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GS Paper: Organized Crime & Terrorism

  • When Nehru took Pak to the UN over Kashmir in 1947?

    Finance Minister sought to remind Parliament that it was the country’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, who internationalized the Kashmir issue by taking it to the United Nations.

    Kashmir at UN

    • The United Nations has played an advisory role in maintaining peace and order in the Kashmir region soon after the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947.
    • India took this matter to the UN Security Council, which passed resolution 39 (1948) and established the United Nations Commission for India and Pakistan (UNCIP) to investigate the issues and mediate between the two countries.
    • Following the cease-fire of hostilities, it also established the United Nations Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan (UNMOGIP) to monitor the cease-fire line.

    Why did Nehru agree to these terms?

    • In December 1947, because the British perhaps suggested Nehru that this matter will not be resolved unless you take it to the UN.
    • British were convinced that an intermediary was needed.
    • Nehru, a loyalist to the British agreed upon the terms laid by Mountbatten.
    • It was Nehru who first put forth the idea of a referendum under the aegis of UN soon after independence.
    • There is evidence to believe Sardar Patel was uncomfortable with Nehru taking the matter to the UN, and thought it was a mistake.

    Issue: Adventurism by Pakistan

    • The discussions in the Security Council on our complaint of aggression by Pakistan in Jammu and Kashmir took a very unfavourable turn.
    • Pakistan then succeeded, with the support of the British and American members creating a western bias against India.
    • Pakistan is misusing this till date paving wave for third-party intervention.
    • It is an issue which should not have gone to a global forum, it is essentially an Indian issue.

    Article 35 of UN Charter

    • There has been some debate on whether India chose the wrong path to approach the UN.
    • In 2019, Home Minister said that had Nehru taken the matter to the UN under Article 51 of the UN Charter, instead of Article 35, the outcome could have been different.
    • India pointed out that J&K had acceded to India, and that the “Government of India considered the giving of this assistance by Pakistan to be an act of aggression against India.
    • Articles 33-38 of the UN Charter occur in Chapter 6, titled “Pacific (peaceful) Settlement of Disputes” :

    These Articles lay out that:

    1. the parties to a dispute that has the potential for endangering international peace and security are not able to resolve the matter through negotiations between them, or by any other peaceful means, or with the help of a “regional agency”
    2. the Security Council may step in, with or without the invitation of one or another of the involved parties, and recommend “appropriate procedures or methods of recommendation”
    3. Article 35 only says that any member of the UN may take a dispute to the Security Council or General Assembly
    4. Article 51, which occurs in Chapter 7, titled “Action With Respect to Threats to the Peace, Breaches of the Peace, and Acts of Aggression”
    5. It says that a UN member has the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if attacked

    Issues with the internationalization of Kashmir

    • Kashmir issue no longer remains bilateral; it has thus been internationalized.
    • However, India has been successful in perhaps internationalizing terrorism but not the Kashmir problem.
    • But unwarranted statements against India’s sovereign concerns are increasing these days.

     

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  • Houthi Attack on United Arab Emirates

    A suspected drone attack on Monday in Abu Dhabi, the capital of UAE, caused multiple explosions in which three Indians were reportedly killed.

    Who is behind the attack?

    • The Shia Houthi rebels of Yemen have claimed responsibility for the attack.

    Who are the Houthis?

    • The roots of the Houthi movement can be traced to “Believing Youth” (Muntada al-Shahabal-Mu’min).
    • It is a Zaydi revivalist group founded by Hussein al-Houthi and his father, Badr al-Din al-Houthi, in the early 1990s.
    • Badr al-Din was an influential Zaydi cleric in northern Yemen.
    • This group is inspired by the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the rise of Hezbollah in southern Lebanon in the 1980s.
    • Badr al-Din and his sons started building vast social and religious networks among the Zaydis of Yemen, who make up roughly one-third of the Sunni-majority country’s population.

    What led to the Houthis’ rise?

