents Sri Lanka has had. He came to office determined to defeat the LTTE as an insurgent and terrorist organization first before addressing the aspirations of the Tamils. He gave his armed forces the wherewithal in terms of money and equipment to enable them defeat the LTTE. He also resisted international pressure to reach a political accommodation with the LTTE. He was determined that the political accommodation will be with the Tamils after the defeat of the LTTE and not with the LTTE.
8. The improved morale and capabilities of the Sri Lankan Armed Forces have definitely contributed to their remarkable success in relentlessly rolling back the LTTE from the areas controlled by it, but this success was facilitated by the ruthless use of air strikes against the LTTE.
9.Did Indian assistance also contribute to the success of the SL Armed Forces? The Government of India denies having given any offensive equipment and training to the SL Armed Forces, but Sri Lankan officers and leaders have themselves been saying that the success of their Armed Forces was made possible by Indian assistance. The failure of the Government of India to counter these claims has created growing suspicions not only among the Sri Lankan Tamils, but also among sections of the people of Tamil Nadu that the Government of Dr.Manmohan Singh has not been very straightforward and that it had given more assistance to Sri Lanka than it has admitted.
10.The LTTE’s brutal assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in May 1991 created a revulsion for it in Tamil Nadu. If it has since managed to rehabilitate itself in the eyes of some sections of public opinion in Tamil Nadu, the Manmohan Singh Government and its senior functionaries cannot escape the responsibility for it. The failure of the Government to condemn the air strikes and its seeming helplessness in the face of the humanitarian disaster affecting over 200,000 Tamils have cast it considerable public support in Tamil Nadu and made support for the Sri Lankan Tamils once again a popular cause. Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination by the LTTE has been forgotten.
11. People tend to compare what they perceive as Manmohan Singh’s helpless attitude in the face of the repeated rejection by the Rajapaksa Government of the requests for a humanitarian approach to Rajiv Gandhi’s action in sending the Indian Air Force to drop humanitarian supplies to the Tamils despite strong criticism of the Indian action not only by the SL authorites, but also by the international community.
12. What next after the defeat of the LTTE? Rajapaksa has been repeatedly promising that he would address the aspirations of the Tamils for greater political and economic rights. Will a bloated Army and the Sinhalese extremist elements allow him to keep his word even if he wants to or will he, egged on by his army, try to impose a dictated peace on the Tamils? One has to keep one’s fingers crossed. (23-4-2009)
(The writer is former Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India. )
( Written at the request of the “Hindustan Times” , New Delhi )
The decisive defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which is ferociously fighting probably its last battle in a small piece of land (about 20 sq. kms) with little chance of winning it, is partly due to the follies of Prabakaran, its chief, during the last four years and partly due to the determined and ruthless manner in which the Sri Lankan Armed Forces have carried out their operations.
2. Among his follies, one could mention his split with Karuna, the legendary conventional fighter from the Eastern Province and his followers, his increasing reliance on terrorism after the desertion of the conventional fighters led by Karuna and his working for the defeat of Ranil Wickremasinghe, former Prime Minister, in the Presidential election in November, 2005, which was won by Mahinda Rajapaksa.
3.During its existence, the LTTE had developed a capability for conventional warfare as well as for spectacular acts of terrorism. Its best conventional fighters came from the Eastern Province and many of its suicide terrorists from the Northern Province. Unhappiness among the conventional fighters that the suicide bombers from the North were accorded greater importance and honours by Prabakaran led to their desertion under Karuna’s leadership. Karuna helped the Sri Lankan Army in its operations against the LTTE.
4. Deprived of the strong conventional capability, the LTTE increasingly relied on terrorism and intimidatory attacks by its small fleet of aircraft in its fight against the Armed Forces. Its reliance on terrorism at a time when the international community was developing a policy of zero tolerance for terrorism after 9/11 deprived it of even the little public and political support which it had enjoyed in the West. The European Union countries declared it a terrorist organization and took vigorous action to stop its gun running.
5. No Sri Lankan leader was more sympathetic to the aspirations of the Tamils than former President Chandrika Kumaratunge and Wickremasinghe. The latter was prepared to concede in a large measure the political demands of the LTTE within a federal set-up. If Prabakaran had responded positively to the gestures from Wickremasinghe, the latter would have enabled the LTTE to retain control of the territory which it had occupied and given it a measure of autonomy in return for the LTTE giving up its demand for an independent Tamil Eelam.
6. Prabakaran, who had an inflated belief in his own prowess and in the perceived invincibility of the LTTE, spurned his gestures and worked for his defeat in the Presidential elections. His calculation that Rajapaksa would be a weak and indecisive President, whose Sinhalese extremism would further polarise relations between the Sinhalese and the Tamils, proved terribly wrong.
7. Rajapaksa turned out to be one of the strongest and clear-headed Presidents Sri Lanka has had. He came to office determined to defeat the LTTE as an insurgent and terrorist organization first before addressing the aspirations of the Tamils. He gave his armed forces the wherewithal in terms of money and equipment to enable them defeat the LTTE. He also resisted international pressure to reach a political accommodation with the LTTE. He was determined that the political accommodation will be with the Tamils after the defeat of the LTTE and not with the LTTE.
8. The improved morale and capabilities of the Sri Lankan Armed Forces have definitely contributed to their remarkable success in relentlessly rolling back the LTTE from the areas controlled by it, but this success was facilitated by the ruthless use of air strikes against the LTTE.
9.Did Indian assistance also contribute to the success of the SL Armed Forces? The Government of India denies having given any offensive equipment and training to the SL Armed Forces, but Sri Lankan officers and leaders have themselves been saying that the success of their Armed Forces was made possible by Indian assistance. The failure of the Government of India to counter these claims has created growing suspicions not only among the Sri Lankan Tamils, but also among sections of the people of Tamil Nadu that the Government of Dr.Manmohan Singh has not been very straightforward and that it had given more assistance to Sri Lanka than it has admitted.
10.The LTTE’s brutal assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in May 1991 created a revulsion for it in Tamil Nadu. If it has since managed to rehabilitate itself in the eyes of some sections of public opinion in Tamil Nadu, the Manmohan Singh Government and its senior functionaries cannot escape the responsibility for it. The failure of the Government to condemn the air strikes and its seeming helplessness in the face of the humanitarian disaster affecting over 200,000 Tamils have cast it considerable public support in Tamil Nadu and made support for the Sri Lankan Tamils once again a popular cause. Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination by the LTTE has been forgotten.
