Hyderabad

Why did we need a free and fair trial for Kasab? Because…

RE: Your performance during the Kandahar Episode

Do you have anything better than this Kanchan Gupta article to explain your performance? If not, then here are some questions that arise from that article:

1. The article blames the media for creating the impression that the entire country wanted the terrorists to be released. The question is, were you elected to office based on SMS polls organized by the media? Don’t you have BJP workers all over the country?  Did you really have no way to be in touch with those who elected you?
2. If you cannot fight your country’s media and some 200 families within the country, how do you expect Indians to have the confidence that you will fight India’s enemies? If you cannot take tough decisions and communicate them during a minor crisis like this, what would you have done if you had faced the situation that Britain faced during World War II when the Germans were bombing them?
3. The article is pretty critical of the behaviour of the officials at the Raja Sansi airport. Apparently, they failed to obey a direct order from a Central Minister at the time of crisis. What did you do to end the careers of such incompetent officials? Or do your powers of harrassment and vindictiveness extend only to those who expose wrongdoing in your government?
4. In December 1999, NSG commandoes could not fly from Delhi to Amritsar because they did not have a plane. In November 2008, NSG commandoes could not fly from Delhi to Mumbai because they still did not have a plane. What did you do between 1999 and 2004 to get the NSG commandoes a plane?
5. Finally, if, when faced with the problems, constraints and incentives that the Indian National Congress did, you are going to do the same things that the Indian National Congress did, why should anyone who is exasperated with the performance of the Indian National Congress vote for you?

Lets give it an honest thought. Imagine a situation where gunmen/terrorists had taken a chawl in Bombay hostage instead of the Taj. What do you think would have been the nature of media coverage ?

If he is talking of the Indian media, then yes, they would have covered it almost as breathlessly as they covered the Taj and Oberoi standoffs. 

Look, I am not claiming that the media covers everything evenhandedly. Yes, it focuses more on people like us than on people like them. Mumbai receives greater coverage, if for no other reason than that it has more reporters per square inch. As soon as it starts raining, reporters crowd around Milan subway, stand in ankle deep water, and pontificate about how heavily it is raining. Why Milan subway and why not Ratnagiri? Why, because for one, Milan subway is closer to the news channels’ offices and it is less of a journey in the rain. Also because more people who watch English news channels are interested in the state of the traffic under Milan subway than are interested in the people dying in Ratnagiri. 

Obviously, the Taj and Oberoi got more attention because of their iconic status. Would a hostage situation in VT station, which has greater iconic status, but more likely to contain poor people, have gotten the same media coverage? Absolutely.  It would have got more  coverage. 

What about a chawl in Mumbai? Dude, in Mumbai, even chawls have iconic status. A hostage situation in a chawl would have cameras positioned there as intently as they were trained on the Taj. 

Also, we criticise the media quite a bit, but let’s be fair to them, okay? There is this boy-in-the-borewell phenomenon that has been happening quite a bit in the past couple of years. The children who fall into the borewell tubes are usually from poor families. There aren’t that many borewells in Mumbai; usually these things happen in distant villages.  And yet, they have been focusing their non-stop attention on these children, rivetting the attention of the entire nation and organizing prayers and havans all over the place. More importantly, in these cases, media coverage must have saved some lives by forcing the authorities to act faster than they otherwise would have.  

Once again, this is not to say that the media is fair and balanced in every case. Yes, it is swayed by things that ought not to be relevant. The boy-in-borewell phenomenon gets more attention because children are involved. Hostage situations will get more attention than mere bomb blasts will – what with bomb blasts occurring too frequently these days. A terrorist standoff has greater chance of grabbing a nation’s attention than a mere gang war would have. Given all this unevenness, is the greater coverage that the Taj got because it is frequented by rich people significant? I don’t think so.

Yes, there is a class divide in India. There is a divide between the literate and the illiterate. There is a divide between those who read English newspapers and those who don’t. There is a divide between cities and villages. Now, the whole point of a class divide is that those on one side of a divide feel greater kinship among themselves than with those on the other side. Readers of English newspapers like to read about the travails of other middle-class readers like themselves and don’t care much about farmers dying in Vidarbha. A citizen of Mumbai cares more about people dying in train bombings in his city than he does for deaths due to Naxalism or caste wars. That makes sense.

But if you try to stretch this standard argument to argue that this particular terror strike is getting more attention because it was targeted at the rich South Bombay types, that is where the argument snaps. The typical English speaker is far more likely to travel by train than be able to afford coffee at the Taj or Oberoi. He is much more likely to feel kinship with those who died in a train blast on July 11, 2006  than with those who died in the November massacre.  

There is a sliver of truth in the argument – in that it is true that the attacks got more attention in the West because Americans and Britons were killed.  But using the argument to explain why they have generated such an enormous outrage amont Mumbaikars involves lazy thinking as well as an active effort to avoid the blindlingly obvious.

I am usually contemptuous of attempts to link enormous tragedies to the writer’s minor personal misfortunes, but bear with me on this.  On 27th November, I was stuck in a hotel room in the United States, unable to return to Mumbai because my flight was cancelled due to the terrorist attacks. I had missed breakfast because I was glued to the television, and because it was Thanksgiving day and no restaurant was open, I faced the prospect of staying hungry throughout the day. I was also feeling exceedingly lonely and was desperately missing my two-month old infant son.   

