Author: M J Akbar
Publication: India Today
Date: May 30, 201
URL: http://indiatoday.intoday.in/site/story/india-today-editorial-director-m-j-akbar-on-wazhul-khan-goof-up-and-chidambaram-most-wanted-list-of-fugitives/1/138739.html
The next time Pakistan foreign secretary Salman
Basheer wants to rubbish any wish-list of terrorists sent by India's much-vaunted
home minister P. Chidambaram, he needn't bother to describe it as "mere
literature". Literature belongs to the realm of high art. He can dismiss
it as Groucho Marx and ask for the next question at the press conference.
It requires some capacity to convert India's
most serious problem into a farce, but the home ministry under Chidambaram
has managed to achieve this. If you are in two minds about whether to laugh
or cry at the expose that one of the persons on Chidambaram's "Most Wanted"
list of fugitives allegedly given sanctuary in Pakistan, Wazhul Kamar Khan,
is actually a zari merchant who has been living for years at Wagle Estate
in Thane, next-door to Mumbai, some additional information should help make
up your mind. The Mumbai police had pointedly told Delhi to remove Wazhul
Khan's name, and added two brothers, Riyaz and Iqbal Bhatkal, wanted in terror
attacks in Varanasi, Ahmedabad and Pune, to the list. The Bhatkal brothers
were not included. Maybe the home ministry likes symmetry, and two additions
plus one deletion would have made the figure an untidy 51. Fifty is just so
much neater.
Chidambaram has treated this blunder with
familiar airy disdain. "I don't think," he said, "we should
make a big issue of it. It is possible there could be an error or there could
be two people with the same name." That misses the point. It is not India,
but Pakistan who can make a big issue of this. Islamabad can ask India to
circulate the document to its own policemen, with or without a snigger.
There is a third option apart from laughter
or tears: anger. At the top of this "Most Wanted" list is Dawood
Ibrahim, principal accused in the Mumbai blasts of 1993. Some Don Quixotes
in Delhi even made fanciful noises about picking up Dawood in an American-Abbotabad
style operation after Osama bin Laden was killed. But you don't need either
the US Seals or Marines to pick up Dawood Ibrahim's brother, Iqbal Kaskar,
from Nagpada, in the heart of Mumbai. Nor is it the case that while Dawood
might be an international villain, young Iqbal lives in a Gandhian ashram
from where he does gaon and dharma seva. Kaskar is just another goon. On Tuesday
May 17 evening, at 9.15, he was shot at in Nagpada during an after-dinner
walk in the company of his driver-cum-bodyguard Arif Bael (also known as Arif
Jewellery and Abu Bakr) by two men in a drive-past motorcycle. Mr Jewellery
did not survive.
Question: Why is Dawood's brother, a thriving
member of Mumbai's underworld, almost certainly in criminal contact with the
Dawood gang, not behind bars? It is as inconceivable that the Mumbai police
were unaware of Kaskar as that the ISI had no clue of Osama bin Laden's presence.
The ISI saved Osama because of some miscued double game. The Mumbai police
protected Dawood's brother and his underworld operations out of nothing more
dramatic than sheer greed. Law and order may be a state subject, but who rules
in Mumbai? Congress and NCP.
Mumbai has become a well-organised jungle,
with defined territories. Literally around the corner from Nagpada is the
visible paraphernalia of a modern city: an imposing Mumbai municipality, next-door
to a grand building that is headquarters of the country's largest media company,
divided from a classic railway station by traffic jams and, just a sniff further,
beautiful clubs and greens. The government winks at this coexistence of an
urban world at its congested best and an underworld that conspires to erode
the vitals of a nation. Why should it be surprised when terror is planned
within such labyrinths?
All the sins of matsanyaya (law of the jungle)
certainly cannot be laid at the door of Chidambaram. But he replaced Shivraj
Patil as home minister in the wake of the ISI-planned terror attacks on Mumbai.
Terrorism and its links with Pakistan, including through the Mumbai underworld,
were his special remit. Chidambaram's USP was believed to be competence. But
two-anda-half years later, a litter of mistakes is snapping at his heels.
The mismanagement of Telangana, certainly his worst political misjudgment,
began the series of miscalculations that have culminated in the overwhelming
victory of Jagan Reddy, and could lead to the collapse of the Congress ministry
in the fortress from which the party conquered Delhi. There is a new, if slightly
subversive, view gaining ground in the capital: when cowboy Chidambaram draws
his six-shooter, his own foot is in trouble.
If it was merely a question of Chidambaram
turning into a laughing stock, it would be a personal tragedy. When India
becomes a laughing stock in Pakistan, it is a national wound.
