The following is an extract from the author’s interview with KPS Gill, India’s former Director General of Police in the Punjab, who was charged with crushing Sikh militancy in the northern Indian state. To his admirers he is the ultimate strongman who helped prevent secessionists from breaking India. To his detractors he is known as the “Butcher of Punjab”, a man willing to go to any lengths to break the terrorist. Here, over whisky sodas in his bungalow in Delhi, Gill voices contempt for those who seek to protect human rights in the war on terror:
“I put this question to all human rightists. When a man takes up a gun, when there is another nation state which is arming, training, motivating and tasking him to come and commit acts of terror. Not to destroy India, but to destroy the civilisation. The ancient Hinduism, the glories of Hinduism. What should I do to that man when I find him and catch him? You give me the answer. He’s not after your nation. He’s after your civilisation. What is Osama bin Laden saying?”
“What’s your answer?” I asked him.
“My answer is to answer them in kind.”
“A bullet for bullet?”
“Bullet for bullet.”
“Equal response?”
“Equal response.”
“No holds barred?”
“No holds barred.”
“Then how does that differentiate the state from the terrorist?”
“You have got into a bind here. What was our fight about? What was the message I sent to them? The message was ‘You confront us. Either we kill you or you kill us.’ If 1,800 policemen die, I tell you 5,000 terrorists will die.”
Political scientists at Guru Nanak University in Amritsar published a study in 1999 that showed the average terrorist died within two years of taking up arms. Looking at Gill I was surprised it was that long. He leaned forward in his chair, eyes blazing, his great paw-like hand gripping the half full whisky glass.
“There was a train going from Ludhiana, distance 50km to its destination. Terrorists entered this train. Office workers, shop workers, they come and go back by this train. Fifty six people are killed. Bodies are loaded onto trucks. Then, in the mortuary their bodies are laid on the ground as there is not enough space. When I went to see them, on the floor there was blood semi-caked, thicker than this carpet. You can’t reach the mortuary without walking through it. A layer of blood which sort of springs beneath your feet. So what have these people done? And those who kill them. By what logic of humanity or politics, or what Musharraf calls ‘root causes’, by what logic did they kill them?”
There was no answer, of course.
(Text © Copyright Edna Fernandes, 2007)
