Countering Terrorism: What ails India’s efforts?
By Swaran SinghIndian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s hyperactive foreign policy of the last five years has resulted in the CCIT being endorsed at various bilateral and multilateral summits, including the 2016 Non-Aligned Movement Summit, as also at successive India-Africa, Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, and BRICS summit meetings.
Late last month in New York, at a solemn commemorative event for remembering the victims of the Easter Sunday terrorist attacks in Sri Lanka, India’s permanent representative to the UN, Syed Akbaruddin, urged Member States to come up with a global framework for countering terrorism, at the earliest, as their tribute to victims of terrorism.
With the advantage of hindsight, this renewed clarion call was understandable, coming on the eve of the UN Security Council designating Lashkar-e-Taiba Chief Masood Azhar a ‘global terrorist.’ With India’s decade-long crusade on Masood Azhar coming to fruition, India was now ready to redouble efforts to urge member states, to also adopt India’s 1996 proposal for a Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism (CCIT).
This exhortation by India’s diplomat at this event organised by the Sri Lankan mission and in the presence of host, Dr. Amrith Rohan Perera, Sri Lanka’s Permanent Representative to the UN since 2011, was also well thought of. What made India’s appeal for CCIT here so timely, was not just the but that Dr. Perera has had an enduring association, by evolving various international measures in countering terrorism, including now being the Chair of the UN Sixth Committee (Legal) Ad Hoc Committee on CCIT. Indeed, Dr. Perera has also been Chair of the UN Ad Hoc Committee on ‘Measures to Eliminate International Terrorism,’ set up by the UN General Assembly annual resolutions, starting from Resolution 51/210 of December 1996, under which this Ad Hoc Committee is currently negotiating the draft CCIT.
Not that there are no international conventions on terrorism. In fact, there are over a dozen international conventions that deal with various aspects, dimension, and sectors of terrorist threats, yet there is no overarching coherent framework that can provide a leak-proof legal safeguard in addressing various evolving contours and hues of this hydra-headed monster called international terrorism, that keeps raising its head at most unanticipated occasions and destinations.
And, no one better understands the limitations of having multiple legal instruments than Dr. Perera, who has had prolonged engagement in developing multiple legal arrangements on countering terrorism in parts and pieces. Among others, he was formerly Consultant to the Commonwealth Secretariat, examining interconnections between Mutual Legal Assistance under the Commonwealth Schemes and Counter-Terrorism and Anti-Money Laundering Measures. Later, he was Commissioner of Sri Lanka’s Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission and was a Member (2007-2011) of the International Law Commission, and was elected General Rapporteur of the Commission at the 63rd Session. The list can be exhaustive.
Flag-bearer
India’s credentials on being the flag-bearer in developing a global framework for countering international terrorism is no less immaculate. India has been a victim of terrorism almost from the very beginning, but it was to face an unprecedented heat of cross-border terrorism from early 1980s, first in Punjab and then from 1989 in Kashmir that since continues unabated. Terrorism has cost India assassinations of two Prime Ministers: Indira Gandhi in 1984 and Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 and thousands of innocent citizens lost opportunities. Failing to make any use of their 1987 SAARC Regional Convention on Suppression of Terrorism, India’s Foreign Minister Inder Kumar Gujral had first presented a draft CCIT at the 51st Session of the UN General Assembly on 4 October 1996. Twenty-three years of untiring crusade of successive Indian leaders and thousands of terror deaths world over have not yet made Member States of the UN move beyond their myopic political interests to develop much needed consensus on its provisions, especially on defining terrorism that remains most formidable of all its challenges so far.
Understandably, most countries (read regimes) continue to be guided by their narrow national (read political) interests. The most powerful of all, the United States continues to fight shy as CCIT will have a direct impact on its international military operations, exposing its forces for State terrorism allegations. And this reluctance of the US is not a recent phenomenon germinating from President Trump’s preoccupation with taking Yankees home. This disregard of international norms and conventions has been a sustained bipartisan approach making the US absent in multiple sections of international cooperation.
Arabs on the other hand want to protect the Palestinian movement. They want to ensure exclusion of categories like ‘self-determination’ and ‘national-liberation movements’ from any definition of terrorism. Amongst major powers, perspectives of both China and Russia have often been at variance from Western narratives and strategies on countering terrorism. Others continue to have serious operational limitations making them vulnerable to terrorism or conditional assistance from powerful benefactors. In these unending fire-fighting in various directions, the ‘urgent’ has continued to push aside what is ‘important’ in addressing international terrorism.
However, it will also be unfair to conclude that there has been no progress at all, howsoever, slow and frustrating it may be. By the year 2000, the Working Group of the 55th UNGA Session, for instance, had evolved a skeleton draft of CCIT. This is nothing, but a compilation from various pre-existing conventions focusing on creating an overarching binding legal instrument to define terrorism and regulate cross-border extraditions and ban terrorist funding amongst other things. Nevertheless, there remain contentions on its text and Member States continue debating this 2007 draft, where defining terrorism remains its most formidable challenge.
Meanwhile, India has continued with its crusade in countering terrorism both at home and at various multilateral meetings and its recent rise has seen India becoming not just hyperactive, but also assertive in pursuing both discourses as also counter-terror operations on the ground.
India
India, for instance, has been active member (since 2010) of an increasingly powerful 37-member Paris-based Financial Action Task Force (FATF). It monitors terrorist funding and money laundering for terrorism. It was set up by the G7 nations in 1989 and was further strengthened, when in 1999 the UN adopted an International Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism and several other resolutions and conventions have been adopted and enforced since then.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s hyperactive foreign policy of the last five years has resulted in the CCIT being endorsed at various bilateral and multilateral summits, including the 2016 Non-Aligned Movement Summit, as also at successive India-Africa, Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, and BRICS summit meetings.
To recall, India and Sri Lanka had been at the forefront in successful adoption of the 1987 SAARC Regional Convention on Suppression of Terrorism that became dysfunctional following India and Pakistan repeatedly locking horns. This is about time that India and Sri Lanka can once again take the CCIT as their joint initiative to pursue its early adoption at the United Nations.
(The author is Professor for Diplomacy and Disarmament, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi)
