There is no POTA in India anymore, and we all more or less agree that the motivations of terror must be addressed. But until such time that this idyllic world can come to ensure that all is fair and no one is angry enough to kill the innocent, we, as a nation, would have to go on doing what we can to deal with acts of terror.
The Dr Haneefs and Sunjay Dutts of the world, and the wrack-drawn trials, bring home the point that the individual?s right to be free until proven guilty sits uneasily sometimes with the right of the state to hunt out the guilty.
Other liberal democracies have also shared the dilemmas of balancing their citizens? right to be regarded as innocent with the prosecution?s need to go after suspects, who are often people they cannot pin any ?admissible? evidence on even if convinced of their culpability on the basis of trusted intelligence/inference. The US adopted its controversial Patriot Act, 2001, soon after 9/11. Until then, the country had been insulated from the nightmare of terror bombings on its own soil. Next came the Military Commissions Act, which allows ?non-citizens? to be detained indefinitely without any legal process whatsoever. Australia has also modified its 1914 Act, and its Anti-Terrorism Act, 2005, now allows the authorities to detain people without charges. The UK has enacted a Prevention of Terrorism Act, 2005, and last year, its state agencies got the right to detain suspects without charges for 28 days.
Meanwhile, skirmishes between the State and human rights groups have increased because of deep suspicions, worsened by incidents like the police shooting down a London-based Brazilian electrician called Menezes (he was reading a newspaper on a tube train, after the 7/7 blasts).
But the point is that dealing with genocidal crimes like riots and terror, which target large numbers of people, is never free of trouble; perpetrators often assume that they are acting ?on behalf of? a larger group of people. The validity of any such assumption of group representation is always extremely doubtful. But lurking fears of there being even a modicum of group support for such crimes can complicate the due process of law no end, with little hope left for insulating sub judice cases from public appraisal and possible ballot consequences (also the reason why some countries allow no publicity of trials).
In other words, what may seem to be about the law and its enforcement can be as much about the excesses of politics. For decades, India?s political leadership made conscious efforts to portray itself as being duly protective of those whose vulnerabilities to such excesses were evident. In recent years, however, political parties have taken to the gratuitous certification of Muslims or Sikhs (even Christians or Jains) on a new scale of ?nationalist? acceptability.
As a commentator remarked last week, to say ?all Muslims are not terrorists? is as bad as saying that ?all Jews are not misers? or that ?all blacks are not criminals?. And to think that such thinking has gained serious currency!
Now, if you had a political environment in which someone with a Muslim name being picked up by the cops is not greeted with apologetic faces on one side of the political divide and by expressions of glee on the other, we would get closer to an era of enlightened policing and debate on how to fix the yawning gaps in our internal security.
Traditional conservative-versus-liberal politics has a lot to do with how Indian leaders plot their moves. But perhaps they need to take better cues from the West. Take Europe. The right-wing French President Sarkozy has key leftists in his Cabinet. Britain?s Tony Blair made Labour winnable by borrowing liberal market ideas from the Tories. And now the young Tory leader David Cameron is doing a Blair on his own party.
With some imagination, Indian parties could give the political arena an enlightened transformation. How about a 60th anniversary present?