Courtesy: INAV

In 1962, after the humiliating debacle in the face of the Chinese aggression, Jawaharlal Nehru confessed, "We were living in a dream world". Evidently, despite the continuous succession of shocks to the system, India’s leadership has never really extricated itself from fantasy land, and remains entirely incapable of making objective and principled judgements. Nehru was a broken man after the war against China. And yet, amazingly, no lessons in regional realpolitick had been learned, I recall the Conference of the Indian and Pakistan Home Ministers in 1964, which I attended as a young officer, during which the question off the deportation of illegal immigrants from what was then East Pakistan was the main subject. The Pakistan was the main subject. The Pakistanis were well prepared, sharper in debate, and much mire convicting; our negotiators, on the other hand, inckined towards much waffle and wind. Part of the problem was that Nehru had very strong opinions against the deportation of illegal immigrants, and it was only Chief Minister BP Chelliah’s letter to the Prime Minister that prevented the stoppage of deportation of these "illegals". Unfortunately, succeeding governments remained ambivalent on this issue, and North-East is a result of this single factor.

A year later, India went ofo war against Pakistan, and Indian forces stood poised at the Ichogal Canal, within striking distance off Lahore. And them Lal Bahadur Shastri went to Tashkent, and gifted away everything that had been secured through heroism and blood in the battlefield, without even attempting to negotiate a clear settlement of the Kashmir issue from a position of unprecedented strength. Winston Churchill once remarked, "Woe betide the leaders if they lose at the conference table what their soldiers have won at the battlefield." But this, precisely, is what we have done with unremitting regularity. After Tashken: came the Shimla Agreement in 1972, where Indira Gandhi succumbed to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s pleading and, once again, failed to force a settlement of the Kashmir issue in the wake of Pakistan’s resounding defeat in the 1971 war.

Therefore, as internal strife spiralled, we-entered the Age of Accords under Rajiv Gandhi. The first and most immediately disastrous of these was the Rajiv-Longowal Accord, hailed as a great breakthrough in the "Peace Process" in Punjab. It resulted in Longowal’s assassination and the installation of the feckless Barnala government at Chandigarh That government simply pretended that terrorism did not exist in the State and, within months, released en masse, over 2,000 terrorists accused of a variety of heinous crimes. Those who were released simply resumed their activities and violence escalated immediately and dramatically.

The Assam Accord followed close at the heels of the Punjab experiment (less than a month divided the signing of the two accords). Once again, it was hastily hammered out, with more attention to form and politically correct postures, than to content. Fifteen years later, there is still no end in sight to the violence in Assam.

And yet, the rhetoric of accords, agreements and "ceasefires" with terrorists and their front organisations continues to dominate our entire perspective on the resolution of these problems and there has been an unending sequence of lesser accords and agreements over the past decade and a half. In all these years, no effort has been made to assess the impact of such a strategy on the ground and in quantifiable terms. The fact is, many of these interventions have resulted in an extra-constitutional, indeed criminal arrangement of sharing of powers between legitimate eand elected governments and terrorist organisations who run a network of extortion, crime and a virtual parallel administration. More significantly, it is only the exception among these that has, in any measure, resulted in any significant diminution of violence and the restoration of the rule of law. Most have contributed to further escalation.

The consequences of these "accords" are compounded by the "surrender" policies being variously implemented by the government, where liberal rewards and "rehabilitation packages" are unconditionally offered, without any limitation of time, to individual terrorists who choose to surrender at their own convenience. I do not know of any other state that has as licentious a policy permanently in place, a policy that visibly and actively rewards terrorism, even as the entire criminal justice system adamantly refuses to punish any act of terror. What is worse, these "surrendered militants" often only abandon their political agenda and simply continue with their criminal activities of intimidation and extortion the activities of the Surrendered United Liberation Front of Asom (SULFA) is a  well documented cases in point. But the state makes no attempt to hold them accountable, as long as the politically expeient arrangement is not disturbed.

The latest of the "great betrayals" followed the gratuitous bus-ride to Lahore, when Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee chose to wilfully ignore Pakistans continuing role in sponsoring terrorism in Jammu and Kashmiri to adopt a path of naive political adventurism. The Prime Minister, after the confrontation at Kargil, confessed to great shock and disappointment at learning that, even as he was embracing the Pakistani Prime Minister, the Pakistani Army, supported by mercenaries and mujahideen, was strengthening fortifications in the heights of the hitherto peaceful Ladakh in a creeping aggression that was to be discovered by India three months later.

These feelings of personal shock, however, are irrelevant. Governments and its leaders are not supposed to be acting on unpredictable and personal impulse, however, well-intentioned. Each policy initiative must be preceded by hard-headed assessments and groundwork that ensure that the outcome would, minimally, follow the general direction of its intent.

To return to the release of the Hurriyat leaders, there is no visible evidence that any such assessment or groundwork preceded the decision. Under the circumstances, it is difficult to interpret this initiative as anything more than a desperate and destructive search for approval for "goodwill", from sources where it does not, and cannot in the foreseeable future exist.