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The Rediff Special/ Professor Brahma Chellaney

India cannot forever remain in a reactive, defensive mode

The government's New Year Eve hostages-for-terrorists swap at Kandahar capped a millennium of defeat, capitulation and shame in Indian history. It was as if India consciously ended the second millennium in accord with its ignominious history.

No large society in the world has suffered the extended ignominy or subjugation that India did in the second millennium in the period from Mahmud Ghauri's triumphant entry into Delhi to the departure of the British colonialists. This exceptional history has coloured independent India's thinking and approach, inculcating a subaltern mindset and producing what Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal long ago called a soft State. The Kandahar deal was a reminder that India, which loves to talk about its 'glorious' traditions, needs to take a honest look at itself in the mirror of its inglorious history.

The hijacking saga involving the Indian Airlines jetliner left India bruised, with its self-esteem dented, its ineptitude bared and its vulnerability to further acts of terrorism heightened. A nuclear-armed nation of a billion people buckled to demands of five militant Islamic hijackers after being held to ransom for more than a week, during which government policy-making ground to a virtual standstill as Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee held daily crisis meetings of his Cabinet.

The saga will be best remembered for the ignoble way External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh personally delivered three hardcore Kashmiri terrorists to the hijackers in Kandahar, the lair of international terrorists. This was the first instance since hijackings began in the late 1960s that a government minister flew to known terrorist territory to hand over terrorist prisoners to terrorists holding a planeload of hostages.

Admission of a reversal does not have to take the form of grovelling. But Jaswant Singh's flight to Kandahar with the three terrorists amounted to that. That, plus his repeated good-conduct certificates to Afghanistan's thuggish Taliban militia, have turned him into a cartoonist's delight. The 'External Appeasement Minister' has emerged as 'India's new Taliban,' at least in newspaper cartoons. His friends in Washington were of little help in the hostage crisis.

The Vajpayee government now needs to both redeem its image and recoup the country's fight against terrorism. This can be done only by striking some major blows against terrorism and its backers.

The only way India can effectively fight the scourge of terrorism is not by sinking more and more of its scarce resources in anti-terrorist operations at home, but by taking the battle to the terrorists's springboards and delivering a strong deterrent blow whenever the militants strike. No counter-terrorism action can be risk-free. But at Amritsar India was timorous to take any risk. A golden opportunity for India that the hijackers had not bargained for – the aircraft being forced to land in Amritsar because of low fuel – was allowed to slip by.

That mistakes were made in handling the hijacking is being implicitly acknowledged at the highest level. Had the failure to immobilise the hijacked airliner in Amritsar not been seen as a blunder, the government would not have ordered an internal probe.

Also necessary is a probe into the strangely inconsistent messages that were sent to Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates and the Taliban regarding the further movement of the hijacked airliner. Most odd was Jaswant Singh's expressed desire that the Taliban not allow the plane to take off from their terrorist paradise of Kandahar.

The hijack crisis evocatively exposed India's political diffidence and diplomatic gullibility under a government that came to power on a fiercely nationalistic agenda. The message terrorist groups will read is that if such a government can bow, India is an easy target.

India's loss of face over the hijacking was largely self-made: A series of blunders compelled it to negotiate on bended knees. Even in negotiations with the terrorists, India did not fully employ the negotiating card. The Indian negotiating team was sent to Kandahar not to psychologically wear down the hijackers's resolve, but to cut a deal.

The government has now correctly sought to undertake joint counter-terrorism operations with Nepal. As India shares a long open border with Nepal, its security perimeter should naturally extend up to the northern Nepalese frontier. If India cannot fight terrorism in Nepal, the battle is lost. Alternatively, if Nepal does not fully co-operate, India will have to redraw its security perimeter by sealing the Indo-Nepalese border and ending travel without visa or passport.

While no nation, however focused and determined, can completely free itself of terrorist infiltration and hijacking, the level of threat from such acts to a State is determined by the manner in which it responds to them. A laid-back, uncoordinated or slipshod response only exposes a country as a soft target, emboldening extremists to commit further acts of terror against it.

Lamentably, twice in 1999, first in Kargil and then on the hijacking, India failed to deliver a clear-cut, effective deterrent message against further acts of clandestine or terrorist warfare. Instead, a wrong message unwittingly got conveyed: That a negligent, reactive India is content to take on invaders and hijackers on their terms. Both in Kargil and Amritsar, India faltered in responding quickly and methodically to a crisis, thereby allowing the emergency to become more critical.

When the Kargil invasion first came to light, India took a number of days to assess the level of aggression and improvise a policy set-up to pursue war, allowing the encroachers to entrench themselves and widen their operation. In the absence of an integrated military force and command structure, the Cabinet first rejected the idea of airstrikes and then reversed its decision exactly a week later. Without an institutional structure in peacetime, India can never be fully ready for war. It still does not have an integrated military force, with the three services kept divided and competing among themselves for budgetary resources.

The hijacking particularly brought out Indian diplomacy in poor light, with Jaswant Singh focusing more on media spin than on longer-term ramifications. Before he left for Kandahar, he publicly declared that the government strategy was to protect both the passengers and crew on board and the national interests. After he delivered the three freed terrorists, his public comments emphasised only the first goal and were tellingly silent on the second.

Until the hijacking happened, India had circumspectly stayed away from the two hostile regimes lacking legitimacy – the military junta in Islamabad and the thuggish, Pakistan-backed Taliban in Afghanistan. Within 24 hours of the hijack, India's diplomatic aloofness towards both regimes melted so quickly that Jaswant Singh beseeched them for their co-operation.

