Peace on tenterhooks

Sandeep Dikshit

The simmering cauldron, that is India’s national security, remained at a disturbing but as-yet controllable flame all through the year.

The Gau Rakshak has come to stay despite prime ministerial homilies asking them to desist. The calculated but scattered pattern of lynching Muslim cattle traders, its perpetrators encouraged by the acquittal of Pehlu Khan’s murderers, sent fresh waves of uncertainty among the targeted community. Its insecurities went up a notch by the country’s first videographed, faith-based murder of a Muslim.

It is a measure of the change in country’s national security management calculus that the National Investigative Agency (reportedly as impartial as the CBI in its early days but for the blot of the Samjhauta blasts) was liberally let loose on a vast assortment of targets: relatives and associates of Kashmiri leaders to bomb blasts in Malda. But this capability of a more professional and technologically better-equipped NIA was disfavoured for the clumsy, biased local police for Junaid Khan and Pehlu Khan’s murderers.

In Kashmir, the body count continued to mount — mostly of gun-toting teenagers and an occasional soldier or policeman. But the impressive statistics — “double century” of militants felled, as the PM announced at a Gujarat election rally — has been insufficient to conduct panchayat polls, subdue the pesky Pakistani soldier on the LoC or permit the Jammu and Kashmir CM’s vacated Lok Sabha seat to be filled by fresh elections.

The North-East continued to be wrapped in a mist of its own. There was still no word about text of the mysterious Naga accord and all efforts to neutralise the dissenters unravelled. Assam, however, kept its peace despite the Supreme Court-monitored verification of suspected Bangladeshis, a highly emotive issue that has seen considerable bloodletting in the past, including a sapping insurgency.

While the Indo-Gangetic basin grappled with the Sangh Parivar’s successful harnessing of tensions, very similar to the period leading to the demolition of the Babri Masjid, southern India witnessed similar societal discord: a journalist was assassinated in Bengaluru while a spirited effort helmed by the BJP president Amit Shah turned the spotlight on the decades-old killing fields of Kannur in order to convey a Sangh Parivar-helmed post-truth: as if the murderous rivalry between the Sangh and the CPM in one tiny patch of Kerala was a statewide manifestation.

Haryana, once again, temporarily slipped into the nether-region. Last year, the administration came second best to the Jats. This year, their strategy of controlling followers of the Dera Sacha Sauda literally went up in flames; Panchkula alone recorded a horrendous death toll of more than 40. The government’s handling of the aftermath, too, raised more questions.

Punjab continued to hold its peace after the discord of the past two years. Its handling of the Dera Sacha Sauda fallout was firm, focused and commendable while the police claimed to have solved the targeted killing of minority leaders.

Peace in the land was fragile, snapped many a time but did not escalate. The virtues of tolerance and coexistence continued to dominate the social structure, despite the ruling arrangements attempts to forcibly reset social equations.