11. People tend to compare what they perceive as Manmohan Singh’s helpless attitude in the face of the repeated rejection by the Rajapaksa Government of the requests for a humanitarian approach to Rajiv Gandhi’s action in sending the Indian Air Force to drop humanitarian supplies to the Tamils despite strong criticism of the Indian action not only by the SL authorites, but also by the international community.
12. What next after the defeat of the LTTE? Rajapaksa has been repeatedly promising that he would address the aspirations of the Tamils for greater political and economic rights. Will a bloated Army and the Sinhalese extremist elements allow him to keep his word even if he wants to or will he, egged on by his army, try to impose a dictated peace on the Tamils? One has to keep one’s fingers crossed. (23-4-2009)
(The writer is former Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India. )
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
AFTER THE LTTE, WHAT?
B.RAMAN
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) is in its death rattle. It was decisively defeated by the Sri Lankan Armed Forces weeks ago, but a handful of its leadership headed by Prabhakaran has cynically and cruelly prolonged the agony of the Tamil civilians by using them as a buffer and human-shield in order to delay the re-establishment of the writ of the Sri Lankan Government in a miniscule piece of territory (about 20 sq.kms), which has been declared by the Government as a no-fire zone to avoid collateral casualties among the civilians still under the control of the LTTE and to enable them to escape from the clutches of the LTTE.
2. Prabhakaran is a leader with a split personality. During the 26 years he has dominated the Tamil landscape in Sri Lanka, he had shown a remarkable organizing capacity and an ability to motivate his followers to perform virtual miracles. His motivating his cadres to acquire a capability for action by air and sea would go down in the history of insurgency and terrorism as indicating an organizing capability of a high order. The LTTE under his leadership managed to bring almost the entire Tamil-inhabited territory in the Northern and Eastern Provinces under its control. The determined manner in which the LTTE fought against the Indian-Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) in the late 1980s and frustrated its efforts to defeat it spoke highly of its capabilities for a conventional warfare.
3.If Prabhakaran had the activities of the LTTE confined to conventional warfare and developed the LTTE as a purely insurgent force, which targeted only the armed forces and not innocent civilians, he would have acquired greater support from the international community for the Tamil cause. The rational side of his personality as illustrated by his organizing capabilities had to constantly contend with a highly irrational side, which drove him to simultaneously take to terrorism of a shockingly brutal kind.
4. The targeted killings by the LTTE of many Sri Lankan Tamil leaders, who were perceived by Prabhakaran as possible impediments to his rise as the unquestioned leader of the Tamil community, and its brutal assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in May 1991 were the outcome of the irrational side of his personality. No other Indian leader had done more to help the Sri Lankan Tamil cause than Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi. Only a sickly and sickening irrational mind could have ordered the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi and Laxman Kadirgamar, a highly-respected Tamil leader, who was a senior adviser on foreign policy to former President Chandrika Kumaratunge. The assassination of Rajiv Gandhi on Prabhakaran’s orders shocked Indian public opinion----including public opinion in Tamil Nadu--- and weakened Indian support for the Tamil cause. The assassination of Kadirgamar shocked the Western public opinion and led to the declaration of the LTTE as a terrorist organization by the Western world, thereby denying the last vestiges of Western support for the Tamil cause.
5.As the LTTE faced one defeat after another during the last three years from the Sri Lankan Armed Forces---initially in the Eastern Province and finally in the Northern Province---- the irrational side of Prabhakaran’s personality erased his rational side. His shocking use of the Tamil civilians in order to delay the final end of the counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism campaign undertaken by the Sri Lankan Armed Forces is driven by this irrational streak in him, which now dominates his personality.
6. The prolonged agony of the Sri Lankan Tamils caused by the final bout of Prabhakaran’s irrationality and loss of lucidity in thinking has to be ended. The Sri Lankan Armed Forces, which have shown patience till now and deliberately slowed down their operations, cannot be faulted if they have come to the conclusion that the time has come to liberate the no-fire zone too from the clutches of the LTTE by undertaking limited operations with small arms and ammunition even at the risk of some collateral casualties to the civilians.
7. The desperate attempt of Prabhakaran to use the civilians to protect himself from the advancing Sri Lankan Army can be attributed to the total loss of lucidity in his thinking and his consequent inability to face the bitter truth that he and his organization have been defeated decisively by the Sri Lankan Armed Forces and that there is no chance of their staging a come-back. The Requiem for the LTTE could be written without fears of going wrong, should the LTTE stage a come-back as it had done on occasions in the past. It has been defeated beyond recovery. His conventional as well as terrorist capabilities are in shatters. Earlier conventional wisdom that small groups of the LTTE might still be able to keep indulging in sporadic acts of terrorism in different parts of Sri Lanks needs re-consideration. His desperate delaying action at the cost of immense suffering to the Tamils, whose cause he claims to espouse, is meant to give him an opportunity to seek safe sanctuary either in Tamil Nadu or elsewhere from where he could try to re-start his fight against the Sri Lankan Armed Forces. It is in the common interest of India and Sri Lanka that Prabhakaran is finally able to make peace with his Maker by either being killed by the Armed Forces or by taking his own life. A defeated Prabhakaran, if left alive in India or elsewhere, would not be a threat, but could be a nuisance for both the countries.
8. After the final death of the LTTE, which is expected any day, what is the future of the Sri Lankan Tamil cause? Would a Requiem for the LTTE also mean a Requiem for the Sri Lankan Tamil cause? Hopefully not. It is in India’s interest that the LTTE as a terrorist organization is destroyed once and for all, but it is not in India’s interest that the Sri Lankan Government and Armed Forces proceed from the destruction of the LTTE to the destruction of the Tamil aspirations for greater political and economic rights in their traditional homeland and for greater human dignity.
9. Let us not forget that ever since our independence in 1947, the Bengalis of the then East Pakistan, the Balochs and Sindhis of Pakistan and the Tamils of Sri Lanka have been India’s natural allies. It was this reality which persuaded Indira Gandhi to assist the Bengalis of the then East Pakistan to achieve their independence. Even though successive Governments in New Delhi refrained from supporting the causes of the Sindhis and the Balochs, Indian public opinion sympathized and continues to sympathise with their cause. It was sympathy for the Sri Lankan Tamil cause at New Delhi when Indira Gandhi was the Prime Minister and in Tamil Nadu, which induced India to take up their cause in the 1980s.