Even as the Pakistan military spokesman was announcing on CNN International that the commandeered jetliner at Lahore airport was being refuelled to make the hijackers leave Pakistan, Jaswant Singh called up the Pakistani junta's foreign minister, Abdus Sattar, and pleaded for co-operation. Until that point, India had refrained from any diplomatic contact with the Pakistani military regime to the extent that when the father of its self-appointed chief executive died recently, Vajpayee addressed his condolence simply to 'General Pervez Musharraf, Islamabad, Pakistan,' declining to call him 'chief executive.' A peeved Musharraf did not acknowledge receipt of the condolence message.

Jaswant Singh also has played havoc with the carefully calibrated Afghanistan policy New Delhi had crafted in the aftermath of the Kargil war. The policy recognises that the Pakistan-Taliban terrorism nexus, the single biggest threat to India's internal security, has to be effectively countered through a multi-pronged strategy. Jaswant Singh has already sowed seeds of suspicion about India in at least one key constituent of that policy – Afghanistan's Northern Alliance commanders, such as Ahmad Shah Masoud, the 'Lion of the Panjshir.'

In an echo of his famous statement earlier claiming a 'paradigm shift' in America's approach towards India, Jaswant Singh briefed newspaper editors on December 27 about what he called a new positive shift in the Taliban's policy. From being a terrorist organisation no different than the Harkat-ul-Ansar, the Taliban overnight got portrayed in the Indian press as an ally of India against the hostage-takers.

The diplomatic credulity displayed was remarkable: In dressing up a foe as a new-found buddy, the assumption made was that others change their beliefs and policies as rapidly and abstractedly as India does. It is obvious that if anyone has changed, it is India, not the Taliban. The hijackers first revealed their demands through the Taliban, and it was the Taliban again that said it had made them drop them two of four demands. Equally significant was the Taliban's decisions to militarily block any foreign commando rescue mission, set a deadline for India, and eventually give the hijackers safe passage out of Kandahar.

Before the relief plane with Indian negotiators, doctors and engineers was sent to Kandahar on December 27, Jaswant Singh had reposed such confidence in securing the Taliban's cooperation and freedom for the hostages that he told the media the previous day to expect 'a significant development' within 24 hours. When no significant event occurred, the relief plane took off for Kandahar.

Pathetically, India put itself at the Taliban's mercy. Neither Saudi Arabia nor the UAE came to its assistance. The Saudi cabinet discussed the hijack issue on December 29 but did not issue a customary statement after the meeting. Saudi Arabia stayed mum on the crisis. The UAE denied the Indian ambassador even access to the air base while the hijacked aircraft was parked there.

The hijacking also bared the naiveté of the diplomatic assessments from Indian missions in Riyadh and Kathmandu that questioned home ministry and intelligence appraisals about Saudi funding activities and the use of Nepal as a terrorist springboard. The mission in Riyadh had even reported Saudi interest in building a special relationship with India.

It is time Indian diplomacy distinguished real friends from fair-weather friends. The only countries that have come out clearly on India's side in the hostage crisis were Russia and France. Moscow, an important component in India's Afghanistan policy, went to extra length to extend co-operation in this crisis.

In contrast, the United States, despite being on a heightened alert against terrorist attacks, took four full days to openly condemn the hijack. President Bill Clinton's statement that 'the Kashmir issue is perhaps the most dangerous one in the world' only showed that whenever he publicly refers to India, he casts it in negative light on its two most vital concerns – Kashmir and nuclear defence.

US co-operation with New Delhi on counter-terrorism is warranted by the fact that India has been paying the biggest price for the unintended consequences of America's past covert actions in Afghanistan, where the CIA alone funnelled more than $ 5 billion worth of arms through the ISI. There is a link between those past actions and the rise of terrorist violence in Jammu and Kashmir through the flow of sophisticated arms and militants.

India's Afghan policy since after the Kargil war was designed to counter the rising terrorist menace. As long as the Taliban, propped up by the Pakistan military and fattened by the heroin trade, remains in control of large parts of Afghanistan, Pakistan will enjoy the strategic depth and resources to bring India's internal security under pressure. India cannot tackle Pakistan effectively without taking on the Taliban, which behind its religious mask is an organisation of tribal thugs, pillaging mercenaries, and drug and arms traffickers.

India was too quick to declare victory in Kargil. No victory can be described as decisive if it is immediately followed by a qualitative escalation in the enemy's sponsorship of proxy and terrorist actions, as India has witnessed in the spate of militant attacks on army and paramilitary camps in Jammu and Kashmir.

Nor should a clear victory impose the enormous, long-term costs that Kargil did by making it mandatory for the Indian military to forward-deploy troops along the long line of control in that sector even during the harsh winter months. That the militants and their backers can still bring India under further pressure was shown by the professionally executed hijacking.

The Kargil war has not ended because the main foe has only been wounded, not vanquished. The war is still being waged against India by different means.

India cannot forever remain in a reactive, defensive mode. It has to take the battle to the terrorist launch pads. In various ways, it can also raise the costs of those that sponsor terrorism. But before that it needs to do two essential things: Formulate a long-term counter-terrorism strategy that clearly identifies the objectives and means; and establish an organisational structure involving various agencies and departments to implement that strategy.

An earlier version of this commentary was posted on these pages on January 7.

Brahma Chellaney, a well-known columnist and commentator on strategic affairs, is professor of security studies at the independent Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi.

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