The War On Everyone

Amitava Kumar tells tales of a much-vaunted, much-abused war on terror, says TRIDEEP PAIS

EVIDENCE OF SUSPICION Amitava Kumar Picador 230 pp, Rs 350

THERE ARE now some emerging voices about the other face of the War on Terror — how this ‘war’ has terrorised the very people it’s supposedly being fought for. In such ‘cases’, hardly anyone gets bail and the innocent get no reparation on acquittal. Every Indian arrested in the name of ‘terror’ has suffered, on average, one to five years in jail, not to mention torture. In his excellent new book, Amitava Kumar documents some startling cases emerging from America’s great war — and how they reverberate across the globe in places like India.

Kumar assembles many such constructed cases. Take Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, a blind, infirm cleric who received multiple prison terms for his conversation with an informant quoted out of context. Or the unfortunate Haspatel family who were arrested, tortured and then freed on the ‘evidence’ that textile bobbins found in their home were ‘missiles’. Other examples include SAR Geelani, the Delhi University professor arrested and tortured in the parliament attack case, and American Hasan Elahi who, being put on a ‘watch list’ after 9/11, fears arrest so much he posts his every move online to prevent suspicion. The pattern is also reminiscent of some of the SIMI cases, where police held books of Khalil Gibran and the lunar calendar as ‘jihadist’ literature.

The typical method seems: depute an ‘informant’ to ensure an otherwise innocent person ‘commits’ a crime. In all these cases the accused were arrested even before a crime was committed. Those held without evidence are tortured into a confession, to convert ‘suspicion’ into ‘evidence’. Kumar also notes the precedent set by the Hollingsworth case, which holds that when authorities have provoked or created a crime, they cannot punish the ‘criminal’.

There’s a marked racial and communal slant in who is accused. Under draconian laws such as MCOCA, police custody confessions count — and often there’s no evidence besides such confessions. While false implication by ‘planting’ evidence is common, the elaborate entrapments discussed here are something new to us.

American counsel for such cases are so helpless they’d rather clients plead guilty than face trial. This isn’t the case in India, but we’ve gotten used to the media hysteria and the State’s negative publicity during terror arrests. So, despite the media noise around the arrest for the attempt to attack the Indian Military Academy, there hasn’t been a whimper from the police or press after the person’s acquittal.

Certainly, the authorities are caught in a numbers game for prosecutions. As the US and India continue to ‘curb terror’, Kumar peels a layer off the hype to expose the effort’s indiscriminate brutality. He concludes this ‘war’ is just to distract us from the unjust wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

No doubt India matches the US in one respect: there’s no redress for the wronged.

Pais is a trial court advocate who argued before the SIMI tribunal in 2006