10.There is no reason why India should not pride itself and seek to be the paramount power of the region. To emerge and remain as the paramount power, we need natural allies in the region around us. We should not let the legitimate aspirations of our natural allies---whether they be the Sindhis and Balochs of Pakistan or the Sri Lankan Tamils--- be crushed by a brutal regime--- whether in Islamabad or in Colombo.
11. Since 1947, the Balochs rose twice in revolt in favour of independence for their homeland. On both occasions, they were defeated by the Pakistani Armed Forces as decisively as the LTTE by the Sri Lankan Armed Forces. The Pakistani leadership brutally used the Air Force against the Balochs to crush their freedom struggle. Undaunted by this, the Baloch people, under a new leadership, rose in revolt for a third time two years ago and their third war of independence is still going on.
12. The remarkable victory of the Sri Lankan Armed Forces against the LTTE was partly due to their improved counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism capabilities made possible by Indian assistance in the form of training and sharing of intelligence and partly due to their emulating the Pakistani Armed forces in the brutal use of the Air Force against people whom they portray as their own. Just as the Balochs were defenceless against the brutal Pakistani air strikes, the Sri Lankan Tamils were defenceless against the Sri Lankan air strikes.
13. The US has used air strikes in Iraq and Afghanistan----but in foreign territory and against foreign nationals. Only three countries in the world have used air strikes in their own territory against their own people---- the Pakistanis against the Balochs, the Russians against the Chechens and the Sri Lankans against the Tamils.
14. President Mahinda Rajapakse has repeatedly promised that once the LTTE is defeated, he would be generous in meeting the political aspirations of the Tamils. He gives the impression of being a sincere man, but will the Sinhalese Army with its head bloated by its success against the LTTE allow him to do so? The indicators till now are not encouraging. Many Sri Lankan officers might have been trained in India, but their mindset and their attitude towards the minorities have more in common with those of their Pakistani counterparts than with those of their Indian counterparts. Therein lies the danger that after winning the war against the LTTE, the Government, strongly influenced by a victorious army, might trey to impose a dictated peace on the Tamils.
15. If the angry Tamils once again look up to India, there is no reason why we should not reciprocate provided a new leadership emerges in the Tamil community and it has drawn the right lessons from the brutalities of the LTTE.
16. The LTTE is deservedly dying, but long live the Tamil cause. (22-4-2009)
( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. E-Mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) is in its death rattle. It was decisively defeated by the Sri Lankan Armed Forces weeks ago, but a handful of its leadership headed by Prabhakaran has cynically and cruelly prolonged the agony of the Tamil civilians by using them as a buffer and human-shield in order to delay the re-establishment of the writ of the Sri Lankan Government in a miniscule piece of territory (about 20 sq.kms), which has been declared by the Government as a no-fire zone to avoid collateral casualties among the civilians still under the control of the LTTE and to enable them to escape from the clutches of the LTTE.
2. Prabhakaran is a leader with a split personality. During the 26 years he has dominated the Tamil landscape in Sri Lanka, he had shown a remarkable organizing capacity and an ability to motivate his followers to perform virtual miracles. His motivating his cadres to acquire a capability for action by air and sea would go down in the history of insurgency and terrorism as indicating an organizing capability of a high order. The LTTE under his leadership managed to bring almost the entire Tamil-inhabited territory in the Northern and Eastern Provinces under its control. The determined manner in which the LTTE fought against the Indian-Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) in the late 1980s and frustrated its efforts to defeat it spoke highly of its capabilities for a conventional warfare.
3.If Prabhakaran had the activities of the LTTE confined to conventional warfare and developed the LTTE as a purely insurgent force, which targeted only the armed forces and not innocent civilians, he would have acquired greater support from the international community for the Tamil cause. The rational side of his personality as illustrated by his organizing capabilities had to constantly contend with a highly irrational side, which drove him to simultaneously take to terrorism of a shockingly brutal kind.
4. The targeted killings by the LTTE of many Sri Lankan Tamil leaders, who were perceived by Prabhakaran as possible impediments to his rise as the unquestioned leader of the Tamil community, and its brutal assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in May 1991 were the outcome of the irrational side of his personality. No other Indian leader had done more to help the Sri Lankan Tamil cause than Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi. Only a sickly and sickening irrational mind could have ordered the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi and Laxman Kadirgamar, a highly-respected Tamil leader, who was a senior adviser on foreign policy to former President Chandrika Kumaratunge. The assassination of Rajiv Gandhi on Prabhakaran’s orders shocked Indian public opinion----including public opinion in Tamil Nadu--- and weakened Indian support for the Tamil cause. The assassination of Kadirgamar shocked the Western public opinion and led to the declaration of the LTTE as a terrorist organization by the Western world, thereby denying the last vestiges of Western support for the Tamil cause.
5.As the LTTE faced one defeat after another during the last three years from the Sri Lankan Armed Forces---initially in the Eastern Province and finally in the Northern Province---- the irrational side of Prabhakaran’s personality erased his rational side. His shocking use of the Tamil civilians in order to delay the final end of the counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism campaign undertaken by the Sri Lankan Armed Forces is driven by this irrational streak in him, which now dominates his personality.
6. The prolonged agony of the Sri Lankan Tamils caused by the final bout of Prabhakaran’s irrationality and loss of lucidity in thinking has to be ended. The Sri Lankan Armed Forces, which have shown patience till now and deliberately slowed down their operations, cannot be faulted if they have come to the conclusion that the time has come to liberate the no-fire zone too from the clutches of the LTTE by undertaking limited operations with small arms and ammunition even at the risk of some collateral casualties to the civilians.
7. The desperate attempt of Prabhakaran to use the civilians to protect himself from the advancing Sri Lankan Army can be attributed to the total loss of lucidity in his thinking and his consequent inability to face the bitter truth that he and his organization have been defeated decisively by the Sri Lankan Armed Forces and that there is no chance of their staging a come-back. The Requiem for the LTTE could be written without fears of going wrong, should the LTTE stage a come-back as it had done on occasions in the past. It has been defeated beyond recovery. His conventional as well as terrorist capabilities are in shatters. Earlier conventional wisdom that small groups of the LTTE might still be able to keep indulging in sporadic acts of terrorism in different parts of Sri Lanks needs re-consideration. His desperate delaying action at the cost of immense suffering to the Tamils, whose cause he claims to espouse, is meant to give him an opportunity to seek safe sanctuary either in Tamil Nadu or elsewhere from where he could try to re-start his fight against the Sri Lankan Armed Forces. It is in the common interest of India and Sri Lanka that Prabhakaran is finally able to make peace with his Maker by either being killed by the Armed Forces or by taking his own life. A defeated Prabhakaran, if left alive in India or elsewhere, would not be a threat, but could be a nuisance for both the countries.