My problems, needless to say, were trivial compared to what my city went through. The reason I am mentioning them is to explain why the incident of Karambir Kang, General Manager at the Taj,  losing his wife and two daughters in a fire while he was saving hotel guests caused me to burst into tears. 

It has been over a week since, and I am still seething. This is not the first terrorist strike on Mumbai or on India, and the way things are going, this will not be the last. But there was something different about this one. It is one thing to anonymously set off a few bombs and kill a couple of hundred people. It is quite another when 10 or 20 people, armed with guns and grenades, hold off the might of the Indian State. This is probably the greatest display of India’s military weakness since the defeat of 1962. 

This is an astonishingly subtle distinction, and I took some time to grasp it. The trouble is, this distinction has very little to do with my actual argument. 

First, is this about Modi or about politicians in general? In my argument, I was quite clearly using Modi as an example of a typical politician. Both Ritwik and FitW seem to be arguing that Modi is an exception to the rule. I don’t agree, but assuming for argument’s sake that it is true,  do you agree that as a rule, my claim that politicians are interested only in votes is correct? If yes, why were you wasting your breath defending Modi? 

Second, Ritwik’s argument seems to be that Modi was not guilty of the sin of commision. When he found that Vanzara had killed an ordinary criminal and passed him off as a terrorist, he was caught in a bind. If he did not defend Vanzara, he would be committing political suicide.  

Now, of course, the reason why it would have been political suicide is that the so-called “hawks” cheer on any encounter killing without bothering about whether it was a genuine encounter, or whether the person killed was an actual terrorist or not. The other problem with the argument is that we still have the sin of omission to consider. Modi presides over the government. He is responsible for setting up the incentive structure for his policemen, and for setting up controls to ensure that policemen work for the state and not as hitmen of marble traders.  But how can you set up controls over things that, by definition, exist out of the legally allowed procedures? The time and resources that Vanzara spent on a private vendetta were paid for by the public, allegedly to fight terrorism. Is this not a matter of concern?  

My view of Modi is that he is above average in his administrative competence, and that Gujarat is among the best governed states in India. If this can happen in Gujarat, what about the rest of  India? 

In Mumbai, something similar happened. Police officers were cheered on, and honoured for their “encounter killings” of underworld dons. Till one day, it came to light that these officers had become agents of rival gangs.

Let’s review the model of law enforcement that I have built up in the article.  We have politicians in government, we have bureaucrats and policemen, and we have citizens. All of them are supposed to be comrades in arms in the fight against terrorism, but all of them have their own interests. Politicians want to get reelected, and make money. Civil servants and policemen want to advance their own careers, and make money. Citizens want to stay safe.  

Now some of you may object to this model and say that while modeling the politicians’ interests, we should also factor in the possibility that some politicians, especially the Hindutva-supporting ones, are genuinely concerned about the national interest and wish to rid India of the scourge of terrorism. On hearing this, my first response will be to laugh uncontrollably for five minutes. Once I recover, I am going to point out that if Narendra Modi were really interested in fighting terrorism rather than just using the fight against terror as an electoral platform, he would not have continued to defend Vanzara after it was revealed that he lied about Sohrabuddin being a terrorist. Modi’s behaviour is consistent with my view of his being interested in votes and is not consistent with your claim that he cares about the national interest and wants to rid India of terrorism.

I want to point out here that there is nothing wrong with being ambitious, interested in votes or interested in furthering your own career. It is the citizens’ responsibility to ensure that their votes go only to those who actually fight terrorism, not to those who make a show of fighting terrorism. The way to ensure that is to insist that they obtain convictions, not just shoot people they claim are terrorists.  There is a credible argument being made that Vanzara killed Sohrabuddin because he was paid to do so by Rajasthani marble traders who were getting extortion calls from Sohrabuddin. If true, then shouldn’t citizens who are concerned about fighting terrorism be even more worried? How would you like it if your country is fighting a war and half your soldiers are mercenaries on their own private expeditions? 

Sorry to be fixated on Gujarat and the Sohrabuddin incident. I am doing so because Gujarat is the best administered state in the country. If this is the state of affairs in Gujarat, what are the chances that things will be any better in Andhra Pradesh, where the chief minister does not care two hoots about the lives of any of his citizens?

Now, let’s return to the model that I have built up. I have not clarified the nature of “terrorism” in that model. The threat from terrorism that we are facing right now is different from the ones we faced earlier – it is a low intensity  threat. We have seemingly random attacks against “soft” civilian targets.  Leaving aside rare exceptions like the parliament attack, those in power do not perceive a threat to their own lives or a threat to the Indian state that will unseat them (let’s not get into whether there is such a threat – the important thing is that they do not perceive  such a threat.)  If they did, then the fight would become personal – as happened in Punjab.  So, my model will apply only up to a particular point. I agree that if the menace escalates beyond that point, a different set of measures will be needed.  But it is just as critical to distinguish between situations where a law enforcement approach is needed and where a war-like approach is required. A prolonged war does bad things to an army’s morale and effectiveness.