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India, a nation for soft targets

It is, as I write, the early hours of Janmashtami, the festival honouring the birth of Krishna. While popular tradition delights in showing him at his mischievous best, Krishna has always had a more serious nature associated with him. Scholars down the ages have hailed his Bhagvad Gita as the very essence of Indian thought. (To this day it is on this revered book that Hindus take their oaths in court.) And the Gita stresses action, not passive acceptance, as the duty of a man. Why then are the Indians of today so ridiculously inert?

Earlier this week, there were spirited debates in the Houses of Parliament where representatives of the Congress (I) and of the erstwhile Third Front disparaged the Atal Bihari Vajpayee ministry for its passivity in the face of militant outrages, specifically the slaughter of pilgrims as they were going to Amritsar. They were fine speeches, but I could not help reflecting that they might have sounded more credible coming from other mouths.

What steps did the Congress (I) and the Third Front ministries take to combat terrorism when they were in office? Is it not they who started down the slippery path of releasing captured prisoners in exchange for civilians taken hostage? Mulayam Singh Yadav might plead for "pro-active" measures today, but it was he, as defence minister, who once characterised infiltration as brothers returning home!

No, I am afraid every political party has, to a greater or lesser extent, caved in to terrorist demands when necessary. But in a democracy the leaders are merely the representatives of the people. I am afraid that we, the people of India at large, are just as much to blame for supine behaviour.

What happened, for instance, when an Indian Airlines flight was hijacked to Kandahar in December 1999? Was there any attempt at being stoic, or of saying that the honour of the nation was worth just a bit more than the lives of individual citizens? No, I am afraid we came out of it rather badly.

The relatives of the victims held emotional conferences where they demanded that the Government of India release terrorists. The media, seemingly bored at the lack of any other major news, gave them all the column inches and air time that hearts could desire. If you ask me, the only people who retained their dignity through those agonising days were the men and women taken hostage -- so much so that some of the foreigners on the flight later commented in amazement at how they had kept their poise. One of them even took the Government of India to task for releasing any militants; it would have been better, he said, to have died for India's sake.

To be perfectly honest, I am not sure how I myself would have reacted under such stress. Had some relative or friend of mine been on that flight from Kathmandu, would I have been any more resilient? I do not know. But the fact remains that the behaviour of all concerned could only have helped the militants' morale.

But what, if anything, have we learned from that mess? Very little, almost nothing. The boot is on the other foot. It seems to have inspired the sandalwood smuggler Veerappan to take a leaf from the terrorist book and kidnap the Kannada superstar Rajkumar. He too wants sympathisers released and here too ministries are buckling under pressure. The government of Karnataka chose to withdraw cases filed against several men. Jayalalitha too is trying to fish in troubled waters, lambasting the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam government without a thought for the future. Is that really the way to bring Veerappan to heel?

Frankly, we have reached the point where even other nations, forget about terrorists, seem to believe that India's prisons are a little more than rest-houses. The Russians, for instance, made a gigantic fuss about the men jailed for their involvement in the Purulia arms drop case. It should come as no surprise that they got their way and the men were released.

You might say that this was worse in some ways than the release of prisoners which led to the liberation of the prisoners aboard the Indian Airlines flight in Kandahar. At that point, there was some semblance of a quid pro quo, where is the deal here?

Do you think that other people don't notice all this? Was it just a coincidence that in distant Sierra Leone, it was an Indian contingent that became the pet target of a rag-tag bunch of third-rate crooks? (By the way, I do not understand why India chooses to participate in these ill-defined United Nations missions. It is nonsense to say that it raises the country's profile; the United States, say, or China didn't bother -- does anyone have any less respect for their military might?)

Of course, other nations too have been forced to give in to the demands made by hostage-takers, even the mighty United States. But I don't think there is any other nation that has done so as consistently as India. It was certainly not how the Italian government reacted when Aldo Moro, one of nation's most prominent politicians, was kidnapped. He was murdered, but not a single prisoner was liberated. Would an Indian ministry have the same courage?

Our leaders often state that the twenty-first century shall belong to India because of the nation's expertise in information technology. I have my doubts over how realistic this is, but that is a story for another day. All I can say today is that we are rapidly becoming a nation famous not for its software, but for offering soft targets!

Krishna, be it noted, did not advise Arjuna to turn the other cheek; he ordered the vacillating Pandava prince to pick up Gandiva and fight. It would behoove Indians this Janmashtami to pay heed.

T V R Shenoy