New Delhi Gives Indians a Dangerous, Disgraceful Image
    By J. Sri Raman
    t r u t h o u t | Perspective

    Monday 08 May 2006

    On April 30, an otherwise uneventful Sunday, India received shocking news from Afghanistan ... The Taliban had beheaded an Indian hostage. The grisly killing came as yet another reminder of the cost of appearing to back the Bush crusade against "global terror" through a series of unequal and unjust wars launched and waged in utter violation of all international law and norms.

    After abducting 41-year-old engineer K. Surayanarayana a couple of days earlier, the Taliban had announced that it would kill him by 7 pm that Sunday if all Indian nationals working in Afghanistan were not "withdrawn." They explained they killed him ahead of the timeline as he was trying to escape. The government in New Delhi as well as the grieving family of Surayanarayana in Hyderabad, besides the Indian public glued to the television all day long, had somehow nursed the hope that negotiations would save the hostage's life.

    They had not gauged the gravity of the situation for the about 2,500 Indians in that strife-torn country. They did not quite recognize the damage done to India's image in Afghanistan, as indeed elsewhere over the past few years, increasingly beyond easy repair.

    Other Indians had been through tough times in Taliban country before. I was one of them myself, a Kabul-based journalist during 1979-83. Those were times when Taliban were anti-Soviet "freedom fighters" and, therefore, the hot favorites of the illustrious predecessors of George W. Bush in Washington. Some of us did receive an occasional missive of anonymous threat from the unholy militants, though the ordinary Afghans treated Indians as brothers. But the period passed without any abduction of any Indian national working in Afghanistan, not to speak of his slaying.

    Suryanarayana, or Surya as he came to be known to millions of Indians following his fate, was not the first victim of the Taliban, fighting the Bush-led forces with the same weapons that another US regime had given them. In November 2005, Ramankutty Maniappan, a driver of India's Border Roads Organization, was abducted and killed. At least two other Indians were abducted subsequently, though not killed.

    The Taliban had accused Surya, who was working with a Bahrain-based company, of being a "US spy." They had also accused the Indian nationals in Afghanistan in general of "helping the Western forces." Their demand for withdrawal of Indians came in the wake of the Bush visit to India, the series of US-India statements about a "strategic partnership" - and, of course, Afghan President Hamid Karzai's mission to New Delhi.

    There is a Pakistan angle to the matter that makes it relevant to the "strategic partnership." The International Special Assistance Force (ISAF) dominated by NATO, in Afghanistan, has complained more than once that its anti-Taliban operations are constrained by the porous Pakistan-Afghanistan borders, allowing the fundamentalist forces refuge in the no man's land of the neighboring country that General Pervez Musharraf cannot quite manage to control. India's Ministry of External Affairs has now linked the problem of Indians' security to the same Pakistan factor.

    Karzai, it may be recalled, had on his visit to Islamabad last February handed Musharraf a list of Afghan "terrorists" hiding in Pakistan. Islamabad in turn dismissed the list as outdated. The controversy remains yet to be officially resolved.

    Surya's killing led to predictable demands for a "fitting response" from India. It is a matter of relief to all peace lovers of South Asia that New Delhi has, for the moment, ruled out a dispatch of Indian troops to Afghanistan. India's hawks, however, are still trying to have their way by other means.

    India had recently managed to raise the strength of its non-army security personnel in Afghanistan. Two hundred members of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) are now guarding Indian personnel and India-associated projects in the country, as against an initial 40. Demands are now being heard for a further increase in the number. While this step may not provide sufficient security in far flung Afghan areas, where most of India-aided projects are sited, the militants' propaganda can easily project it as a precursor to military intervention on the side of the multi-national force.

    It is not only New Delhi's Afghanistan-related role that has given India its dangerous new image. In July 2004, three Indian employees of a Kuwait-based company were taken hostage by a group called "Holders of Black Banners" in Iraq. The kidnapping, which also created country-wide anxiety, followed hints by New Delhi that India might consider sending troops to Iraq to help occupation forces. If negotiations succeeded the hostages' release, it was perhaps because the militants' attention was focused more on their victims from Pakistan, which had then hinted at readiness to join an "Islamic force" on the side of the occupation forces.

    Earlier, four Indian employees of another Kuwait-based firm escaped a worse fate only by fleeing to their home state in Kerala in India. Reports of the more recent period suggest that there is cause for concern about the security of Indians in Iraq.

    The number of Indian nationals in Iran may be far less, and settlers of the second, third and fourth generations account for the majority of Indian population in that country. But New Delhi's policy on Iran, faced with a bullying offensive from Bush and his Western allies, can do nothing to make official India's image safer for thousands of expatriate Indians.