Page 3 of 3 The monster in India's mirror
By Arundhati Roy
It was after the 2001 parliament attack that the first serious questions began
to be raised. A campaign by a group of lawyers and activists exposed how
innocent people had been framed by the police and the press, how evidence was
fabricated, how witnesses lied, how due process had been criminally violated at
every stage of the investigation.
Eventually, the courts acquitted two out of the four accused, including S A R
Geelani, the man whom the police claimed was the mastermind of the operation. A
third, Showkat Guru, was
acquitted of all the charges brought against him, but was then convicted for a
fresh, comparatively minor offense.
The Supreme Court upheld the death sentence of another of the accused, Mohammad
Afzal. In its judgment the court acknowledged that there was no proof that
Mohammed Afzal belonged to any terrorist group, but went on to say, quite
shockingly, "The collective conscience of the society will only be satisfied if
capital punishment is awarded to the offender."
Even today we don't really know who the terrorists that attacked the Indian
parliament were and who they worked for.
More recently, on September 19th of this year, we had the controversial
"encounter" at Batla House in Jamia Nagar, Delhi, where the Special Cell of the
Delhi police gunned down two Muslim students in their rented flat under
seriously questionable circumstances, claiming that they were responsible for
serial bombings in Delhi, Jaipur, and Ahmedabad in 2008. An assistant
commissioner of police, Mohan Chand Sharma, who played a key role in the
parliament attack investigation, lost his life as well. He was one of India's
many "encounter specialists", known and rewarded for having summarily executed
several "terrorists".
There was an outcry against the Special Cell from a spectrum of people, ranging
from eyewitnesses in the local community to senior Congress party leaders,
students, journalists, lawyers, academics and activists, all of whom demanded a
judicial inquiry into the incident.
In response, the BJP and L K Advani lauded Mohan Chand Sharma as a "Braveheart"
and launched a concerted campaign in which they targeted those who had dared to
question the integrity of the police, saying to do so was "suicidal" and
calling them "anti-national". Of course, there has been no enquiry.
Only days after the Batla House event, another story about "terrorists"
surfaced in the news. In a report submitted to a sessions court, the Central
Bureau of Investigation (CBI) said that a team from Delhi's Special Cell (the
same team that led the Batla House encounter, including Mohan Chand Sharma) had
abducted two innocent men, Irshad Ali and Moarif Qamar, in December 2005,
planted two kilograms of RDX (explosives) and two pistols on them, and then
arrested them as "terrorists" who belonged to Al Badr (which operates out of
Kashmir).
Ali and Qamar, who have spent years in jail, are only two examples out of
hundreds of Muslims who have been similarly jailed, tortured and even killed on
false charges.
This pattern changed in October 2008 when Maharashtra's Anti-Terrorism Squad
(ATS), which was investigating the September 2008 Malegaon blasts, arrested
Hindu preacher Sadhvi Pragya, a self-styled God man, Swami Dayanand Pande and
Lieutenant Colonel Purohit, a serving officer of the Indian army. All the
arrested belong to Hindu nationalist organizations, including a Hindu
supremacist group called Abhinav Bharat.
The Shiv Sena, the BJP, and the RSS condemned the Maharashtra ATS and vilified
its chief, Hemant Karkare, claiming he was part of a political conspiracy and
declaring that "Hindus could not be terrorists." L K Advani changed his mind
about his policy on the police and made rabble rousing speeches to huge
gatherings in which he denounced the ATS for daring to cast aspersions on holy
men and women.
On November 25, newspapers reported that the ATS was investigating the high
profile VHP chief Pravin Togadia's possible role in the blasts in Malegaon (a
predominantly Muslim town). The next day, in an extraordinary twist of fate,
Hemant Karkare was killed in the Mumbai attacks. Chances are the new chief,
whoever he is, will find it hard to withstand the political pressure that is
bound to be brought on him over the Malegaon investigation.
While the Sangh Parivar does not seem to have come to a final decision over
whether or not it is anti-national and suicidal to question the police, Arnab
Goswami, anchorperson of Times Now television, has stepped up to the plate. He
has taken to naming, demonizing and openly heckling people who have dared to
question the integrity of the police and armed forces.