    • When protests broke out in Yemen in 2011 as part of the Arab Spring protests that felled Tunisian and Egyptian dictators.
    • The Houthis, now confident from their military victories and the support they enjoyed in Sadah, backed the agitation.

    Why did Saudi Arabia attack Yemen?

    • The rapid rise of the Houthis in Yemen set off alarm bells in Riyadh which saw them as Iranian proxies.
    • Saudi Arabia, under Mohammed Bin Salman, started a military campaign in March 2015, hoping for a quick victory against the Houthis.
    • But the Houthis had dug in, refusing to leave despite Saudi Arabia’s aerial blitzkrieg.
    • With no effective allies on the ground and no way-out plan, the Saudi-led campaign went on with no tangible result.
    • In the past six years, the Houthis have launched multiple attacks on Saudi cities from northern Yemen in retaliation for Saudi air strikes.

    Not a one-way proxy war

    • There are serious allegations against both the Saudis and the Houthis in the war.
    • While the Saudi bombings caused a large number of civilian deaths, the Houthis were accused, by rights groups and Governments, of preventing aid, deploying forces in densely populated areas.
    • Houthis have been using excessive force against civilians and peaceful protesters.

    Why did the Houthis target the UAE?

    • This is not the first time the Houthis attacked the UAE. In 2018, when the UAE-backed forces were making advances in Yemen, the Houthis claimed attacks against the Emirates.
    • They stayed focussed entirely on Saudi Arabia and Saudi-backed forces inside Yemen.

    Try this PYQ:

    Consider the following pairs:

    Towns sometimes mentioned in news: Countries

    1. Aleppo: Syria
    2. Kirkuk: Yemen
    3. Mosul: Palestine
    4. Mazar-i-sharif: Afghanistan

    Which of the pairs given above are correctly matched?

    (a) 1 and 2 only

    (b) 1 and 4 only

    (c) 2 and 3 only

    (d) 3 and 4 only

     

     

    [wpdiscuz-feedback id=”lv8gqunrwl” question=”Please leave a feedback on this” opened=”1″]Post your answers here.[/wpdiscuz-feedback]

     

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  • Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA)

    The Centre has designated 18 key operatives and leaders of extremists groups as individual terrorists under the recently-amended Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA).

    Try this question for mains:

    Q.“Anti-terror laws should not be used as a tool to silence the critics of the government.” Discuss in context to the recent amendments to the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA).

    About UAPA

    • The UAPA is aimed at effective prevention of unlawful activities associations in India.
    • Its main objective was to make powers available for dealing with activities directed against the integrity and sovereignty of India
    • It is an upgrade on the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act TADA, which was allowed to lapse in 1995 and the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) was repealed in 2004.
    • It was originally passed in 1967 under the then Congress government led by former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.
    • Till 2004, “unlawful” activities referred to actions related to secession and cession of territory. Following the 2004 amendment, “terrorist act” was added to the list of offences.

    Recent amendments

    • The Centre had amended UAPA, 1967, in August 2019 to include the provision of designating an individual as a terrorist.
    • Before this amendment, only organisations could be designated as terrorist outfits.

  • The Resistance Front (TRF)

     

    (Image Source: The Economic Times)

     

    A newly floated outfit, the Resistance Front, has come under the scanner of enforcement agencies for its suspected links with the banned Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT).

    This is a very significant development with respect to India’s concern against terrorism. Terrorism and the terror outfits are increasingly becoming more institutionalized and ‘the Resistance Front’ is an another move towards it.

    ‘The Resistance Front’

    • TRF, which is owning up terror attacks in Kashmir these days, is an offshoot of the terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba and is also associated with other terror outfits such as Hizbul Mujahideen, Jaish-e-Mohammed.
    • Various reports claim that after the abrogation of Article 370 in J&K, Pakistan decided to increase the terror activities in the Valley.
    • However, facing international pressure and to protect itself from being blacklisted by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), Pakistan decided to launch a new terror group with a new identity.
    • Various Indian security agencies operating in Kashmir feel that the ‘TRF’ was formed due to the pressure on Pakistan from the FATF to cut down on the funding of the terrorist groups.