8. After the final death of the LTTE, which is expected any day, what is the future of the Sri Lankan Tamil cause? Would a Requiem for the LTTE also mean a Requiem for the Sri Lankan Tamil cause? Hopefully not. It is in India’s interest that the LTTE as a terrorist organization is destroyed once and for all, but it is not in India’s interest that the Sri Lankan Government and Armed Forces proceed from the destruction of the LTTE to the destruction of the Tamil aspirations for greater political and economic rights in their traditional homeland and for greater human dignity.
9. Let us not forget that ever since our independence in 1947, the Bengalis of the then East Pakistan, the Balochs and Sindhis of Pakistan and the Tamils of Sri Lanka have been India’s natural allies. It was this reality which persuaded Indira Gandhi to assist the Bengalis of the then East Pakistan to achieve their independence. Even though successive Governments in New Delhi refrained from supporting the causes of the Sindhis and the Balochs, Indian public opinion sympathized and continues to sympathise with their cause. It was sympathy for the Sri Lankan Tamil cause at New Delhi when Indira Gandhi was the Prime Minister and in Tamil Nadu, which induced India to take up their cause in the 1980s.
10.There is no reason why India should not pride itself and seek to be the paramount power of the region. To emerge and remain as the paramount power, we need natural allies in the region around us. We should not let the legitimate aspirations of our natural allies---whether they be the Sindhis and Balochs of Pakistan or the Sri Lankan Tamils--- be crushed by a brutal regime--- whether in Islamabad or in Colombo.
11. Since 1947, the Balochs rose twice in revolt in favour of independence for their homeland. On both occasions, they were defeated by the Pakistani Armed Forces as decisively as the LTTE by the Sri Lankan Armed Forces. The Pakistani leadership brutally used the Air Force against the Balochs to crush their freedom struggle. Undaunted by this, the Baloch people, under a new leadership, rose in revolt for a third time two years ago and their third war of independence is still going on.
12. The remarkable victory of the Sri Lankan Armed Forces against the LTTE was partly due to their improved counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism capabilities made possible by Indian assistance in the form of training and sharing of intelligence and partly due to their emulating the Pakistani Armed forces in the brutal use of the Air Force against people whom they portray as their own. Just as the Balochs were defenceless against the brutal Pakistani air strikes, the Sri Lankan Tamils were defenceless against the Sri Lankan air strikes.
13. The US has used air strikes in Iraq and Afghanistan----but in foreign territory and against foreign nationals. Only three countries in the world have used air strikes in their own territory against their own people---- the Pakistanis against the Balochs, the Russians against the Chechens and the Sri Lankans against the Tamils.
14. President Mahinda Rajapakse has repeatedly promised that once the LTTE is defeated, he would be generous in meeting the political aspirations of the Tamils. He gives the impression of being a sincere man, but will the Sinhalese Army with its head bloated by its success against the LTTE allow him to do so? The indicators till now are not encouraging. Many Sri Lankan officers might have been trained in India, but their mindset and their attitude towards the minorities have more in common with those of their Pakistani counterparts than with those of their Indian counterparts. Therein lies the danger that after winning the war against the LTTE, the Government, strongly influenced by a victorious army, might trey to impose a dictated peace on the Tamils.
15. If the angry Tamils once again look up to India, there is no reason why we should not reciprocate provided a new leadership emerges in the Tamil community and it has drawn the right lessons from the brutalities of the LTTE.
16. The LTTE is deservedly dying, but long live the Tamil cause. (22-4-2009)
( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. E-Mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )
Sunday, April 19, 2009
TERRORISM & ELECTIONS
B.RAMAN
As we have been facing a grave problem of insurgencies and terrorism of different hues----jihadi, ideological, ethnic and separatist--- in different parts of the country since 1947, one would have expected a serious and professional debate on insurgency,terrorism, counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism during the election campaign---- particularly from the Congress (I) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The expectations have been belied.
2.There has been hardly any meaningful debate, which has been trivialised by both the Congress (I) and the BJP. Personal attacks and exchanges of mutual recriminations and ridicule of a highly personalised nature by both the parties have become one of the defining characteristics of the election campaign. While the Congress(I)'s campaign has been marked by false projections and assertions with a cover-up of the failure of the Governments at the Centre and in Mumbai to prevent the terrorist attack in Mumbai from November 26 to 29,2008, the campaign of the BJP has been rich in rhetoric and negative with almost the entire focus being on the abolition of the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) by the Congress (I) led coalition and its perceived reluctance to carry out the death sentence passed by a court on Afzal Guru for his role in the attack on the Indian Parliament House on December 13,2001.
3.It is surprising that the BJP and other Hindutva organisations,which like to project themselves as strong on counter-terrorism, have not been able to come out with positive ideas as to how to deal with the threat. Their approach has been more tactical and denunciatory than strategic and reflective. The result: the public is none the wiser as to what changes it could expect from any new coalition Government that might come to power after the elections.
4. The various insurgencies confronting the country since 1947----whether the tribal insurgencies in the North-East or the left extremist or Naxalite (Maoist) insugencies in the tribal belt in Central India--- started during the long Congress (I) rule between 1947 and 1977. While the Congress (I) was able to find a political solution to the insurgencies in Nagaland, Mizoram and Tripura, it has been totally at its wit's end in dealing with the left extremist or Naxalite (Maoist) insurgency, which continues to gather strength and adherents and spread its area of political influence and territorial dominance despite tall claims by the intelligence and security agencies of eliminating many Maoist cells.
5. After the Congress (I) came to power at the head of a coalition in 2004, it had set up a special task force of the party headed by one of its Members of Parliament (MP) from Andhra Pradesh to recommend a strategy on counter-insurgency in the Naxalite-infected areas.Its report-- for whatever its worth--- has been gathering dust without implementation. The Prime Minister, Dr.Manmohan Singh, has made more statements and issued more warnings on the threat posed to internal security and our economic progress by the unchecked activities of the Naxalites (Maoists) than on the threat posed by the Pakistan-sponsored jihadi terrorists. From this, one would have thought that his
Government would have come out with at least a workable counter-insurgency strategey to deal with the Naxalites since the so-called vote bank politics does not operate in their case.Surprisingly, the statements and warnings of the Prime Minister have not been translated into concrete action on the ground.
