Flashing V, iron hand

For all his political acumen, Gujarat’s macho chief minister, Narendra Modi, missed the import of Congress President Sonia Gandhi’s now famous ‘maut ke saudagar’ barb at the state Government on a lazy afternoon rally in Navsari district on December 1. Those who studied the Gujarat poll scene will testify that Modi’s immediate response was to ask why she (Sonia) is shy of talking about rising prices and Inflation in the country. Simultaneously, telephone lines burnt between Gujarat election in-charge Arun Jaitley and BJP’s now prime ministerial candidate, L.K. Advani, and by late evening that day Modi had brought in Sohrabuddin and internal security on to the electoral canvas at a rally in Bhuj. The rest, as they say, is history. For the first time, a vital national security issue — confined to mundane and ill-informed debates in Parliament since Independence — was brought to the top of the political agenda by Modi and used to garner votes in the Gujarat elections.

Modi had legitimate reasons for showcasing his government’s firm commitment towards internal security issues in post-2002 riots Gujarat. Despite the state being on top of the hit-list of all jihadi groups in the subcontinent after the Godhra riots, not one major terrorist incident has taken place in Gujarat in the past five years of BJP rule. The state government was able to harmonise internal conflict with economic and industrial reform even while there were agitations over industrial policies in certain parts of the country. To add to this, there is little or hardly any infiltration of Naxalism among Gujarat’s tribals, in sharp contrast to rising Maoist movements in tribal Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and even Maharashtra.

This is not to say that all is hunky-dory with Gujarat under Modi, but only to point that the Congress-led UPA government can ill-afford to ignore the political dimension of the internal security issue. The internal security meeting in the Capital last week clearly showed that nearly all state chief ministers wanted anti-terror law sans the draconian provisions of the now repealed Pota, as they made it very clear that their states were ill-equipped to handle terror. However, the UPA government’s record in matters of national security leaves much to be desired. Given its sensitivity to vote banks, the present government not only refused to develop new tools to fight Terror but also has made enforcement agencies toothless by repealing Pota and putting the recommendations of the Justice V.S. Malimath Committee on Reforms of Criminal Justice System on the back burner.

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