In a long career fighting terrorism and political violence, one of the greatest impediments I have encountered to effective action was the absence of a comprehensive strategic perspective, a coordinated and well-informed state policy that could free the security forces to do their job, even while other arms of government, including the judiciary, the bureaucracy and the political executive, continued to do theirs. Decisions that eventually had great and unforeseen consequences were improvised from day to day at the highest policy making levels; and what passed off as “analysis” in bureaucratic and political circles was a self-serving fiction tailored to the career ambitions and political stratagems of specific individuals.
The fact is that the State’s response to internal security crises, though successful on occasion - as in the dramatic victory over terrorism in Punjab - has been random, inadequate and inconsistent. Confronted with subversive violence, administrations have vacillated between appeasement and over-reaction; governments and a variety of covert agencies have often preferred subterfuge and a policy of brinkmanship to constructive political solutions. Successes have been won, eventually, by force of arms and by an exhausting process of attrition at the end of which the insurrectionists withdraw into what subsequent events demonstrate to be essentially a state of hibernation. Since basic problems and grievances are almost never addressed, and since the same decaying institutional structures are simply permitted to perpetuate past inequities and distortions, the remnants of violent dissident movements eventually recover sufficient strength and support to regroup and relaunch their activities.
The absence, of a coherent institutional response to the cumulative crises of conflict in India is one of the most dangerous intellectual failures - no doubt among many others - of our constitutional democracy. Terrorist movements and collective civil strife in the West, in terms of loss of life and property, and in their geographical scope, have been relatively minor when compared to the violence that has afflicted the Indian sub-continent. But in every such case in the West, the intellectual response has been enormous. The body of empirical and analytic literature that exists even on minor
Western terrorist groups and movements is in dramatic contrast with the paucity and the poor quality of work on the most protracted of insurgencies in India. Nor have our jurisprudence, our legislation, or our administrative philosophies kept pace with the demands of the immensely inventive range of insurrections and the growing sphere of organised political and criminal violence that plague this region.
It is a remarkable and characteristic feature of our political and intellectual defalcation that there is, today, no single institution in this country that offers an adequate environment where these issues can be effectively addressed. Sporadic and uncoordinated research is certainly being carried out in a variety of academic and state institutions; but its quality and utility are suspect, and its impact on policy has remained negligible.
An enormous urgency attends the task of bringing individuals from a range of disciplines and backgrounds to focus their attention on the contemporary problems of burgeoning violence and the shrinking sphere of civilised and secure life. As we approach the 21st Century, perhaps the greatest challenge that confronts us is to define and implement effective instruments to cope with the ever increasing intensity and range of conflicts that plague this divided subcontinent. Weapon systems, information technologies and processes, and organisational and political responses will all play an important role in this task. But they will not suffice.
Small arms, today, proliferate; the implements of war are becoming more lethal, more difficult to detect, and more easily available; societies are becoming far more complex and less tolerant of intrusive policing methods. The critical differences, therefore, between success and failure will be the exploration of ideas, ideologies and strategies that provide concrete and effective alternatives to violence in conflict resolution; alternatives that must appeal, equally, to the establishment and to the alienated groupings that currently believe that violence is the only method to secure relief within the prevailing system.
This task becomes even more urgent in view of the unfortunately wide variety of reasons that make this region one of the most volatile in the world today. Radical shifts in the geopolitical architecture of Asia place the sub-continent in a unique position within the emerging international order. The most obvious and consequential of these changes is, of course, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and with it, the destabilisation of cold war equations, and the haphazard emergence of a variety of conflicting American ‘strategic interests’ that have exacerbated tensions between India and Pakistan, and have contributed enormously to destabilisation in Afghanistan as well. A devastated and destabilised Afghanistan is a source of great present and potential anxiety to both India and Pakistan. These factors have tended to compound influences emerging from the religious ferment and ethnic entanglements of Muslim Central Asia. And sporadic support, both moral and material, from the West as well as from hostile neighbours, to various brands of sub-nationalism in South Asia, has added strength to the rash of terrorist movements and insurgencies that plague the region.
