Countering Terrorism -------------------------- In countering Terrorism, there are two kinds of State responses that are not only inadequate but also incorrect. (1) To take counter-terrorism in a manner of fire-fighting operations. By the time the fire is put out the house is also destroyed and the evidence is consumed by fire. In this attitude, the responder’s presumption is that his main responsibility is to put out the fire and the house is saved by default. (2) The other wrong response is to take police actions in military terms and to treat counter-terrorism as a ‘war on terror’, a ‘low-intensity warfare’ etc. Borrowing from Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and somewhat deviating from it, I would venture to say that the language used in such a response shapes the attitude of the responders. The responders see themselves as the defenders and the so called terrorists as the enemies of the country. In their psychological attitudes, the responders assume that they are counter-terror soldiers and imagine a border behind which are these enemies. They then forget that there is an in-between space which is peopled and where law is prevailing. In war, many legal norms are presumed to be suspended and so are in counter-terrorism war. It is not seen in terms of a social conflict and that its genesis may lie in the peopled space. The political unconscious of the social space is ignored or not understood. Unfortunately, routinized and mechanical approaches to terrorism have made these two kinds of attitudes dominant amongst the security forces engaged in counter-terrorism, and in India, that approach began with counter-insurgency operations with a mindset in which terrorism and insurgency were treated in the same plane. From the beginning of insurgency in this country, which is from the start of the Naga rebellion, the army is being used to deal with such internal security situations and the police have been playing a secondary role. The war rhetoric has been dominant in counter-terrorism (and counter-insurgency) ever since. In this language, the imaginary enemy line is not on the actual state border but in the internal social space and as a result the fighting frontier is within the country’s governed space. In this frontier-zone, the elimination of enemy becomes the primary responsibility and upholding of law takes the back seat. Since the imaginary enemy line gets drawn up within the internal space of the state, the identity of the rebels and that of the other members of the community to which they belong often get jumbled. No doubt, the group or the sections of the people who adopt terror as a method to achieve some political goal develop a psyche in which the suffering of others is seen as a triumph of theirs. But one needs to be aware that behind such psychological deviation there are root causes and these causes arise in the state’s own socio-political space. The unresolved causes take the form of social conflict, and when they are protracted, a desperate group may see solutions only in their liberation from the prevailing power-mould. They may move into a terror psychology in which the resistance to the state power or the ruling elite is sought through extreme violence. Innocent victims become their soft targets whose destruction is used to communicate a strong message. However, since resentments erupt from the political unconscious of the society, the state needs to be conscious of this dimension in addressing the problem. The use of a simple crime control method or treating the radicalized elements as enemies to be engaged in a battle appear to me to be inadequate as well as wrong. The main responsibility in this regard is that of the state, and therefore, in addressing the whole gamut of the problem the state cannot allow police or military response to be isolated. Police response to terrorism has to be an integral part of the socio-political action plan of the state. Forgetting this, if a repressive policy is undertaken, it does not affect the terror perpetrators alone but its rigour affects the people in general and this in turn increases disaffection that only helps the terrorists. The cycle of violence continues instead of being broken. However, when terrorism is sponsored by one State against another or when it has foreign private origin based on ideology, it turns into a proxy war and there needs to be an international consensus to deal with such terrorism by mutual cooperation and intelligence-sharing. The most dreaded future scenario is that such international terrorism may cause intense regional war that may be the prelude to a third world war. One can visualize a nuclear war in such a scenario that can cause disaster to the human civilization itself. The World should use all the sanity to prevent such a scenario.
Posted on: Thu, 27 Nov 2014 00:03:58 +0000
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