India’s terrorism-related fatalities fell by an astonishing thirty-five percent in the year following the 26 November 2008 Bombay carnage, and that trend appears to hold, thanks to the Union home minister, P.Chidambaram. Why has Chidambaram succeeded where his predecessors, including the Opposition BJP’s leading light, L.K.Advani, who moulded himself after the redoubtable Sardar Patel, the country’s first home minister, failed? In any answer must lie one of several future courses to take to contain and rebuff Pakistani and threatened Al-Qaeda/ Taliban terrorism.
 
Chidambaram is hardly new to internal-security administration, having been a junior minister of home in Rajiv Gandhi’s government when Punjab terrorism was at its peak. Even then, his application of management practices learnt as a Harvard MBA were evident, but he most reluctantly became cabinet home minister after the Bombay massacre (26/ 11) following the egregious failure of the then incumbent, Shivraj Patil, a staunch loyalist of the all-powerful Congress party president, Sonia Gandhi.
 
It is easy to understand Chidambaram’s initial reluctance to accept this responsibility. The home office has been a graveyard for reputations in the face of what until then seemed uncontainable Pakistani terrorism, which had targeted India’s Parliament House, popular temple shrines, the Srinagar (Jammu and Kashmir) army corps headquarters, Bombay’s commuter trains and crowded Delhi markets during festival rushes, Bangalore, and been responsible for the Indian-Airlines plane hijack in 1999 that lead to the release of three dreaded terrorists, including the future Daniel Pearl murderer.
 
Also, it could not have been clear to Chidambaram how far the Congress would back a tough home minister, because of the party’s dependence on Muslim votes (“votebank politics”, as the BJP calls it). On the other hand, he would certainly have known that the BJP would watch him eagle-eyed, and pounce on him for any committed mistake, although Chidambaram enjoys a good personal equation with the BJP leadership, especially its former law minister, Arun Jaitley. Then, the police administration was a mess. Police were corrupt, ill-equipped and underpaid, and the better officers were either sidelined or demoralized.
 
Simultaneously, the criminal-justice system was laggardly. Intelligence had repeatedly failed on account of poor leadership; its counter-terrorism role was sacrificed for gathering dirt on the political opposition; there was neither place for objective, projective analysis nor were hard countermeasures taken against terrorist sleeper cells of the main anti-India Pakistani groups like the Lashkar-e-Toiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed and contra counterfeiting networks. Finally, there were entrenched interests that refused to countenance reforms in the internal security administration, lead by an intelligence warhorse and a Sonia/ Rajiv/ Indira Gandhi faithful, M.K.Narayanan, who till the past week was India’s national security advisor (NSA). No wonder, at the time of taking up the home charge post 26/ 11, Chidambaram publicly expressed his reluctance about it.
 
From then to now, Chidambaram has done a remarkable job, and it is hard for this writer to say this, because he had forecast (blunderingly, as it turns out) his failure. Chidambaram commenced charming the BJP to assist him in toughening existing laws against terrorism, but refused to draft a custom anti-terror law like the earlier PoTA and TADA which allegedly had been used against the minorities. Then he turned to salvaging the police and intelligence administration, running into difficulties with Narayanan, which were recently settled with Narayanan’s exit. All intelligence related to counterterrorism now comes to Chidambaram, and he is planning a US-like national counterterrorism centre tasked with the all-important assignment of “connecting the dots”. Less well-known but arguably the most important facet of Chidambaram’s success as home minister is that his counterterrorism thrust does not invite reflexive Muslim suspicion, not at any rate in a substantive manner.
 
Why is that? Because of its Hindutva ideology (now being shed), the BJP leadership’s counterterrorism policy provoked Muslim distress and opposition, which in turn assisted the Congress and like-minded parties in the ruling UPA coalition with their respective votebank politics. Second, because of its “secular” image, a Congress home minister is automatically regarded with less anxiety by the minorities. Third, the Congress leadership has understood that one more 26/ 11-type attack will destroy its credibility with the majority Hindu population, which has refused to polarize for long despite communal provocations. Flowing out of this post-26/ 11 compulsion, Sonia Gandhi has very likely given Chidambaram a free hand to tackle and overcome Pakistani terrorism, although there was a setback recently in Srinagar, when suicidal jihadis held out for hours attacking security forces. Finally, perhaps Chidambaram’s political base (or lack of it) back in Tamil Nadu’s Sivaganga constituency helps. The South is generally less communally polarized than the North or Western India, so Chidambaram’s toughness as home minister does not affect his electability, not negatively at least.
 
There is a clear link between Sonia Gandhi’s approval of Chidambaram’s actions and Narayanan’s exit from the Centre, otherwise there was no shaking the former NSA. And that the home minister has and is going to have more decisive say in India’s relations with its South Asian neighbours was evident in two recent developments, although undercurrents exit in other cases. Chidambaram warned the visiting Nepal home minister, Bhim Rawal, to take “prompt and positive” action on India’s 1999 request post the 1999 Indian-Airlines hijack to permit sky marshals on the national carrier, failing which the country would take its own incident-specific countermeasures. He was tougher on Pakistan, saying it would be held responsible for any terrorist attack emanating from its soil. He pungently dismissed the distinction between state and non-state actors, a fig leaf behind which Pakistan always hides following a terrorist attack on India.
 
Can Chidambaram leave a decisive legacy behind? By any metric, he is a hard act to follow. But it is also evident that if the Indian state invests the counterterrorism policy with integrity, not deflected by considerations of votebank and minority-bashing politics, Chidambaram-like successes may be replicated. But he still has a long way to go, and for once, here is a home minister who does not underestimate the challenges ahead. P.Chidambaram is not Sardar Patel II, but he is putting up a hard fight for that honour.