“Terrorism and radicalization”: What needs to be done by South Asia

The news that no less a person than the President of Sri Lanka has entered into a dialogue process with some civil society groups on the need for reconciliation in the country ought to be welcome news for progressive opinion in Sri Lanka and outside. Hopefully, the dialogue process would lead to its logical conclusion: that is, the fostering of harmony among Sri Lanka’s communities on the basis of a mutual appreciation among these groups of their essential needs.

The meting out of justice to aggrieved communities in Sri Lanka’s 30-year anti-LTTE war is principal among these needs and is central to the enterprise of reconciliation. Needless to say, this is a crying need in Sri Lanka and this requirement has been winked at by successive governments to the steady detriment of the country.

The above news came in the wake of reports that another forum in the Colombo Security Conclave process was recently concluded in Colombo, featuring tripartite talks among India, the Maldives and Sri Lanka. The following topics were identified as “four pillars” of future cooperation among these states: Maritime safety and security, terrorism and radicalization, trafficking and organized crime and cyber security.

Of the above subjects, terrorism and radicalization calls for the most delicate and insightful handling. In the absence of the latter condition reconciliation among communities would be difficult to achieve and most countries in South Asia are badly in need of reconciliation and a substantial measure of domestic peace.

In a small state such as Sri Lanka, terrorism and radicalization have been continually approached by governments as mainly law and order issues. This has been the case since 1983 when communal relations in Sri Lanka collapsed under the implosive impact of the cataclysmic ethnic riots of that year. Sri Lanka has not had complete peace and harmony since then and the experimentation by governments with the law and order approach to resolving the befuddling question of terrorism accounts substantially for this lingering failure. The management of terrorism anywhere calls for a scientific approach which entails the identification of unresolved socio-economic problems faced by aggrieved social groups as accounting in the main for the emergence of armed militancy and radicalization among them.

Generally, disaffected groups take to arms when they find that states are indifferent towards their legitimate demands. Radicalization usually accompanies the process of taking to arms and points to an attitude of thoroughgoing hostility towards the state or those seen as adversaries on the part of the disaffected.

The war was no doubt won by the Lankan state but reconciliation is remaining to be achieved and as long as reconciliation remains unachieved Sri Lanka is unlikely to have a trouble-free existence. Continued short-sightedness on the part of the Lankan state would preclude the possibility of the country enjoying any degree of reconciliation. It is often ignored by the state that the bestowing upon each other, on the part of the main parties to the conflict, of concrete good will measures is at the heart of reconciliation. Even apologies for wrongs of the past, committed by the once antagonistic parties, is not too much to ask.

The above outlining of some of the festering questions in Sri Lanka is necessitated by some challenges that are coming South Asia’s way in the wake of the seeming re-taking of Afghanistan by the Taliban. The fact that one big Afghan city after another is falling to the Taliban makes it incumbent on the country’s neighbours to realistically visualize the emerging political landscape in South Asia and to come to grips with issues in foreign policy and other fields that a Taliban take-over would necessitate.

The greatest of challenges would be for the democracies of South Asia, since a Taliban regime in Afghanistan would be religious fundamentalist in nature. To be sure, most states of South Asia would likely relate to a Taliban regime in the most cordial of terms since the regime change would be a fait accompli over which nothing could be done by them in terms of changing the internal status quo. That is, a live-and-let-live policy would in all probability prevail.

However, how would the democracies of the region come to terms fully with the fact that an undemocratic, religious-fundamentalist regime is in power in Kabul? How India would be relating to a Taliban administration would be of particular interest. In the short term, India would probably relate to the Taliban regime in the most cordial terms possible but what would be its terms of interaction in the long run? The point needs to be raised because the Taliban has won for itself a notable notoriety for tyrannical, anti-democratic practices, such as religious intolerance and the oppression of women, to mention just two sets of gross abuses.

More basically, South Asia would be having in Afghanistan a regime that would not flinch from using violence and terror to advance its domestic and foreign policy aims. Minority ethnic and religious groups in Afghanistan, for instance, would need to brace for a possible reign of terror since a Taliban regime would be touting a Muslim fundamentalist image with a correlated policy of repression towards those groups that are seen as aliens and “misfits” in its theocratic setup.

In other words, identity politics would enjoy a new lease of life in Afghanistan and even in its adjacent regions, since the clerical class in Afghanistan would be exercising religious fundamentalist influence over similar groups along Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan. In such a situation, reconciliation in any form could not be thought of, whereas, considering the identity-based bloodshed in South Asia, reconciliation in all its dimensions should ideally be part of regional intra-state and inter-state discourse.

Small states such as Sri Lanka would be obliged figure out very closely as to how they would be relating to a Taliban regime, since reconciliation is likely to win some mention in their domestic and foreign policy agendas. Likewise, Sri Lanka, like India, would need to calculate to what degree it would be tolerant of the Taliban’s possible anti-democratic practices. This is in view of the fact that excessive oppression of a people by its rulers cannot be ignored indefinitely by states claiming to be democratic. The limits of tolerance would need to be defined.