Asian Age, November 7, 2008, Editorial
The arrest of a serving Army officer in the Malegaon bomb blast case is a shocker. It remains to be seen if the police can gather enough material to formally charge him as an accused. What is disturbing is that an Army officer of the rank of lieutenant-colonel has been seen to be hobnobbing with elements of the Hindu far right accused of a terrorist crime. This particular act was aimed at a concentration of Muslims. This imparts it a communal and an ideological hue. The best one may hope is that this is an isolated case. A former Army Chief has called it an "aberration". No doubt he has gone by the record since India’s armed forces have been nurtured in the best tradition of military professionalism. This tradition arose in British India and has been maintained without a shadow of doubt after Independence, unlike Pakistan or Bangladesh where the services have been embroiled in coups and counter-coups, and in running the country. Nevertheless, anxiety has been voiced. A Union minister of state for home apprehends that the arrest points to a "big conspiracy". If he is right, our best chance is that the conspiracy doesn’t involve others in the military but only civilians.
Irrespective of what the court finds, the government would do well to discreetly activate across-the-board vetting procedures to weed out doubtful elements from the armed forces. It may also be a good idea to take a fresh look at the activities of non-democratic organisations, regardless of their ideological colour, that have the space to operate pretty much freely in a democratic society. The aim should be to stymie their aspiration of contaminating the government machinery, particularly the uniformed services. Hindu extremists call themselves "nationalist" and extremists of other breeds "secessionist" and "anti-national". This is a grotesque inversion of democratic logic, especially in a country of such bewildering diversity as India. The message should be clear: if we don’t hang together, we’ll hang separately. If incursion of the extreme tendencies among the majority community into the armed forces is not eradicated with a firm hand in the incipient stage, the prognosis can be unnerving. This is how the seizure of power by unconstitutional elements began in Pakistan and in most of the dictatorships in West Asia and elsewhere. All in the name of nationalism. The full majesty of the law must be brought to bear on those who seek to undermine the country’s basic democratic structure.
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