When a society chooses performative but hollow ‘justice’ over ‘substantive’ policing and counter-terrorism, it is the terrorists and their handlers who benefit. Always and every time.

For the past 24 hours, the Narendra Modi government has worked frantically on two fronts to stop the people of India from asking pointed, logical questions about the security and political failures that allowed six heavily armed terrorists to gun down 26 innocent civilians at the Baisaran meadow in Pahalgam, Kashmir on April 22.
These failings are manifest. The government spent the past five years claiming the threat of terrorism had receded thanks to its decision to abrogate Article 370 in August 2019. Then it said its ‘surgical strikes’ on terrorist camps in Pakistan would serve as a deterrent. To present a picture of ‘normalcy’, it allowed tourists to gather in a vulnerable, inaccessible place without the presence of even basic security. None of this absolves the terrorists of their crime, of course, but the prime minister’s complacency cannot also be wished away.
So how has his government tried to cover its tracks? First, by blaming the people of India for not loving their country enough. “Until 140 crore Indians don’t make nationalism and patriotism their supreme duty (‘param dharm‘), these types of incidents will continue to trouble the country,” Union commerce minister Piyush Goyal told reporters on Friday. Of course, Modi was smart enough to convey this noxious theory via a politically expendable acolyte in case it backfires.
The second move the government has made is to emulate the Israeli tactic of inflicting collective punishment on poor Kashmiri families for the alleged sins of their black sheep. Israel routinely does this to the Palestinians, who are, in the eyes of international law, an Occupied people. But Modi has no compunctions rendering dozens of his own fellow citizens homeless—the elderly, children, women—so long as he gets to avoid being blamed for his hubris and incompetence in claiming a premature victory over terrorism.
In demolishing home after home, however, he has exposed not just his own contempt for the rule of law—as recently reiterated by the Supreme Court—but also the discriminatory nature of official policy in which the religion of terror victims and of their attackers determines how the state will respond.
Consider this. The individuals accused of the dastardly terrorist attack in on Hindu tourists Pahalgam (all said to be linked to the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba) are supposed to be equal in the eyes of the law to, say the Hindutva militants accused of the Malegaon terrorist bombings which killed 38 Muslim worshippers in 2006 and 2008.
But in Kashmir, the homes of as many as seven individuals (of whom only two have actually been named by the police in the Pahalgam case) were demolished by the authorities in the past 24 hours.
Do you recall if the residence of Pragya Thakur, prime accused in the Malegaon 2008 case, was demolished, or the homes of Lieutenant Colonel Shrikant Prasad Purohit, Major Ramesh Upadhyay (retired), Ajay Rahirkar, Sudhakar Dwivedi, Sudhakar Chaturvedi and Sameer Kulkarni? Not only was Thakur’s home never demolished, she was given a Bharatiya Janata Party ticket by Modi in 2019 and went on to become a member of parliament.
Let me be clear: There should be no leniency towards persons accused of terror. Investigate the crime, gather the evidence and prosecute them. if the case is solid, convict them and sentence them to the punishment prescribed by law.
That is how civilised nations deal with terror.
And if the constitution says a person is innocent until proven guilty—a presumption Modi used to justify making Pragya Thakur an MP even though she was accused of a major terrorist crime—then this benefit surely needs to be given to everyone accused of terror. Any punishment due to them must only be delivered after their conviction in a court of law, not before.
The danger with house demolitions of the sort we just witnessed in Kashmir is that they are meant to convince the Indian public that they are seeing justice being done—even when the authorities are actually nowhere close to solving this crime, or catching the terrorists and delivering them to justice.
Remember this: the Lashkar terrorists who killed three dozen Sikhs in Chittisinghpora in 2000 were never caught. Two Pakistanis—Suhail Malik and Wasim Ahmed of the LeT—were arrested and tried but acquitted because there was “no evidence against the respondents”, a verdict upheld by the Delhi High Court in 2012.
You want to know why no one got caught and punished for the Chhittisinghpora massacre? Because the army and police picked up and murdered five civilians from in and around Anantnag soon after, dressed them up in fatigues, murdered them in cold blood and burned their bodies in Pathribal before announcing to the world that the dreaded terrorists who had murdered the Sikh civilians had been cornered and killed in an encounter. I covered the story at the time and the names of the five victims need to be remembered: Zahoor Dalal, Juma Khan, Bashir Ahmed Bhat, Mohammed Malik and a second man named Juma Khan.
I won’t recount all the details of this horrific case – the firing at Brakpora on protestors demanding the bodies of the five ‘encounter’ victims be exhumed, the crude attempt to swap DNA samples in order to cover up the crime – but the CBI was subsequently tasked with investigating Pathribal and ended up charge-sheeting the officers and soldiers involved. None of their homes were demolished because the law does not allow persons accused of a crime to be subject to this sort of retribution. However, to India’s eternal shame, the soldiers were never even tried. This, despite the fact that there was no disputing the innocence of the men they had killed.
As if that were not bad enough, the Chittisinghpora terrorist attack file was never reopened and pursued. For all we know, the terrorists who emptied their Kalashnikovs on the Hindu tourists in Pahalgam included some of the terrorists who had murdered the Sikhs of Chhittisinghpora 25 years ago.
I mention this not to make a moral or legal point about house demolitions—the Supreme Court has already clarified the law in this regard and Narendra Modi and Amit Shah believe they have the right to disregard this. Rather, the issue is one of the government’s disregard for national security.
When a society chooses performative but hollow ‘justice’ over ‘substantive’ policing and counter-terrorism, it is the terrorists and their handlers who benefit. Always and every time.

Courtesy: The Wire