•Neeraj Chauhan: Intelligence inputs say Sikh terrorist outfits have their meetings in Germany. Do they have bases in Germany? What is the status of terrorism in your country?

India and Germany have agreed to cooperate closely on combating terrorism. We also have a working group which meets regularly. In Germany we have a rule of law which says you can arrest people and you can conduct necessary judicial processes if evidence is provided. We can also prosecute people in our country if they commit a crime in some other country, but for that we need evidence. And we need evidence that can stand up in German courts. With respect to a number of outfits, we have never been able to move as we have never been provided with sufficient evidence to do so.

•Neeraj Chauhan: Do they have German citizenship or are they staying there legally?

If they are staying in Germany, illegally, they will be arrested and all the other consequences of the law will come to bear on them. Also, Germany itself has been confronted with terrorism at an early stage. We had our own homegrown terrorism problems in the late Sixties with the Red Army Faction, a group of alienated dissatisfied young people who felt they could change society by means of terror. We have been able to come to grips with that phenomenon. In the meanwhile, we have been subject to terrorism that has become more and more international. You know that some of the bombers of 9/11 had been studying at Hamburg, fortunately, we did not have a major terrorist incident. Germans, who have been exposed to this kind of terrorism, have not fully understood the kind of reaction terrorism has caused in other countries, particularly in the United States. We have all been continuously exposed to terror; it was only the Americans who thought that nobody could attack them. As a young man, I was negotiating the prohibition of certain inhumane weapons. We were talking about napalm and other incendiary weapons. The European countries favoured banning the use of napalm in areas of civilian concentration, even if the attack might be on military targets. The only ones who were pleading for its use in civilian concentrations was the USA. Why? Because they could never conceive anyone using napalm against them. Basically, they were living in a sanctum and that sanctum has finally been taken away.

... contd.