#6 I quote the Former Director General of the Punjab Police KPS Gill who fought a bloody counter-terrorist war and won.
"Terrorism in the Punjab didn't end because there was some political solution. It ended because we killed all the terrorists."
"I used to meet the same arguments in Punjab. People talk as if the terrorists represent some sort of inchoate democratic aspiration. But once terrorism was defeated in Punjab, the terrorist 'support base' vanished. Where is it now? These are falsehoods that only serve the terrorist cause. Terrorism does not recognise the normal conventions of politics and democracy, and cannot be countered by these. It is a completely immoral and unconstrained use of force and can only be countered by the use of force."
"There has, in every theatre of terrorist violence, certainly in South Asia and in other parts of what is referred to as the Third World, been a general, albeit implicit, assumption of popular support to terrorist movements far in excess of what actually exists on the ground or among the societies on whose behalf the terrorists claim to speak. Such assumptions are apparently ratified by the public statements of many leaders and even of the "common people" and the local media, from time to time. And yet, they are utterly false – though this fact can only be confirmed after the terror has been conclusively defeated. This is precisely what happened in Punjab. In the end Eighties, I recall many a muddle-headed "liberal" arguing that "we" had lost the hearts of the "people of Punjab", and so there was little sense in holding on to a piece of land. Thousands, at times even hundreds of thousands, assembled in bhog ceremonies of slain terrorists, and the media pointed to this intractable evidence of the mass support that the Khalistanis enjoyed. But by 1992, when the terrorists were in open flight, there was visible elation in the streets, as markets began to remain open late into the evenings, and I recall the sheer jubilation that marked the first "musical night" – organised by the Punjab police at Tarn Taran – that was attended by thousands of people rediscovering their freedom. It was the same sense of relief that was visible among the crowds thronging the broken-down cinema halls in Kabul to stand in the midst of collapsed seats through a projection of the only film available – a documentary on the mujahiddeen who drove out the Russian forces from Afghanistan in the 1980s." |
