Pallab Bhattacharya
Less than two months in office on returning to power after parliamentary elections, the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi tabled and got passed in the Lok Sabha in its current budget session a Bill that seeks to bolster the fight against terrorism. In the process, the government drove home a political statement on two counts: (1) the Bill’s passage was in consonance with the Bharatiya Janata Party’s principal poll plank of national security that largely contributed to its landslide poll victory and (2) the government deftly managed to secure the backing of the key opposition parties like Congress, Trinamool Congress, Samajwadi Party and Dravida Munnetra Kazagham which had strong reservations about the Bill.
The amendment Bill passed with overwhelming majority in division vote on July 14 widens and strengthens India’s elite counter-terror organization National Investigation Agency (NIA). The proposed legislation allows the NIA to investigate terror cases targeting Indian nationals and Indian assets abroad, probe new crimes related to cyber terrorism, fake currency, hijacking, human trafficking and crimes involving nuclear facilities.
The debate on the Bill turned out to be a big political slugfest between the government and the opposition. During the discussion, the opposition parties’ attack was spearheaded by All India Majilis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) lawmaker Assaduddin Owaisi who pointed to the acquittal of nine Muslims in the bomb blasts in Malegaon, Maharashtra, ten years after they were accused in connection with the incident. Congress lawmaker Manish Tewari alleged the government was trying to turn India into a police state and that the proposed law ran the risk of being turned into a weapon for scoring political vendetta. Tewari’s party colleague Adhir Ranjan Choudhury, leader of the Congress in the Lok Sabha, wanted to know from Home Minister Amit Shah how the government intended to probe cases in Pakistan especially when Islamabad is not yet a signatory to the SAARC Convention Against Terrorism.
The opposition lawmakers also cited the scrapping of the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) brought by the then BJP-led coalition government headed by Atal Bihari Vajpayee in 2002 on the ground of its alleged misuse. The tough law was junked in 2004 when the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance was in power. Shah hit back by rejecting the claim that POTA was scrapped because of its misuse but only because of the Congress “vote-bank” politics. Pointing to the spurt in terror incidents between 2004 and 2008 including the November 26, 2009 Mumbai attack by ten Pakistani terrorists that left 166 people dead, Shah said it was the Mumbai incident that forced the then Congress-led dispensation to set up the NIA.
In his reply, Shah also said the NIA amendment Bill cannot be held hostage to Pakistan’s refusal to sign the SAARC Convention Against Terrorism and that India has other ways of tackling terror emanating from Pakistan. What he left unsaid is the Indian army’s surgical strikes on terror installations in Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir in 2016 in the wake of a terror attack on an Indian army camp in Uri, Jammu and Kashmir, and India’s air strike on a terror camp in Balakot in February this year. These two retaliatory attacks have set a new diction in India’s strategy to deal with terror sponsored by Pakistan.
The NIA has been pushing for widening its power and ambit of operations for the last two years and the permission to probe cases in other countries was being strongly felt because of transnational linkages of perpetrators of terror attacks. Two glaring examples of this are the attacks carried out by Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh on both sides of the border and the April 21 serial bombings in Sri Lanka. While one Indian was killed in the Holey Artisan terror attack in Dhaka, 11 Indian citizens perished in Sri Lanka.
The political victory for the ruling party came when the NIA Amendment Bill was put to voting. Usually, the government with clear majority does not seek a division vote on a Bill moved by it and prefers voice vote. But Owaisi insisted on division vote even though the Bill would have been approved by voice vote given the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance’s far superior parliamentary arithmetic.
Sensing an opportunity to score a politically point, Shah seized the accepted Owaisi’s demand and said the country should know who supported and who opposed the anti-terror measure. Owaisi’s move caught the rest of the opposition lawmakers by surprise who then went into an informal huddle and finally decided to vote for the Bill. Only six lawmakers belonging to the AIMIM and the Left voted against it.
Analysts said all major opposition parties, after having faced the rout in parliamentary elections, opted to be politically correct by backing the Bill when it came to division vote. The opinion in the Congress, the main opposition, was divided on the issue of supporting the Bill as a section felt such a move would send a wrong signal to the minority community given its concerns over the NIA Act and might harm the party in a state like Kerala, a state now ruled by the Left Democratic Front led by the CPI(M), where it is trying to come back to power in fresh assembly polls.
The Congress lawmakers from Kerala were particularly unhappy with the support the party lent to the Bill especially after the CPI (M) and the CPI voted against the legislation. These lawmakers stressed the need for holding on to the momentum of the Congress’ win in recent parliamentary elections in Kerala in which the Left Front put up a dismal show. But the view that ultimately prevailed in the Congress is that the NIA Act was after all the brainchild of the party-led government headed by Manmohan Singh in 2008 and should not be seen as resisting the amendments now to give it more teeth. Besides, the Congress did make its point during the debate that the Bill should not be misused and that the security agency should function without bias towards any community or political party. Most importantly, it was felt by the majority in the Congress that opposition to the amendments in the NIA Act would have given the BJP another handle to accuse it of being minority appeasement, something the Congress studiously avoided during the parliamentary poll campaign this time.
Pallab Bhattacharya is a
journalist based in India
