US SECRETARY for Homeland Security Janet Napolitano is on her first visit to India to start a structured bilateral dialogue with her hosts. Contrary to common wisdom, the two countries have little in common in their definition of what threatens them and how they are tackling the problem.

The notion of American homeland security underscores democracy at home, no matter how abbreviated it may have become under the Patriot Act. That’s obviously one reason why the torture chambers of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay had to be located outside the legal precincts that homeland security defines and governs. Provisions of American democracyhad to be denied to those who survive or confront the depredations of its rampaging troops in their foreign homelands.

In contrast, the Indian approach has been depredatory at home and democratic abroad. Its worldview is deeply entrenched in untenable ‘homeland’ laws such as the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) whereby Indian troops are free to deal as they please with their perceived foes that are mostly fellow citizens. Sensitive Indian analysts have expressed outrage at the fact. Satyabrata Pal, a former Indian ambassador to Pakistan and a member of the National Human Rights Commission, feels let down by the state.

“When public servants kill, terrorise or harm those they are meant to serve, they break the law, because extra-judicial killings, torture or wrongful imprisonment are crimes. But they take place, far more frequently than they should. There are institutional flaws that make these common,” he declared at a symposium earlier this year.

The military and paramilitary pose a seemingly intractable challenge. In Jammu and Kashmir, the local police have investigated and confirmed acts of violence by military units or personnel against innocent citizens. In Assam, says Pal, commissions of inquiry have found that several similar complaints were true. “In almost all cases, however, military tribunals have held that the charges were false.”

Army generals claim that if their personnel were found guilty, particularly by civilians, morale would suffer. If the AFSPA is repealed or diluted, they argue, they would not be able to come to the aid of civil authority.

“The stand taken by the armed forces is an abomination,” said Pal. “Because in war they must abide by the Geneva Conventions. Because of their opposition, India has refused to sign the Optional Protocol, which covers actions taken by armed forces in internal armed conflicts.”

Thus an Indian soldier involved in a war against a foreign enemy, is governed by a set of laws (unlike the American counterpart), and is accountable if he violates them. Under AFSPA, on the other hand, unless his immunity is withdrawn, which it rarely is, he is not accountable when he kills his own citizens (unlike the American soldier), whom he has taken an oath to defend.

But why does India’s civil society want the military to meddle with domestic challenges? Is it really the people or the deep state that wants to involve the army? To answer the questions, Ms Napolitano could benefit enormously from two books released this week.

In my view, Ms Napolitano would do well to read Until My Freedom Has Come. The book, released on Wednesday, offers a bouquet of handpicked essays, most of them by secular Kashmiri intellectuals. Edited by Sanjay Kak, a Kashmiri filmmaker, the book deals with multi-layered nuances of what it suggests could be ‘The new intifada in Kashmir’. Important Kashmiri writers, both Hindu and Muslim, include Basharat Peer, Parvaiz Bukhari and Suvir Kaul.

Graphic accounts of state terror and the people’s unarmed response to it are contained in 27 essays, two or three of them in the form of Associated Press dispatches. The book helps dispel the notion of Kashmir as a fountainhead of Islamic fundamentalism and breathes new life into a much-bludgeoned mass struggle against military occupation of a proud people’s homeland.

The other Indian homelands facing the onslaught of the fully militarised Indian state include north-eastern India and, more recently, the forests of Chhattisgarh in central India. Chhattisgarh is where a group of poorly equipped Maoists have been declared as India’s biggest internal security challenge.

To objectively understand the issues involved, as opposed to the briefing she is likely to get from the home ministry, which is obsessed with militarising the region, Ms Napolitano should read Broken Republic by Arundhati Roy. The book came out this week and contains three insightful essays about the tribespeople’s fight against the state’s seizure of their land and its resources.

Given its violent drift on Chhattisgarh, the Indian home ministry should study the exploits of 16th-century Spaniard Juan de Onate and 17th-century English settler John Mason who both earned notoriety as leading hunters of Native Americans. As an US official representing a Democratic administration, Ms Napolitano may perhaps abhor the obvious similarities between the subjugation of American Indians and India’s bid to grab the resources of its own tribespeople.Ms Roy’s book of three essays offers a clear and cogent ringside view of the shaping military campaign in Chhattisgarh and its roots in the corporate plunder of the shrinking habitat of the poorest layer of Indians.

As for the cross-border nature of India’s security woes, there is something here too that could be salvaged or even pre-empted with better use of India’s democratic rather than military institutions. Ms Napolitano might want to ask her Indian interlocutors, for example, just why a Muslim underworld don who flaunted the Indian flag and cheered India’s cricket team in the 1980s became a serial bomber of Mumbai by 1993.

The answer perhaps lies in the failure of the state to act against those guilty of triggering anti-Muslim pogroms in the aftermath of the Babri Masjid sacrilege. Justice Shri Krishna Commission’s official report has recorded the details with considerable diligence. Ms Napolitano might want to retrieve the report from the dusty archives, and then help with the efforts to bring Dawood Ibrahim and his cohorts to justice.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.

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