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| India-Pakistan | |
| Heroes, not wimps, make nations | |
| 2007-05-06 | |
| By Swapan Dasgupta A controversy being played out in Britain may offer lessons for India's war on terror. During the 'fertiliser bomb' trials that led to the conviction of five British Muslims, it emerged that the intelligence agency MI5 had put two of the perpetrators of the ghastly July 7, 2005 London bombings under surveillance in 2004. However, owing to a misjudgement the monitoring was discontinued, with tragic results. The revelation that Mohammed Siddique Khan and Shehzad Tanveer were actually on the police radar before they killed 52 people in the London Underground has outraged many people. The police and MI5 have been mercilessly pilloried in the media and there are demands for a public inquiry into the costly lapse. If only, it is being said, the surveillance had gone on many lives would have been saved.
The question of how much leeway the police should be given to fight fanatical terrorists has agitated democratic societies. Pre-emptive action is, of course, the best recourse but this may also lead to some wrong numbers being dialled. Arguably, many of those incarcerated by the Americans without trial in Guantanamo Bay were harmless cranks. Yet, can we honestly say that the world would have been a better place if Taliban-trained radicals were roaming free, plotting vengeance? | |
| Posted by:John Frum |
| #13 I understand that some of those that were released from Gitmo showed up in battles again. More precisely, some have already been bagged. The rest are still running around making trouble. |
| Posted by: gromgoru 2007-05-06 21:01 |
| #12 Quite a few of them, actually, JohnQC. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2007-05-06 20:43 |
| #11 I have long advocated both a low threshold for arrest of terrorists, and reverse onus in Habeas Corpus hearings. Terrorism is about taking away rights. Ergo: defend rights by imposing obligatory harsh treatment of terrorists, onto government agents. Frankly, a good terrorist is a dead one. |
| Posted by: Sneaze 2007-05-06 20:17 |
| #10 I understand that some of those that were released from Gitmo showed up in battles again. |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2007-05-06 15:09 |
| #9 Arguably, many of those incarcerated by the Americans without trial in Guantanamo Bay were harmless cranks. Well armed 'Harmless Cranks' are NOT "Harmless." |
| Posted by: Redneck Jim 2007-05-06 12:30 |
| #8 from another Indian journalist... Police: our willing executioners Encounters are almost as old as independent India. They began in the 1950s when policemen who were fighting the dacoit menace in the Chambal ravines discovered that the best way to destroy the power of the daku gangs was to murder their leaders. Because dacoits held entire districts in their thrall (a phenomenon celebrated in Hindi cinema from the 1950s to the 1970s), policemen would shoot the outlaws dead and then line up their bodies for villagers to view. Triumphant cops would be photographed with their feet on the heads of dacoits in imitation of pictures of great white hunters and the word would go out: do not be frightened of these thugs; the police will kill them one day. Though we romanticise the early days of independent India, the truth is that this policy had widespread public sanction even in that era. The political class wanted it known that nobody could escape the power of the Indian state and law-abiding citizens were entirely pleased to see the dacoits shot dead without the inconvenience of the judicial process. In the 1960s, the same approach was followed in fighting the Naxalites and in combating insurgencies in the Northeast. By the 1970s, police forces in the cow belt regarded it as totally legitimate to shoot mafia leaders dead in bogus encounters. Many will argue that militancy in the Punjab would not have ended without the fake encounters that were the hallmark of the state policeÂ’s fight-back against terrorists (the so-called bullet-for-bullet policy) in the 1980s. And by the 1990s, every police force in India was cheerfully bumping off gangsters in cold blood. Each time the policy of bogus encounters was questioned by human rights activists, the same arguments were trotted out. It was not that the police enjoyed murdering people, we were told. It was that the judicial process was so slow, corrupt and time-consuming that it was almost impossible to bring hardened gangsters to justice. Far easier to just shoot them dead. Perhaps these arguments were valid when it came to fighting terrorism. But as a means of imposing law and order? Surely, it was not that difficult to persuade judges to deny bail to gangsters? Was it really impossible to find evidence against hardened criminals? |
| Posted by: John Frum 2007-05-06 12:04 |
| #7 The title should read: Heros make nations. Wimps give nations away. |
| Posted by: DarthVader 2007-05-06 10:41 |
| #6 A self-trap. Man bots are geting so mannerly. |
| Posted by: Shipman 2007-05-06 10:23 |
| #5 Helloltg - this is just a testing, don't worry about it |
| Posted by: Testervsf 2007-05-06 09:25 |
| #4 The system, it would seem, proved incapable of distinguishing between normal circumstances and conditions of war. Terrorism can't be fought by the Queensbury rules. This should sound familiar to Americans, Canadians, British, French, German, etc. readers. Not only is it absurd to apply due process to foreigners whose only "right" was to be hanged as pirates, our domestic traitors use the law to hamstring every effort to defend civilization against nihilism (be it Marxist or muslim). |
| Posted by: Excalibur 2007-05-06 09:07 |
| #3 . . . it is entirely possible that had Khan and Tanveer been detained by the authorities in a pre-emptive move, there would have been charges of human rights abuse by the same people who are today demanding an inquiry . . . Sadly true. Some people aren't antiwar, they're on the other side. |
| Posted by: Mike 2007-05-06 07:26 |
| #2 Arguably, many of those incarcerated by the Americans without trial in Guantanamo Bay were harmless cranks. Yet, can we honestly say that the world would have been a better place if Taliban-trained radicals were roaming free, plotting vengeance? So, which are they? Harmless cranks or vengeful and plotting Taliban-trained radicals? This is pure journalistic double-speak. It's long past tea for these scribbling assclowns to finally realize that anyone infected by Islamic indoctrination poses a direct threat to society. |
| Posted by: Zenster 2007-05-06 04:52 |
| #1 In striking a balance between civil liberties and national security, the authorities have a daunting task. Or you can stop pretending that Islam is just another religion like Christianity or Buddhism. |
| Posted by: gromgoru 2007-05-06 01:40 |