Author: Brahma Chellaney
Publication: The Wall Street Journal
Date: May 5, 2006
URL: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB114677778818844140.html?mod=opinion_main_europe_asia
This week's killing of 35 Hindu villagers
in Kashmir is an ugly reminder of how India is under siege from the forces
of terror. What the country needs is a credible counterterror campaign. Instead,
its citizens get political rhetoric and little else.
India has come a long way since the gloom
of the 1960s, a decade in which the Chinese military invasion shattered national
confidence, socialism began to fail and U.S. wheat aid gave rise to the image
of a country with a begging bowl. Today, a buoyant India is a knowledge powerhouse,
a nuclear-weapons state and a food exporter. But it still manifests some of
the same weak spots that crippled it several decades ago.
Nowhere is India's frailty more apparent than
on internal security, which historically has been its Achilles heel. With
one of the world's highest rates of terrorism, India today is battling underground
extremists on multiple fronts: Pakistan-aided Islamists in Kashmir and elsewhere;
Maoist rebels in a north-south corridor stretching from Nepal to its southeastern
coastline; and separatists in the restive northeast region between Burma,
Bangladesh and China-annexed Tibet.
The biggest threat India confronts is from
Pakistan-based jihadist groups that are carrying out daring assaults deep
across the border. The terrorist bombings in New Delhi, Bangalore and the
Hindu holy city of Benares in the past six months were all linked by investigators
to Pakistani militant groups. U.S. National Intelligence Director John Negroponte
told the Senate Intelligence Committee last February that these groups "represent
a persistent threat to regional stability and U.S. interests in South Asia
and the Near-East."
The jihadists, having ethnically cleansed
much of Indian Kashmir of its Hindu minority, are now targeting the small
number of Hindus that remain in isolated, rugged pockets. Monday's attacks
on three mountainside villages in a border belt were among the worst massacres
in Kashmir in recent years. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh responded typically
-- with empty rhetoric about the need to fight terror. But this was not backed
by any concrete plans to tackle the militants. Instead he simply held talks
with Kashmiri separatist politicians Wednesday.
The latest massacre comes at a time when Mr.
Singh's credibility is under attack in the face of mounting political problems
at home. Faced with bickering in his cabinet, the prime minister is looking
less like a leader and more a manager seeking to keep his government from
unraveling. The expected communist victories in state elections in West Bengal
and Kerala -- where results are expected next week -- won't help.
Mr. Singh, the latest in a series of septuagenarians
and octogenarians who have led India since 1989, epitomizes India's leadership
deficit. A technocrat who served as finance minister in the first half of
the 1990s, Mr. Singh became prime minister in 2004 by accident when Congress
Party leader Sonia Gandhi declined to assume that office and nominated him
instead. With the Congress Party holding only 26% of the seats in the ruling
lower house of Parliament, Mr. Singh has led a wobbly government dependent
on troublesome allies and with important Cabinet colleagues undercutting his
authority.
Weak leadership and political squabbling have
compounded India's internal-security challenges, spurring more terrorism.
Nothing can better illustrate its faltering approach than the way it handled
the deadliest terrorist strike in its capital last Oct. 29, when several bombs
killed 70 shoppers across the city. More people died in those synchronized
New Delhi bombings than in the worst attacks that the U.K., Israel, Australia
or Japan have suffered in recent years. Yet, after the Indian government's
ritual condemnation of the bombings and standard promise to defeat terror,
within a few days India put the bombings behind it and went back to what now
defines it -- partisan politics, scandal and sleaze.
India's former Chief Justice R.C. Lahoti felt
compelled to remind fellow citizens that, "We don't have the political
will to fight terrorism," when he retired from office last October. That
failing is conspicuous from India's reluctance to wage its own war on terror,
although terrorism represents an existential battle that will determine whether
it stays a free, secular, united state.
Not only is there no political will, the Indian
system has also become so effete that the state instruments are unable to
deliver results even on the odd occasion when the leadership displays a spine.
India cannot boast of a single successful commando raid to rescue hostages.
In December 1999, a hijacked Indian Airlines flight from Nepal reached the
terrorist lair of Kandahar in then Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, because a dithering
Indian leadership failed to seize the chance to intercept the plane when it
landed to refuel at Amritsar in India.
India's stoic, forbearing approach is now
embedded in the national psyche. It is as if the Indian republic has come
to accept terrorist strikes as the products of its unalterable geography or
destiny. That may help explain why India's laconic response to the Pakistan-based
jihadist groups' strategy to inflict death by a thousand cuts has been survival
by a thousand bandages. Just as India has come to accept a high level of political
corruption, it is starting to live with a high incidence of terrorism. Turning
this abysmal situation around demands a new mindset that will not allow India
to be continually gored. That means a readiness to do whatever is necessary
to end the terrorist siege of India.
Mr. Chellaney is professor of strategic studies
at the privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi.
