The Usual Suspects

India Today
September 7, 1998

THE USUAL SUSPECTS
Friends of Bin Laden

Let America now understand who stands for what.

Swapan Dasgupta

If Sherlock Holmes was puzzled by the dog that didn't bark, Indians have reason to be mystified about the protestors who didn't protest. In normal circumstances, Washington's retaliatory strikes against terrorist camps in Afghanistan and an alleged chemical weapons factory in Sudan would have prompted shrill indignation. South Block would have issued a sanctimonious statement, there would have been demonstrations outside the US Embassy and consulates, the odd USIS office would have been ransacked and the professional petitioners would have written angry letters to the editor.

Strangely, none of this happened, although to keep their hand in, the CPI(M) staged a demonstration against "US imperialism" in Calcutta and AICC Secretary Mani Shankar Aiyar defended Osama Bin Laden against the wrath of Arun Shourie on Star News. On the contrary, the Ministry of External Affairs came up with an unprecedented statement that, in effect, reminded President Clinton we-told-you-so. Home Minister L.K. Advani didn't say anything -- unlike the voluble Defence Minister George Fernandes -- but he had the satisfaction of knowing that the US State Department was eating crow for describing his "proactive" strategy as "foolish" and "irresponsible". Of course, Washington never feels the need to say sorry, but perhaps more importance needs to be attached to Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott's wife cooking a meal for the ever-charming Jaswant Singh in Washington.

That symbolic gesture of extra hospitality says a lot. Clinton may or may not visit India next year; India may or may not be persuaded to sign the dreaded CTBT; and Moody's may or may not fail to be convinced that the success of the Resurgent India Bonds is indicative of things to come. These are episodic details. What is consequential is that the US has been forced to grudgingly accept the fact that India is different. That India is not another of the rogue states playing cops and robbers in the Hindu Kush and that, at the end of the day, India is a responsible democracy that has faced up to terrorism with quiet dignity.

Since the Pokhran blasts, a section of the Clinton Administration has acted on the assumption that India has been hijacked by irresponsible, religious zealots. It was not an idea that was fed to the Washington establishment by the numerous think tanks that make a living out of non-proliferation. It flowed from what the most articulate section of the Indian intelligentsia has been saying and writing for foreign consumption. When prominent UN functionaries seek convoluted reasons for justifying the Coimbatore bomb blasts and when Booker Prize winners suggest that dissent in India is stifled by tax raids, is it surprising that many responsible Americans actually believed that India had become a nuclear rogue state? Some of these notables even went to the extent of accusing the Indian intelligence agencies of staging the massacres in Doda to give Pakistan a bad name. If they are silent today, it is because the West has understood that there is a terrorist threat and it doesn't emanate from within India.

Bin Laden is not a Pakistani national. The brain behind the blasts in Kenya and Tanzania is said to be a Saudi millionaire who lives in Afghanistan, who communicates on a satellite phone and whose statements are printed in London. Like our self-righteous aesthetes, he too is a citizen of a "mobile republic". His terrorism is also post-modern.

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