6.During the 28 years that have seen terrorism emerge as the most serious threat to internal security, the Congress (I) has been in power for 18 years---from 1980 to 89, from 1991 to 96 and now since 2004. During this period, the BJP was in power for six years from 1998 to 2004. Other coalitions headed by V.P Singh,Chandrasekhar, Dev Gowda and Inder Gujral were in power during the remaining four years.
7. Khalistani terrorism, the ethnic terrorism of the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) and the Pakistan-sponsored separatist-cum-religious terrorism of Jammu & Kashmir (J&K) started when the Congress (I) was in power due to the mishandling of the grievances of some sections of the Sikh community in Punjab and in the Sikh diaspora abroad and of the grievances of sections of the Assamese students over the Government's failure to take action against the hundreds of thousands (now millions) of illegal immigrants from Bangladesh into Assam. The ground work for the proxy war of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in J&K started when the Congress (I) was in power before 1989. This proxy war started in J&K when the V.P.Singh-led coalition, which had the support of the BJP,was in power in 1989-90 and it acquired momentum after the Congress(I) returned to power in 1991. The unchecked infiltration of Pakistani terrrorist organisations into J&K started in 1993 and it spread to other parts of India subsequently.
8. Both the Congress (I) and the BJP have to be held equally responsible for the spread of jihadi terrorism to other parts of India outside J&K starting from the Mumbai blasts of March 1993. The demolition of the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya by a Hindutva mob in December,1992, acted as the trigger for the spread of jihadi terrorism to other parts of India..
9. The Congress (I) has to be held equally responsible because it was in power in New Delhi at the time of the demolition and its inaction in the face of reports and assessments that the Hindutva elements congregating in Ayodhya might target the Masjid indirectly facilitated the demolition. The role of the BJP was public knowledge,but not the negligence of the Congress (I) Government led byNarasimha Rao, the then Prime Minister. He failed to act on the advice of his senior bureaucrats to dismiss the UP Government and impose the President's rule in order to protect the Masjid.
10.While the Congress (I) has to be blamed for the birth and growth of terrorism in many parts of the country, it has had a better record than other governments in dealing with terrorism after it started threatening the country. The credit for the petering-out of Khalistani terrorism in Punjab and the bringing under some control of the indigenous terrorism backed by the ISI in J&K should largely go to the Governments headed by Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh.
11 There were eight hijackings of aircraft of the Indian Airlines to Pakistan by terrorists when Indira Gandhi was in power--- seven by the Khalistani terrorists and one by the Jammu & Kashmir LiberationFront (JKLF).She refused to concede the demands of the hijackers in any of these cases. Similarly, she refused to concede the demand of the JKLF kidnappers who kidnapped Ravi Mhatre, an Indian diplomat posted at the Indian Assistant High Commission in Birmingham, in 1983for the release of Maqbool Butt, who had been sentenced to death for an act of terrorism, The terrorists killed Mhatre. She retaliated by having the death sentence on Maqbool Butt carried out. The only instance of weakness by a Congress (I) Government was in not taking action against the terrorists responsible for occupying the Hazratbal shrine in Srinagar in 1993. They were allowed to escape into Pakistan by Narasimha Rao in return for their agreeing to lift the siege.
12.The Congress (I)'s Prime Ministers---- Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi and Narasimha Rao---realised the importance of covert action by the intelligence community to counter Pakistan's proxy war. They had a well though-out strategy for countering Pakistan's proxy war. Covert action formed an important component of this strategy. It played an important role in countering the ISI's designs in Punjab. This
capability was reportedly wound up by Inder Gujral when he was the Prime Minister in 1997.It should also be underlined that in 1993 Narasimha Rao had succeeded in having Pakistan declared as a suspected state-sponsor of terrorism by the Clinton Administration --- though only for six months.
13.The BJP's record in dealing with insurgency and terrorism, when it was in power between 1998 and 2004, was marked by the mishandling of the hijacking of an IAC aircraft to Kandahar by terrorists of the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM) in December 1999, which led to the release of three notorious terrorists from detention of whom one MaulanaMasood Azhar later founded the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JEM) and another Omar Sheikh had Daniel Pearl, the US journalist, kidnapped and murdered in Karachi. Maulana Azhar released by the BJP-led Government later played an important role in the conspiracy to attack the Parliament House.
14. In the history of Indian counter-terrorism, there have been two instances of pathetic surrender to the terrorists by the Government.The first was in 1989 when the V.P.Singh Government shockingly surrendered to the demands of the indigenous Kashmiri terrorists to release some terrorists under detention in order to secure the release of the daughter of Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, the then Home Minister, who had been kidnapped by the terrorists. The second was in 1999 when the BJP-led Government agreed to release three terrorists---two of themPakistani nationals--- to secure the release of the IAC passengers.
15. However, I would blame more the bureaucrats in the national security establishment under the BJP-led Government than A.B.Vajpayee,the then Prime Minster, L.K.Advani, the then Home Minister, and Jaswant Singh, the then Minister for External Affairs, for the Kandahar fiasco. The bureaucrats were responsible for ensuring that the aircraft was not taken by the hijackers to a hostile territory where commando action would not be possible. They failed to do so.Once they mishandled the hijacking and allowed the aircraft to reach Kandahar, no commando action was possible because Kandahar is in hostile territory and Pakistan would not have allowed an Indian plane carrying commandoes to overfly its territory. As a result of thismishandling by the bureaucrats, the BJP leadership was in the unenviable position of having no other option but to swap the three terrorists for the release of over 100 innocent passengers. Manmohan Singh has been less than honest in comparing his action in sending commandoes to Mumbai during the terrorist attack of November,2008, to the BJP's failure to send the commandoes to Kandahar. Mumbai is in Indian territory, but Kandahar is in hostile foreign territory. A commando raid in Kandahar was out of the question.
16.The BJP, when in power, failed to implement its pre-election promise to issue a White Paper on the ISI's proxy war in India and to have Pakistan declared as a state-sponsor of terrorism. What was more,the security bureaucracy was surprised by the BJP-led Government's decision not to reverse the decision of Gujral to wind up the covert action capability.
17. Against this, the BJP's dubbing the Congress (I) led Government as soft in dealing with terrorism would hardly carry conviction. All political parties without exception mishandled counter-terrorism.They viewed terrorism not as a national threat to be countered with determination but as a political weapon to be exploited for partisan purposes.
