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| Chief minister Tarun Gogoi at the Maligaon blast site in Guwahati on Saturday. Picture by Eastern Projections |
After home minister P. Chidambaram’s unequivocal stance against terrorism during his New Year’s day visit to Guwahati, it appears that the security agencies have suddenly perked up. They are now delivering the goods.
But what a messy affair it has become. Would Pranjal Deka not been better alive than dead? Dead men tell no tales, so goes the famous James Hadley Chase novel. It would have been revealing to hear his narrative. Anyway, this rigmarole is neither new nor unexpected. When under pressure to deliver the police often take shortcuts and pot-shots.
Deka, a taxi driver by profession and therefore assumedly belonging to a class which has no influential peers, was accused of masterminding the recent blasts at three places in Guwahati city and therefore, conveniently bumped off in an encounter.
This storyline is familiar to every terror-prone metropolis. So also is the graduation of some policemen into encounter specialists. Those who believe terrorism must be dealt with firmly and swiftly will endorse the actions of the Assam Police. After all, society has the right to breathe free and live a secure life without looking behind their backs to see if a bomb is going to rip them off. And if Deka is not the fall guy but the mastermind behind the bloody demise of five innocent people and the injury to 60 others then he certainly deserves death penalty. We live in unsettling times when arguing about free and fair trials is sardonic. Yes, there will be few to shed tears shed for Deka because he is the underdog here.
The only problem with this swift and not-so-clean encounter is that Deka’s dossier is not accessible to the public. We have to buy what the police tell us. Period. But who cares? Like Dubyaman, post 9/11, are we not all geared up to blast the terrorists out of their holes in Pakistan? If they are breeding in our own soil then we should be wreaking vengeance on them without demur. Again the problem is that one fine day, human rights groups will wake up and say, “Hey why the heck are the innocent guys kicking the bucket while the bomb planters are still at large?”
Deka might have been a desperado who did what he did for money. We will never know. Poverty is a great motivator. And the rising poverty graph seems to match only that of the high-rise malls that deface the Guwahati skyline.
There is no argument at all that terrorism has to be dealt with resolve. It can brook no political interference. Assam minister Himanta Biswa Sarma says there will be “zero tolerance” towards terrorism. He affirms his party’s stand to “take on Ulfa, NDFB, Huji and Fuji”, plus many more acronyms that he forgot to add perhaps.
Chief minister Tarun Gogoi’s lips are now sealed. He has passed no comments at all on the recent blood-spattering gunshots that killed Deka and or the bone-shattering blasts that killed still some more innocents. Biswa Sarma is certainly calling the shots now. Gogoi has decided to let his junior mentor fire the political gun and just as well. He streetsmart, politically savvy and a smart media manager.
His next promotion can only be to the top job. So why not shoot a few blank cannons while the going is good. Although, how long this vengeful drama will continue and with what consequences, is difficult to tell.
The rhetoric about “talks with the Ulfa leadership” is an old school of thought. It is banal stuff. To say that government will talk only with groups that lay down arms is also facile. As long as Ulfa has firepower they will not talk. It serves the leadership better to be underground and carry on as mafia dons in a friendly country across the border. People like Paresh Barua and Ranjan Daimary have long since forgotten what it is to work for a piece of bread.
For them bread snatched through the barrel of the gun is far tastier than bhaat and mas tenga. To believe that such hardened militia will be remorseful of their crimes and lay down arms is idealistic rubbish.
In fact this game has carried on for far too long. So many would have been alive today if successive governments in Assam had not played fast and loose with militancy and instead fast-tracked the counter-terror exercise. There were and still are politicians on both sides of the divide who are not averse to breaking bread with Ulfa, more so in the run-up to the elections. Many a politician has used the outfit to coerce voters into the booth. These are realities that need to be considered. What are the networks the outfit is using to continue its extortion drive even up to this very moment? Who is aiding and abetting the outfit in and outside of the government? Are people willing to do a reality check?
What about peaceniks like Mamoni Goswami and her group of peace peddlers? What is the result of her initiative? We need an honest report on that. We also need to know why the Centre, under Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, agreed to Goswami’s preposterous peace formula? What was the unwritten, unspoken quid pro quo here? All these people served as oxygen tanks for Ulfa. Will Union home minister P. Chidambaram, too, succumb to another hackneyed peace recipe should it also be advanced by some gullible personality? For Assam’s sake, we hope not.
It is my firm belief that the police are a key factor in combating terror. This is by no means the role of the army. That arrangements like the unified command were required is only because the police allowed themselves to be had by politicians. The police’s own internal politics with different personalities owing allegiance to different politicians instead of to their tasks demoralised the rank and file. If the police establishment decides to insulate itself from partisan politics; if it reclaims its credibility by setting high standards of accountability to the people and elected government, terrorism will have lost major ground.
Indeed, there is a strong case for upscaling counter-insurgency skills and developing expertise in intelligence gathering. Much has been said about the redundancy of our security arsenal. Although one does not propose an eye-for-an-eye philosophy, we cannot also be seen as so congenitally weak and demoralised that we cannot fight back when attacked. If we have been flashing this defeatist message to terror mongers, then it is time to delete it off our mental screens.
(The writer can be contacted at patricia17@rediffmail.com)
