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“Don’t club Pakistan with India as victim of terror”

General V. P. Malik

CHANDIGARH: Former Army Chief, General V. P. Malik, on Tuesday warned the international community against clubbing India and Pakistan as equal victims of terrorism, especially when the latter’s ISI network over the years had launched at least 24 terrorist organisations many of which were now out of its control as “a mad dog often bites the hand that feeds it.”

Chairing a round-table on “Security sector reforms: Challenges of terrorism” organised by the Institute for Development and Communication (IDC) as part of its ongoing “Inaugural Series” here, he cautioned that even if Pakistan acceded to India’s demand for handing over the 20-odd wanted terrorists, it would not mean the end of terrorism, which according to him was a method of employing political violence in pursuit of an ideology.

Gen. Malik also questioned the talk about evolving a global strategy as “there is nothing called global terrorism”. Arguing that it was borne out of local issues, he said it would be improper to link crime, justice delivery and poverty with terrorism.

Prof. Christopher Stone from Harvard University, US, in his presentation sought to emphasise that security sector reforms in response to terrorism had distorted the thrust of the criminal justice reforms which were urgently needed for a democratic civil society to function.

The Chairman of the Punjab Social Development and Governance Reforms Commission and IDC Director, Pramod Kumar, said terrorism was not merely a state of mind but a political strategy that used violence to punish the aggressor. The senseless terrorist attacks in Mumbai and the subsequent war cry against Pakistan were nothing but competitive terrorism which only reinforced the cult of violence, he added.

Dr. Kumar said there was an immediate need to learn lessons instead of teaching others a few. He said that post-9/11 US attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan as part of “global war against terror” had rendered the world more vulnerable to attacks now. Unlike the Khalistani and Kashmiri violence which was rooted in a region, terrorism had turned completely footloose now, he observed.

Cop-turned-academician K.S. Subramanian said the root cause of terrorism in India lay in the fact that the Police Act was anti-people, the police had a para-military structure that was meant for suppressing the masses and not for detecting or tackling crime. The first 298 sections of the Indian Penal Code were dedicated to securing the State alone, he quipped.

Former Punjab Police intelligence chief M.P.S. Aulakh rued “continuation of the reactionary mode while dealing with terrorism”. He said that despite losing a Prime Minister, a former Prime Minister, a devastating attack on Parliament and having to storm religious places to flush out terrorists, the country had failed to evolve a cohesive and positive strategy to counter terrorism. The problem, he added, was accentuated by the fact that political leaders were insulated from ground realities and based their decisions on second-hand information. Former Punjab Police chief K.S. Dhillon said erstwhile anti-terror laws did not succeed as they were never implemented fully, leading to the need to raise a new federal agency now to deal with the situation.

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