No compromise with terror: Indira's lesson for Manmohan

A terrorist who waged war against the Indian state sits on death row. A militant group carries out a shocking terrorist attack and demands that the prisoner be released. How should the government respond? No, this is not about what happened in Delhi on Wednesday, when an email purported to have been sent by the Harkat-ul-Jihadi-al-Islami (HuJI), claiming responsibility for the blast at the Delhi High Court, demanded that the death sentence on Afzal Guru for the 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament be commuted. This is about what happened a generation ago, in 1984, when then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi confronted just such a dilemma. Curiously, the clueless UPA government, which faces that question today and whose only response thus far has been to issue anodyne statements, may be able to draw a lesson from Indira Gandhi’s response when she faced down a similar terrorist demand in her time. The case history of that 1984 incident is well chronicled, but merits reiteration. In February of that year, Ravindra Mhatre, an Indian diplomat at the Consulate in Birmingham, was abducted from a Birmingham neighbourhood that had a high Kashmiri-British population. The Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front, which was waging a bloody separatist campaign with its base in Birmingham and its foot soldiers in Kashmir and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, claimed responsibility for the abduction. As the price for Mhatre’s release, it demanded, among other things, the release of JKLF prisoners in India, including the group’s founder Maqbool Butt, then lodged in Tihar. Butt, one of the most high-profile Kashmir separatist-terrorist leaders of that time, had been arrested in 1966 for leading an ambush of an Indian security patrol in Kashmir, but escaped to Pakistan by digging a tunnel from the Srinagar prison. Arrested again in 1976, and facing the death sentence for his earlier crime, Butt filed a clemency petition, which was under consideration even until 1984, when the JKLF abducted Mhatra and demanded his release. But two days after Mhatra was kidnapped, his body was found near Birmingham. Evidently Indira Gandhi had refused to negotiate with the terrorists, although that meant she and the country had to deal with the pain of seeing a senior diplomat killed. Exactly three days later, Butt, the convicted terrorist, was hanged when his clemency plea was rejected. The parallels between the case of Maqbool Butt and Afzal Guru don’t run too deep. Yet, after Wednesday’s blast, and HuJI’s demand for Afzal Guru’s release, political pressure will begin to mount for Afzal to be hanged immediately. Liberal activists like Arundhati Roy and Praful Bidwai have, on the other hand, argued in the past that the case against Afzal is flawed. The issue raises the question of whether the Indian state has formulated a policy on how to respond to demands from terrorists. Its record of the past doesn’t do it any merit. For instance, the VP Singh government buckled under pressure after Rubaiya Sayeed, the daughter of the then Union Home Minister Mufti Mohammed Sayeed, was abducted by the JKLF in December 1989. The kidnappers demanded the release of five JKLF cadres in prison, and although the then Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah was against yielding to the terrorists’ demand, the VP Singh government caved in. [caption id=“attachment_78979” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Manmohan Singh leaves after visiting the injured persons of High Court blast. PTI”]  [/caption] Ten years later, the AB Vajyapee government similarly released three jailed terrorists, including Jaish-e-Mohammed founder Maulana Masood Azhar, following the hijacking of Indian Airlines flight 814 to Kandahar. Azhar’s JeM was subsequently involved in several other crimes against India, including the attack on the Indian Parliament in 2001, the same crime for which Afzal Guru was sentenced to death. Terrorist hostage situations – like the case of Mhatre, Rubaiya and the Kandahar hijacking - are, of course, vastly different from random attacks like Delhi’s High Court blast. In the hostage situation, the governments of the day have to take a difficult decision on how to respond since hostage lives are involved; except in Mhatre’s case, the governments of the day surrendered to the terrorists’ demands. The argument invariably trotted out in such situations is that the compulsion of saving hostages’ lives is paramount. That argument does have some merit, but it overlooks the fact that even when the hostage release is secured by yielding to the terrorists’ demands, there is a future blood price that’s being paid. The same Masood Azhar and other released terrorists have then gone on to inflict much more damage and claim many more lives with more terrorist attacks, which ought to be factored into the equation, but isn’t. Indira Gandhi’s record of facing up to terrorism isn’t, of course, flawless: she built up the Bhindranwale Army and eventually paid with her life for it. And she supplied moral and material support for the LTTE, which then claimed her son’s life. Yet, the zero-tolerance approach that she adopted in the Mhatre case has much to commend itself. Sure, it came with enormous pain for Mhatre’s family and for the country, but in the end, it was entirely in character with Indira Gandhi’s image of a leader who had the courage of her convictions – and was willing to stand up for them. The Manmohan Singh government, which has elevated masterly inactivity to a fine art, can do worse than draw inspiration from her record of dealing with terrorists who make demands of it.