18. There was a consistency of firmness in the policies of Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi and Narasimha Rao in dealing with Pakistan. Such a consistency was missing in the policies of the Government led by Vajpayee as well as its successor Government headed by Manmohan Singh. Both of them followed a policy of "kabi garam, kabi naram"(sometimes tough, sometimes soft). Vajpayee's decisions to go to Lahore in February 1999 to meet Nawaz Sharif, the then Prime Minister,and to invite Pervez Musharraf to India in 2001 and take him on a high-profile visit to Agra for talks were taken without consulting the intelligence community on the implications of the decisions on the ground situation. Both the visits ended in an embarrassing fiasco.
19. It swung to the other extreme after the attack on the Parliament House in December 2001 and confronted Pakistan with the threat of a war by mobilising the Armed Forces and keeping them in the mobilised state for nearly 10 months without achieving any results on the ground. The anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat in February 2002 after the massacre of some Hindu pilgrims travelling by train at Godhra allegedly by some Muslims and widespread perceptions in India and abroad of conscious inaction by the Narendra Modi Government in the initial stages deprived the Vajpayee Government of any moral high ground in its confrontation with Pakistan on the issue of terrorism.The Muslim anger over the riots added fuel to jihadi terrorism.
20. The much tauted coercive diplomacy with a doubtful outcome was followed by another swing by the agreement reached by Vajpayee with Musharraf in Islamabad in January 2004 under which Pakistan agreed that it would not support any terrorism emanating from Pakistani and Pakistan-controlled territory. The BJP-led Government mishandled the overtures for peace talks from a section of the Hizbul Mujahideen (HM) in 2001.This section had got tired of terrorism. This mishandling enabled the Pakistan-based leadership of the HM to identify and eliminate the members of this section.
21.Manmohan Singh's record in dealing with Pakistan on the terrorism issue was no better than that of the Vajpayee Government.He swung to the soft extreme when he signed an agreement with Musharraf at Havana in September,2006, for setting up a joint mechanism for dealing with terrorism despite strong reservations from the security bureaucracy and non-Governmental security experts over the wisdom of this action.When he was embarrassed by the November,2008, terrorist attack, which was carried out by the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) from Pakistani territory at least with the complicity of the ISI, if not at its instance, he swung to the other extreme of coercive diplomacy There has been a meaningless debate between the Congress (I) and the BJP as to who has been more coercive in dealing with Pakistan. Neither has been as seen from the post-Mumbai surge in infiltrations into J&K by Pakistan-trained terrorists.
22.It must be said to the credit of P.Chidambaram, who took over as the Home Minister after the Mumbai attack, that of all the HomeMinisters since Rajesh Pilot, who was Minister of State for Internal Security under Narasimha Rao, he has shown greater lucidity and energy in dealing with at least Pakistan-sponsored terrorism, though his record against the ULFA and the Naxalites (Maoists) is yet to be felt on the ground.His strategy as unveiled in the beginning of April shows the beginnings of a professional approach... Please see the report in'The Hindu" of April 8,2009, titled "Congress Unveils Roadmap to Tackle Terror".
23. Some of the points in the road map such as the setting up of a Permanent Crisis Management Group ( a war room) and the preparation of an operating manual( a war book for counter-terrorism) are old ideas of R.N.Kao, when he was the Senior Adviser to Indira Gandhi before her assassination in October,1984. These ideas were evolved by Kao in the context of the then raging Khalistani terrorism. The idea of a better state of preparedness by the counter-terrorism community was originally Rajiv's. Other ideas in Chidambaram's strategy such as improving the rapid response capability, the concept of joint action in which all agencies are jointly responsible for dealing with terrorism and improving threat-level communication not only to various layers of the bureaucracy, but also to the public have been heavily borrowed from the post-9/11 counter-terrorism architecture set up by the Homeland Security Department of the US.Chidambaram has paid welcome attention to strengthening the number and capability of the police, in order to strengthen its role as the weapon of first resort against terrorism.
24. His strategy seeks to deal comprehensively with terrorism----particularly of the jihadi, Pakistan-sponsored kind--- as a threat to national security. The measures outlined by him are meant to deal with acts of terrorism----preventive as well as dealing with them when prevention fails. But it hardly speaks of measures to deal with terrorist organisations in order to impose a high rate of attrition on them. It was the success of the Sri Lankan counter-terrorism machinery in imposing such a high rate of attrition on the LTTE, which has contributed to its remarkable success against the LTTE. The attrition component is missing from Chidambaram's strategy.
25. Despite this, it is a good beginning and shows a professional approach to counter-terrorism. One would have expected such a professional approach to emerge from the BJP, which projects itself as having greater expertise and a greater number of experts in counter-terrorism. But one's hopes have been belied. Its entire thinking seems to be based on the belief that the re-introduction of the POTA and the execution of the death sentence on Afzal Guru would mark the death-knell of terrorism. It would not. There is more to counter-terrorism than additional powers for the Police, which are necessary, and deterrent punishments.
26. The inability of the Government to prevent the Mumbai 26/11 attack provided the BJP with a wonderful pre-election opportunity to analyse what went wrong in Mumbai and confront the Government with a professional debate on its sins of commission and omission. It has failed to grasp the opportunity.(20-4-2009)
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt.of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For TopicalStudies, Chennai. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )
As we have been facing a grave problem of insurgencies and terrorism of different hues----jihadi, ideological, ethnic and separatist--- in different parts of the country since 1947, one would have expected a serious and professional debate on insurgency,terrorism, counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism during the election campaign---- particularly from the Congress (I) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The expectations have been belied.
2.There has been hardly any meaningful debate, which has been trivialised by both the Congress (I) and the BJP. Personal attacks and exchanges of mutual recriminations and ridicule of a highly personalised nature by both the parties have become one of the defining characteristics of the election campaign. While the Congress(I)'s campaign has been marked by false projections and assertions with a cover-up of the failure of the Governments at the Centre and in Mumbai to prevent the terrorist attack in Mumbai from November 26 to 29,2008, the campaign of the BJP has been rich in rhetoric and negative with almost the entire focus being on the abolition of the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) by the Congress (I) led coalition and its perceived reluctance to carry out the death sentence passed by a court on Afzal Guru for his role in the attack on the Indian Parliament House on December 13,2001.
3.It is surprising that the BJP and other Hindutva organisations,which like to project themselves as strong on counter-terrorism, have not been able to come out with positive ideas as to how to deal with the threat. Their approach has been more tactical and denunciatory than strategic and reflective. The result: the public is none the wiser as to what changes it could expect from any new coalition Government that might come to power after the elections.
