Dancing with the wolves

The safety of the hostages and the long-term, overall interests of the country. The government had promised the nation to keep both these ...

The safety of the hostages and the long-term, overall interests of the country. The government had promised the nation to keep both these criteria in mind while negotiating with the desperate men who had hijacked flight IC-814 on December 24. After a week of what can only be described as dancing with the wolves, it managed to secure the lives of 155 badly traumatised passengers but compromised dangerously with what could be construed as national interest.

The release of Maulana Azhar Masood, Mustaq Ahmed Zargar and Syed Ahmed Umar Sheikh, all hard-core members of the Harkat-ul-Ansar, represents a defeat in the country8217;s long and expensive battle against terrorism. Of that there should be no doubt. It is a defeat, no matter what the government8217;s spinmeisters may say about the move being only a 8220;tactical retreat8221;, no matter that ultimately only three militants were released as against the 36 demanded at first, no matter that it was a extremely difficult choice.

If those called upon to fight terrorism andits promoters in the foxholes of the border, on the streets of Srinagar or in the armed camps of the Valley, now feel let down by their political masters, they have every reason to be. The convenor of the National Security Advisory Board put it baldly in a signed newspaper article. He called it a victory for terrorism.

For the Vajpayee government, that had always trumpeted its commitment to fighting terrorism with an almost Churchillian rhetoric, the surrender at Kandahar comes as a reversal. Suddenly the words of yesterday like 8220;zero tolerance for terrorism8221;, 8220;an Indian century8221;, 8220;India as a hard state8221;, have come to mock it today at the beginning of a new era. Not only does it now have to stomach the Opposition8217;s wrath laced in irony, it finds its cardinal foreign policy positions in disarray now that the force of circumstances had compelled it to make an uneasy peace with the Taliban.

But was there really a choice in the icy ambience at Kandahar? Once the the hijacked aircraft had flown the coopat Amritsar, things were weighted heavily in the hijackers8217; favour, whether in Lahore, Dubai or Kandahar. To expect the government to emerge from this brutish bout with its honour intact would be asking for the impossible.

But the Vajpayee government must and should be upbraided. Not for its conspicuous lack of success at Kandahar, but for its miserable failure in preventing Kandahar from occurring in the first place. Not only did it fail to act with alacrity in Amritsar, it failed to realise the security hazard that Kathmandu, home to numerous militant groups, had become. Brajesh Mishra, security advisor to the Prime Minister, now claims that the hijackers had links with the Chota Shakeel gang and with Pakistan.

Surely, with the formidable intelligence machinery at its command, the government sho-uld have displayed a greater alertness to the nefarious connections between the Mumbai underworld and international terrorist groups? Why does wisdom always have to dawn after it is too late? Kandahar, likeKargil, is a wake-up call. But how many more calls of this kind would the government need before it really does wake up to the realities of international terrorism and its own sorry state of unpreparedness?