My name and the name of the well-known lawyer Prashant Bhushan have come up
several times. At one point, while interviewing a former police officer, Arnab
Goswami turned to the camera: "Arundhati Roy and Prashant Bhushan," he said. "I
hope you are watching this. We think you are disgusting."
For a TV anchor to do this in an atmosphere as charged and as frenzied as the
one that prevails today amounts to incitement, as well as threat, and would
probably in different circumstances have cost a journalist his or her job.
So, according to a man aspiring to be the next prime minister of India, and
another who is the public face of a mainstream TV channel, citizens have no
right to raise questions about the police.
This in a country with a shadowy history of suspicious terror attacks, murky
investigations, and fake "encounters". This in a country that boasts of the
highest number of custodial deaths in the world yet refuses to ratify the
international covenant on torture. A country where the ones who make it to
torture chambers are the lucky ones because at least they've escaped being
"encountered" by our Encounter Specialists. A country where the line between
the underworld and the Encounter Specialists virtually does not exist.
The monster in the mirror
How should those of us whose hearts have been sickened by the knowledge of all
of this view the Mumbai attacks, and what are we to do about them?
There are those who point out that US strategy has been successful inasmuch as
the United States has not suffered a major attack on its home ground since
9/11. However, some would say that what America is suffering from now is far
worse.
If the idea behind the 9/11 terror attacks was to goad America into showing its
true colors, what greater success could the terrorists have asked for? The US
military is bogged down in two unwinnable wars, which have made the United
States the most hated country in the world. Those wars have contributed greatly
to the unraveling of the American economy and who knows, perhaps eventually the
American empire.
(Could it be that battered, bombed Afghanistan, the graveyard of the Soviet
Union, will be the undoing of this one too?)
Hundreds of thousands of people, including thousands of American soldiers, have
lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan. The frequency of terrorist strikes on
US allies/agents (including India) and US interests in the rest of the world
has increased dramatically since 9/11.
George W Bush, the man who led the US response to 9/11, is a despised figure
not just internationally, but also by many of his own people.
Who can possibly claim that the United States is winning the "war on terror?"
Homeland security has cost the US government billions of dollars. Few
countries, certainly not India, can afford that sort of price tag. But even if
we could, the fact is that this vast homeland of ours cannot be secured or
policed in the way the United States has been. It's not that kind of homeland.
We have a hostile nuclear-weapons state that is slowly spinning out of control
as a neighbor; we have a military occupation in Kashmir and a shamefully
persecuted, impoverished minority of more than 150 million Muslims who are
being targeted as a community and pushed to the wall, whose young see no
justice on the horizon, and who, were they to totally lose hope and radicalize,
will end up as a threat not just to India, but to the whole world.
If 10 men can hold off commandos and the police for three days, and if it takes
half a million soldiers to hold down the Kashmir Valley, do the math. What kind
of homeland security can secure India?
Nor for that matter will any other quick fix.
Anti-terrorism laws are not meant for terrorists; they're for people that
governments don't like. That's why they have a conviction rate of less than 2%.
They're just a means of putting inconvenient people away without bail for a
long time and eventually letting them go.
Terrorists like those who attacked Mumbai are hardly likely to be deterred by
the prospect of being refused bail or being sentenced to death. It's what they
want.
What we're experiencing now is blowback, the cumulative result of decades of
quick fixes and dirty deeds. The carpet's squelching under our feet.
The only way to contain - it would be naive to say end - terrorism is to look
at the monster in the mirror. We're standing at a fork in the road. One sign
says "Justice,” the other "Civil War". There's no third sign and there's no
going back. Choose.
Arundhati Roy was born in 1959 in Shillong, India. She studied
architecture in New Delhi, where she now lives, and has worked as a film
designer, actor and screenplay writer in India. A 10th anniversary edition of
her novel, The God of Small Things (Random House), for which she
received the 1997 Booker Prize, will be officially published within days. She
is also the author of numerous non-fiction titles, including An
Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire. This piece was published by Outlook India,
which is sharing it with TomDispatch.com.
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