4. The various insurgencies confronting the country since 1947----whether the tribal insurgencies in the North-East or the left extremist or Naxalite (Maoist) insugencies in the tribal belt in Central India--- started during the long Congress (I) rule between 1947 and 1977. While the Congress (I) was able to find a political solution to the insurgencies in Nagaland, Mizoram and Tripura, it has been totally at its wit's end in dealing with the left extremist or Naxalite (Maoist) insurgency, which continues to gather strength and adherents and spread its area of political influence and territorial dominance despite tall claims by the intelligence and security agencies of eliminating many Maoist cells.
5. After the Congress (I) came to power at the head of a coalition in 2004, it had set up a special task force of the party headed by one of its Members of Parliament (MP) from Andhra Pradesh to recommend a strategy on counter-insurgency in the Naxalite-infected areas.Its report-- for whatever its worth--- has been gathering dust without implementation. The Prime Minister, Dr.Manmohan Singh, has made more statements and issued more warnings on the threat posed to internal security and our economic progress by the unchecked activities of the Naxalites (Maoists) than on the threat posed by the Pakistan-sponsored jihadi terrorists. From this, one would have thought that his
Government would have come out with at least a workable counter-insurgency strategey to deal with the Naxalites since the so-called vote bank politics does not operate in their case.Surprisingly, the statements and warnings of the Prime Minister have not been translated into concrete action on the ground.
6.During the 28 years that have seen terrorism emerge as the most serious threat to internal security, the Congress (I) has been in power for 18 years---from 1980 to 89, from 1991 to 96 and now since 2004. During this period, the BJP was in power for six years from 1998 to 2004. Other coalitions headed by V.P Singh,Chandrasekhar, Dev Gowda and Inder Gujral were in power during the remaining four years.
7. Khalistani terrorism, the ethnic terrorism of the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) and the Pakistan-sponsored separatist-cum-religious terrorism of Jammu & Kashmir (J&K) started when the Congress (I) was in power due to the mishandling of the grievances of some sections of the Sikh community in Punjab and in the Sikh diaspora abroad and of the grievances of sections of the Assamese students over the Government's failure to take action against the hundreds of thousands (now millions) of illegal immigrants from Bangladesh into Assam. The ground work for the proxy war of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in J&K started when the Congress (I) was in power before 1989. This proxy war started in J&K when the V.P.Singh-led coalition, which had the support of the BJP,was in power in 1989-90 and it acquired momentum after the Congress(I) returned to power in 1991. The unchecked infiltration of Pakistani terrrorist organisations into J&K started in 1993 and it spread to other parts of India subsequently.
8. Both the Congress (I) and the BJP have to be held equally responsible for the spread of jihadi terrorism to other parts of India outside J&K starting from the Mumbai blasts of March 1993. The demolition of the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya by a Hindutva mob in December,1992, acted as the trigger for the spread of jihadi terrorism to other parts of India..
9. The Congress (I) has to be held equally responsible because it was in power in New Delhi at the time of the demolition and its inaction in the face of reports and assessments that the Hindutva elements congregating in Ayodhya might target the Masjid indirectly facilitated the demolition. The role of the BJP was public knowledge,but not the negligence of the Congress (I) Government led byNarasimha Rao, the then Prime Minister. He failed to act on the advice of his senior bureaucrats to dismiss the UP Government and impose the President's rule in order to protect the Masjid.
10.While the Congress (I) has to be blamed for the birth and growth of terrorism in many parts of the country, it has had a better record than other governments in dealing with terrorism after it started threatening the country. The credit for the petering-out of Khalistani terrorism in Punjab and the bringing under some control of the indigenous terrorism backed by the ISI in J&K should largely go to the Governments headed by Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh.
11 There were eight hijackings of aircraft of the Indian Airlines to Pakistan by terrorists when Indira Gandhi was in power--- seven by the Khalistani terrorists and one by the Jammu & Kashmir LiberationFront (JKLF).She refused to concede the demands of the hijackers in any of these cases. Similarly, she refused to concede the demand of the JKLF kidnappers who kidnapped Ravi Mhatre, an Indian diplomat posted at the Indian Assistant High Commission in Birmingham, in 1983for the release of Maqbool Butt, who had been sentenced to death for an act of terrorism, The terrorists killed Mhatre. She retaliated by having the death sentence on Maqbool Butt carried out. The only instance of weakness by a Congress (I) Government was in not taking action against the terrorists responsible for occupying the Hazratbal shrine in Srinagar in 1993. They were allowed to escape into Pakistan by Narasimha Rao in return for their agreeing to lift the siege.
12.The Congress (I)'s Prime Ministers---- Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi and Narasimha Rao---realised the importance of covert action by the intelligence community to counter Pakistan's proxy war. They had a well though-out strategy for countering Pakistan's proxy war. Covert action formed an important component of this strategy. It played an important role in countering the ISI's designs in Punjab. This
capability was reportedly wound up by Inder Gujral when he was the Prime Minister in 1997.It should also be underlined that in 1993 Narasimha Rao had succeeded in having Pakistan declared as a suspected state-sponsor of terrorism by the Clinton Administration --- though only for six months.
13.The BJP's record in dealing with insurgency and terrorism, when it was in power between 1998 and 2004, was marked by the mishandling of the hijacking of an IAC aircraft to Kandahar by terrorists of the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM) in December 1999, which led to the release of three notorious terrorists from detention of whom one MaulanaMasood Azhar later founded the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JEM) and another Omar Sheikh had Daniel Pearl, the US journalist, kidnapped and murdered in Karachi. Maulana Azhar released by the BJP-led Government later played an important role in the conspiracy to attack the Parliament House.
14. In the history of Indian counter-terrorism, there have been two instances of pathetic surrender to the terrorists by the Government.The first was in 1989 when the V.P.Singh Government shockingly surrendered to the demands of the indigenous Kashmiri terrorists to release some terrorists under detention in order to secure the release of the daughter of Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, the then Home Minister, who had been kidnapped by the terrorists. The second was in 1999 when the BJP-led Government agreed to release three terrorists---two of themPakistani nationals--- to secure the release of the IAC passengers.
