Comment: Politics of terrorism. (1995, 20 Marks)
Bruce Hoffman, in Inside Terrorism (1998), defines terrorism as violence, or the threat of it, used by an organised group for a political aim and designed to spread fear far beyond its immediate victims. That definition makes terrorism politics by other means. The politics of terrorism works at three levels: who gets to name it, how it works as a strategy, and how states respond to it.
The politics of definition
- No agreed meaning: Alex Schmid counted more than 250 competing definitions. The UN has sectoral treaties but no comprehensive convention. India proposed the Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism (CCIT) in 1996, and it is still stalled over whether state armed forces and “national liberation” struggles should be excluded.
- Relativism: one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter records a real deadlock. The sounder test looks at method rather than cause: deliberately targeting civilians is illegitimate whatever the grievance.
- State terror: the word was born with the Jacobin Terror of 1793–94, a case of state violence. Noam Chomsky’s distinction between “wholesale” state terror and “retail” insurgent terror asks why only the second is usually named.
Terrorism as political strategy
- Propaganda of the deed: in the nineteenth century Carlo Pisacane argued that ideas spring from deeds, and 1890s anarchist assassinations enacted it. Walter Laqueur treats publicity as essential to terrorism: the act is staged for an audience.
- Strategic logic: Martha Crenshaw reads terrorism as a rational organisational choice, not a pathology. Robert Pape, in Dying to Win (2005), found that suicide campaigns aim to coerce democracies into leaving territory the attackers claim. The secular Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) were the leading practitioner.
- State sponsorship: proxy terror is cheap and deniable, and it keeps violence below the threshold of war. Pakistan’s backing of anti-India groups and Iran’s backing of Hezbollah are the standing cases.
- Four waves: David C. Rapoport traced modern terrorism through four generational waves:
| Wave | Era | Driving idea |
|---|---|---|
| Anarchist | 1880s–1920s | Revolt against autocracy |
| Anti-colonial | 1920s–1960s | Self-determination |
| New Left | 1960s–1990s | Revolutionary Marxism |
| Religious | 1979– | Sacred duty |
The politics of counter-terrorism
- Securitisation: the Copenhagen School (Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver) shows how calling a threat existential licenses extraordinary measures. After 2001 that logic produced the “war on terror”, the USA PATRIOT Act and Guantánamo.
- The provocation trap: overreaction alienates communities and supplies recruits, which is often exactly what the attackers intended.
- Civil-liberties costs: emergency laws outlive the emergency and drift towards use against dissent.
The Indian experience in the 1990s
- Punjab: the Khalistan insurgency was ended by police operations and the return of elections in 1992. Chief Minister Beant Singh was still assassinated in 1995.
- Kashmir: militancy from 1989 moved from the secular nationalism of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) to Pakistan-backed pan-Islamist groups. A local grievance became a proxy war.
- Bombay, 12 March 1993: serial blasts killed 257 people, presented as revenge for the riots that followed the demolition of the Babri Masjid. They showed how communal politics and terror feed each other. The LTTE’s killing of Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 showed that terror could cross borders.
- TADA (1985–95): the Act made confessions to the police admissible and was misused against minorities and ordinary accused. The Supreme Court upheld it in Kartar Singh (1994), but it was allowed to lapse in 1995.
Conclusion
Terrorism is political before it is violent. Its aim is fear, publicity and provocation, and it thrives on state sponsorship and on disagreement over definitions. Counter-terrorism is political too. The effective response denies terror its political rewards: legitimacy, overreaction and a sponsor’s impunity. Securitisation that erodes the rule of law hands terrorists part of their victory.