    A new strategy justifying terrorism

    • The word ‘resistance’ has been used by Pakistan and the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) to put in place a new strategy for supporting terrorism against India.
    • Pakistan’s plan is to rebrand the terrorists operating under the umbrella of JeM, LeT and Hizbul as “non-religious” rebellion.
    • Pakistan wants to project Kashmiri terrorism as a resistance movement by Kashmiris. So far Hizbul and LeT have come under TRF’s umbrella.

    Must read:

    https://www.civilsdaily.com/news/explained-amendments-to-the-uapa/

    Back2Basics: What is the FATF?

    • FATF is an intergovernmental organization founded in 1989 on the initiative of the G7 to develop policies to combat money laundering.
    • The FATF Secretariat is housed at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) headquarters in Paris.
    • It holds three Plenary meetings in the course of each of its 12-month rotating presidencies.

  • Global Terrorism Index (GTI) 2019

    A report compiled by NITI Aayog has questioned the methodology adopted by an Australian based institute to rank India as the seventh-worst terrorism affected country.

    Despite of being a global threat, there is yet no consensus on the definition of terrorism. Despite the considerable discussion, the formation of a comprehensive convention against international terrorism by the United Nations has always been impeded by the lack of consensus on a definition.

    Global Terrorism Index (GTI)

    • GTI is a report published annually by the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP).
    • The index provides a comprehensive summary of the key global trends and patterns in terrorism since 2000.
    • It produces a composite score in order to provide an ordinal ranking of countries on the impact of terrorism.
    • It is an attempt to systematically rank the nations of the world according to terrorist activity.
    • The index combines a number of factors associated with terrorist attacks to build an explicit picture of the impact of terrorism, illustrating trends, and providing a data series for analysis by researchers and policymakers.

    Its database

    • The GTI is based on data from the Global Terrorism Database (GTD).
    • The GTD is collected and collated by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) at the University of Maryland.
    • It has codified over 190,000 cases of terrorism.
    • The GTI covers 163 countries, covering 99.7% of the world’s population.

    India’s ranking

    • India has moved to the seventh position from the previous years eighth in the annual Global Terrorism Index (GTI) 2019.
    • India has ranked ahead of conflict-ridden countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, Sudan, Burkina Faso, Palestine and Lebanon.

    Why such ranking matters?

    • The positioning in the global indices impacted investments and other opportunities.
    • The purpose was to see which of the indices can be used to drive reforms or which of these would require some amount of engagement with the publishing agency to make the indices more relevant.

    Issues with GTI

    • The GTD was based solely on “unclassified media articles, with more than 100 structured variables such as each attack’s location, tactics and weapons, perpetrators, casualties and consequences etc.
    • The large diversity in definitions of terrorism amongst countries, and the lack of a universally accepted definition of terrorism, leads to a great deal of ambiguity in calculating and understanding GTI reports.
    • IEP’s economic impact of terrorism model does not account for costs for countering violent extremism and long-term economic impacts on business activity, production and investment.
    • Indeed, the GTI 2019 report itself states that a great majority of property damage values from terrorist incidents are coded in the GTD as ‘unknown,’ resulting in 1 out 4 parameters scoring nil for most countries.
    • Similarly, the definition of mass shootings used in the GTI is limited to ‘indiscriminate rampages in public places resulting in four or more victims killed by the attacker,’ leaving out lone-wolf attacks.

    Highly irrelevant data

    • The absence of a robust data collection and analysis methodology, and any engagement with Governments facing the scourge of terrorism, means that the GTI has low direct value for policymakers.
    • It cannot be used as an aid to understand and alleviate challenges to countries from domestic and cross border terrorism.