15. However, I would blame more the bureaucrats in the national security establishment under the BJP-led Government than A.B.Vajpayee,the then Prime Minster, L.K.Advani, the then Home Minister, and Jaswant Singh, the then Minister for External Affairs, for the Kandahar fiasco. The bureaucrats were responsible for ensuring that the aircraft was not taken by the hijackers to a hostile territory where commando action would not be possible. They failed to do so.Once they mishandled the hijacking and allowed the aircraft to reach Kandahar, no commando action was possible because Kandahar is in hostile territory and Pakistan would not have allowed an Indian plane carrying commandoes to overfly its territory. As a result of thismishandling by the bureaucrats, the BJP leadership was in the unenviable position of having no other option but to swap the three terrorists for the release of over 100 innocent passengers. Manmohan Singh has been less than honest in comparing his action in sending commandoes to Mumbai during the terrorist attack of November,2008, to the BJP's failure to send the commandoes to Kandahar. Mumbai is in Indian territory, but Kandahar is in hostile foreign territory. A commando raid in Kandahar was out of the question.
16.The BJP, when in power, failed to implement its pre-election promise to issue a White Paper on the ISI's proxy war in India and to have Pakistan declared as a state-sponsor of terrorism. What was more,the security bureaucracy was surprised by the BJP-led Government's decision not to reverse the decision of Gujral to wind up the covert action capability.
17. Against this, the BJP's dubbing the Congress (I) led Government as soft in dealing with terrorism would hardly carry conviction. All political parties without exception mishandled counter-terrorism.They viewed terrorism not as a national threat to be countered with determination but as a political weapon to be exploited for partisan purposes.
18. There was a consistency of firmness in the policies of Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi and Narasimha Rao in dealing with Pakistan. Such a consistency was missing in the policies of the Government led by Vajpayee as well as its successor Government headed by Manmohan Singh. Both of them followed a policy of "kabi garam, kabi naram"(sometimes tough, sometimes soft). Vajpayee's decisions to go to Lahore in February 1999 to meet Nawaz Sharif, the then Prime Minister,and to invite Pervez Musharraf to India in 2001 and take him on a high-profile visit to Agra for talks were taken without consulting the intelligence community on the implications of the decisions on the ground situation. Both the visits ended in an embarrassing fiasco.
19. It swung to the other extreme after the attack on the Parliament House in December 2001 and confronted Pakistan with the threat of a war by mobilising the Armed Forces and keeping them in the mobilised state for nearly 10 months without achieving any results on the ground. The anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat in February 2002 after the massacre of some Hindu pilgrims travelling by train at Godhra allegedly by some Muslims and widespread perceptions in India and abroad of conscious inaction by the Narendra Modi Government in the initial stages deprived the Vajpayee Government of any moral high ground in its confrontation with Pakistan on the issue of terrorism.The Muslim anger over the riots added fuel to jihadi terrorism.
20. The much tauted coercive diplomacy with a doubtful outcome was followed by another swing by the agreement reached by Vajpayee with Musharraf in Islamabad in January 2004 under which Pakistan agreed that it would not support any terrorism emanating from Pakistani and Pakistan-controlled territory. The BJP-led Government mishandled the overtures for peace talks from a section of the Hizbul Mujahideen (HM) in 2001.This section had got tired of terrorism. This mishandling enabled the Pakistan-based leadership of the HM to identify and eliminate the members of this section.
21.Manmohan Singh's record in dealing with Pakistan on the terrorism issue was no better than that of the Vajpayee Government.He swung to the soft extreme when he signed an agreement with Musharraf at Havana in September,2006, for setting up a joint mechanism for dealing with terrorism despite strong reservations from the security bureaucracy and non-Governmental security experts over the wisdom of this action.When he was embarrassed by the November,2008, terrorist attack, which was carried out by the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) from Pakistani territory at least with the complicity of the ISI, if not at its instance, he swung to the other extreme of coercive diplomacy There has been a meaningless debate between the Congress (I) and the BJP as to who has been more coercive in dealing with Pakistan. Neither has been as seen from the post-Mumbai surge in infiltrations into J&K by Pakistan-trained terrorists.
22.It must be said to the credit of P.Chidambaram, who took over as the Home Minister after the Mumbai attack, that of all the HomeMinisters since Rajesh Pilot, who was Minister of State for Internal Security under Narasimha Rao, he has shown greater lucidity and energy in dealing with at least Pakistan-sponsored terrorism, though his record against the ULFA and the Naxalites (Maoists) is yet to be felt on the ground.His strategy as unveiled in the beginning of April shows the beginnings of a professional approach... Please see the report in'The Hindu" of April 8,2009, titled "Congress Unveils Roadmap to Tackle Terror".
23. Some of the points in the road map such as the setting up of a Permanent Crisis Management Group ( a war room) and the preparation of an operating manual( a war book for counter-terrorism) are old ideas of R.N.Kao, when he was the Senior Adviser to Indira Gandhi before her assassination in October,1984. These ideas were evolved by Kao in the context of the then raging Khalistani terrorism. The idea of a better state of preparedness by the counter-terrorism community was originally Rajiv's. Other ideas in Chidambaram's strategy such as improving the rapid response capability, the concept of joint action in which all agencies are jointly responsible for dealing with terrorism and improving threat-level communication not only to various layers of the bureaucracy, but also to the public have been heavily borrowed from the post-9/11 counter-terrorism architecture set up by the Homeland Security Department of the US.Chidambaram has paid welcome attention to strengthening the number and capability of the police, in order to strengthen its role as the weapon of first resort against terrorism.
24. His strategy seeks to deal comprehensively with terrorism----particularly of the jihadi, Pakistan-sponsored kind--- as a threat to national security. The measures outlined by him are meant to deal with acts of terrorism----preventive as well as dealing with them when prevention fails. But it hardly speaks of measures to deal with terrorist organisations in order to impose a high rate of attrition on them. It was the success of the Sri Lankan counter-terrorism machinery in imposing such a high rate of attrition on the LTTE, which has contributed to its remarkable success against the LTTE. The attrition component is missing from Chidambaram's strategy.
25. Despite this, it is a good beginning and shows a professional approach to counter-terrorism. One would have expected such a professional approach to emerge from the BJP, which projects itself as having greater expertise and a greater number of experts in counter-terrorism. But one's hopes have been belied. Its entire thinking seems to be based on the belief that the re-introduction of the POTA and the execution of the death sentence on Afzal Guru would mark the death-knell of terrorism. It would not. There is more to counter-terrorism than additional powers for the Police, which are necessary, and deterrent punishments.
26. The inability of the Government to prevent the Mumbai 26/11 attack provided the BJP with a wonderful pre-election opportunity to analyse what went wrong in Mumbai and confront the Government with a professional debate on its sins of commission and omission. It has failed to grasp the opportunity.(20-4-2009)
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt.of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For TopicalStudies, Chennai. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )
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