They asked us to crawl, we gave them our spine

The abduction of Indian migrants as hostages in Iraq in 2004 raised several questions which cannot be ignored, especially regarding the central government's crisis management work.

Iraqi Army soldiers providing security outside the Golden Mosque in Samarra, on 2 October, 2004 | Representational image | Picryl

We all, obviously, pray for the safe return of our hostages in Iraq. Meanwhile, the questions the episode raises can no longer be ignored. Here are some:

When was the last time our government appointed a crisis management group and sent a special negotiator in response to a similar incident? While this goes on, we also have the case of the kidnapped Indian businessman Harish Hitange in Poland. His severed fingers have surfaced in bottles in different parts of Warsaw. Is the CMG looking at his plight as well? We have no evidence it’s even robbing some First Secretary in our embassy in Warsaw of much sleep over this weekend.

How did the same government react to other similar kidnappings in India? What kind of concessions/cash/deals were offered to those who kidnapped and later killed the IRCON engineer and his brother in Kashmir? They were not even indulging in some profit-making activity like ferrying supplies to the Americans in any sovereign nation “occupied” by them. They were involved in the noble and brave task of building a rail line in our Kashmir for the welfare of the nation and, most of all, the Kashmiri people.

What if the next time any foreign tourists are kidnapped in Kashmir or in Delhi or Uttar Pradesh and the terrorists demand that their parent nation describe the Indian Army in Kashmir as an “occupation force”?

What if that nation, be it Britain, Israel, Norway, Japan, or Germany, actually does it? After all, what is a little symbolic gesture if it fulfils a humanitarian objective?

What if one of the nations whose citizens were involved in the Al Faran kidnappings in Kashmir had actually done so? Wouldn’t we have gone apoplectic? And aren’t we grateful that they didn’t? Nor did any of them bar its citizens from visiting Kashmir.

What if al Qaeda or some group, with black, green or saffron banners, picked up a bunch of Indian software engineers in the Silicon Valley or Bangalore and made similar demands? And what if their families also collected crowds to block traffic near their native towns demanding the government show the same combination of alacrity and generosity while seeking their release? After all, what is sauce for a truck driver must be sauce for a software engineer.

And before we even start elaborating on answers, let us recall a few things.

In the past 15 years, most new governments in India have faced a similar challenge before they could settle down. V.P. Singh’s Third Front joke, (arguably the lousiest government in our Independent history), made a surrender on the Rubaiya Sayeed kidnapping and the result was a full-fledged insurgency.

The NDA’s lowest point was the incompetence, and then lack of nerve in the way it handled the IC-814 hijacking. Again, the result was a new fillip to Islamic terrorism.

As far back as in 1983, an Indian leader had stood up to a similar blackmail. JKLF had kidnapped Ravindra Mhatre, a senior Indian diplomat in Birmingham, seeking the release of its leader Maqbool Butt on Death Row in Tihar. Indira Gandhi said ‘get lost’, the terrorists killed Mhatre and Butt was hanged shortly thereafter.

Until 9/11, India’s complaint with the world was, it chooses to confuse terrorism with freedom struggles, or mixes it with other such issues whenever it is “convenient” or “useful” to do so. One man’s terrorist cannot be another’s freedom fighter, we said.

We were furious when Musharraf described what was going on in Kashmir as a freedom struggle and trivialised civilian deaths as some unavoidable collateral damage. After 9/11, OUR view has been internationally accepted and honoured even in Kashmir.

This, indeed, was the remarkable paradigm change that brought groups as diverse as NSCN and LTTE to the negotiating table and which enabled the Indian Army and Bhutan to go after ULFA in an operation that was remarkable, both for its military success as also the total absence of any international censure.

We have caught a whole bunch of our terror-mafia kingpins thanks to phone intercepts made by foreign, notably American, intelligence. The biggest victim of this new global consensus on not submitting to terrorism is the D-company.

So, where does our response to the Iraq kidnappings fit in this big picture? The truth is, it doesn’t. It is incongruous, out of step with the times, weak-kneed, confused, hypocritical, stupid, and disastrous for the future.

Already, we have made diplomatic concessions that we did not do even in our unanimous parliamentary resolution condemning the war in Iraq. Even that resolution had not used language like “occupation forces”.

Now, we have had our Minister of State for External Affairs use that line while Minister Natwar Singh, who was the only one to come up with the right response to what was after all a mere kidnapping for ransom by “ruffians” has been told to shut up.

Frankly, I would have no problem if India actually took position that the “occupation” of Iraq should end forthwith. But then we better have the conviction of saying so formally, in our Parliament resolutions, at the UN and so on.

What we cannot do is to tell the world that we are saying this just to secure the release of our people, but that we don’t mean it. The world will laugh at us.

Serious nations do not practise one policy and say the opposite in public when held to ransom by professional kidnappers.

Besides calling the Americans and the British “occupation forces”, we have also formally written to the governments of Jordan and Kuwait not to allow our wage-seekers to enter Iraq.

It would be interesting to see how many of our truckers have been killed by terrorists while ferrying fuel into and supplies out of the Kashmir Valley. Will Shivraj Patil now ask the Punjab government to stop our own truckers from entering J&K?

Our handling of this whole affair has been so disastrous you’d wonder if its even worthwhile figuring out the reason behind it. But one probably is that we have simply got confused by our conviction-less policy on the US presence in Iraq.

This is further compounded by so many supporters of this government, particularly the Left, being so anti-US. Consequently, we have confused a straightforward kidnapping by “ransom-seeking ruffians” with the larger moral dimension of US “occupation” of Iraq.

So a ransom to the ruffians, ban on truckers, reference to forces of occupation are merely expressions of a policy against the US that we think we would rather pursue but cannot afford.

Banning Indian truckers’ entry, therefore, is a blow for the Iraqi “freedom struggle” against US-British occupiers.

Or, maybe because we in New Delhi live in the vicinity of Ghaziabad and the rest of Western UP where kidnapping for ransom is the only growing industry, our instincts have evolved accordingly.

Either way, it is suicidal. This world is not Ghaziabad. It would also inflict cruel punishment on states that crawl before terrorists, let them define their policy and diplomacy, or allows them to gag a Natwar Singh and gift his deputy E. Ahamed his 96 hours of fame.