:: Editorial

Dangers of swap deals with rebels

Oct.24 : It is not clear if the move of the West Bengal government earlier this week to release two dozen women held for aiding Lalgarh Naxalites to secure the freedom of a West Midnapore police officer captured by the Maoists is policy, or a one-time deal intended to test the Naxal threshold in the matter of letting go policemen who are seen by extremists as the chief instrument of state violence perpetrated on the poor. If it is the former, then we may expect the Maoists to grab police personnel on a routine basis in order to get their own cadres and sympathisers out of jail. The state government has let it be known that there was no swap, although available indications point the other way. Indeed, it has come to light that a couple of reporters were involved in mediation.

The CPI(M)-led government may be tempted to proffer the argument that it didn’t oppose the bail plea of the women in question as they were not Naxalites, but just poor rural folk. In that event, why were they picked up in the first place? In some states, in the recent period, scores of poor people — languishing in jail on technical counts pertaining to tree-felling or collection of minor forest produce — have been released as part of a wider national effort to earn the goodwill of the local populace (the hearts-and-minds approach) in order to better fight the Naxal menace. Was this true in the instant case as well? In that event questions will arise about the release of the women coinciding with the freeing of the police officer in a blaze of media publicity by the Naxalite leadership in the Lalgarh forest area. Instead of acting coy about the whole affair, it would aid understanding of the whole case if the state government came clean with the facts. This might indeed help the framing of policy on the issue of engaging in swap deals with Maoists. Whatever the facts, the authorities in Kolkata would do well to remember that the brave wife of a minor police official in neighbouring Jharkhand became a widow when her husband was beheaded by the extremists. She had thought it wasn’t right to swap Naxal prisoners for her husband.

Prisoner exchange with terrorists and insurgents has been the subject of a wide international debate for some years. Broadly speaking, leading democratic countries frown on the idea. It is thought to set up a bad precedent in dealing with groups that act outside the legal framework in representative states. In India, there have been two striking instances of prisoner exchange. The V.P. Singh government had released terrorists in Kashmir to obtain the freedom of the abducted daughter of the then Union home minister, Mufti Muhammad Sayeed. Later, the Vajpayee government allowed dangerous Pakistani terrorists to go home free to seek the safe return of an Indian Airlines plane from Kandahar. Neither case was helpful in dealing with terrorism. If anything, abductions remained a stock-in-trade of the terrorists. Other state governments may well be tempted to follow the West Bengal example, especially since the swap was successful. But dealing with desperadoes is always a hit and miss affair as they do not have a code of conduct and are known to pursue tactics strictly for short-term gains. It might therefore be best if the Centre consulted with the states and came up with viable guidelines.