China’s hegemonistic predilections are also an ever-present threat to peace in the sub-continent. China’s increasing belligerence in South East Asia; covert support to insurgencies, particularly in India’s North East; the backdrop of the 1962 War against India; the continued occupation of, and oppression in Tibet; and a systematically mischievous policy of arms sales and sensitive technology transfer give adequate grounds for concern to the countries of the sub-continent - though some of them may temporarily benefit from some of these policies.
This backdrop acquires particular significance in the context of fundamental changes that have taken place in the very nature of conflict between nations. Strategic configurations are no longer expressed in the traditional nomenclature of ‘external security threats’. While the nations of this region do have impressive conventional military capabilities arrayed against each other, and against their other neighbours, it is a fact that the danger of open warfare between nations has certainly diminished. The territorial and strategic ambitions, both of regional and extra-regional powers, are now translated into a range of ‘non-standard’, ‘irregular’ and ‘low-intensity’ wars that prey on domestic discontent.
Terrorism is at the very heart of this new paradigm of international conflict. It is, moreover, an increasingly popular ideology of conflict within nations, as discontented factions, disappointed with the attainments and impatient with the processes of democracy, obtain freer access to large arsenals of sophisticated small arms and explosives, as well as to the skills to use them, and the organisational techniques for their deployment. Indeed, the power, the weaponry, and the proficiency of terrorist groups appears to be accelerating at a rate much faster than the countermeasures available to civilised society.
The combined impact of these international and internal factors is the veritable rash of terrorist movements and separatist insurgencies that has swept across South Asia in the recent past, the most prominent of which are Sikh and Kashmiri separatism in India, and the persistent insurgencies in its North Eastern states; Sindhi, Mohajir and Baluchi movements in Pakistan; and the Tamils in Sri Lanka. The Gorkha question in Bhutan, the conflict between the Terai and Hill People in Nepal, and the Chakmas in Bangladesh are among the more obvious of the numerous other areas of potential strife within the sub-continent that could spawn terrorist movements in the foreseeable future.
Another extremely disturbing aspect of the Indian sub-continent is that two of the three largest drug growing areas of the world are located within 400 kilometres of its boundaries; as the region becomes an increasingly important transit route for the international drug trade, it is progressively drawn into the destabilising dynamics of organised crime and narco-terrorism, with hitherto unforeseen implications for peace and security far beyond the region.
These factors are superimposed, in India, on a society deeply fragmented by its obsession with caste and community; and with linguistic, regional and cultural differences. A society, moreover, that is enormously unequal and inequitable. Given the mixed administrative and political record of successive regimes since Independence, it is unsurprising that the manifestations of discontent in explicit conflict and violence have seen a continuous escalation over the last half-century.
TheInstitute for Conflict Management seeks to engage directly in the search for solutions to this widening sphere of strife. Its core objective is to create a non-doctrinaire and ideologically neutral institutional context for a co-ordinated inter-disciplinary effort to explore, define and implement concrete solutions to prevailing conflicts.
At the heart of this exercise is the collection, collation and analysis of information and data relating to terrorism, organised crime, social, ethnic and communal strife, and a variety of institutional and strategic issues connected with internal security.
By creating opportunities and a database for vigorous research and debate in these issues, ICM would help correct the prevailing informational imbalances and the political-bureaucratic make-believe that shapes present policies.
This is a time when the intelligentsia can also engage directly with large numbers of people through media that transcend even the hitherto insurmountable barrier of illiteracy. The great contest between competing ideologies and conflicting ideas can, and must, now be fought in the public arena as never before. The Institute would, therefore, attempt to explore all available mass media in order to widen the scope and impact of these debates.
The eventual objectives of the collective endeavour of those who would be associated with ICM’s activities are to discover and implement tangible strategies that would help preserve the unity of this nation in a way that does not diminish the essential diversity, ethnic identities, and religious, cultural and ideological pluralism that are the essence of India; as well as to help define an integrating vision for the entire sub-continent.
(Late) Shri K.P.S. Gill, IPS
1997