Pota chatter

So the Prevention of Terrorism Act (Pota) is back on the political centrestage, with the UPA government — egged on by the DMK within it...

So the Prevention of Terrorism Act (Pota) is back on the political centrestage, with the UPA government — egged on by the DMK within it, the Left outside it, and the Congress Party’s public stance against it — is all set to repeal Pota, as the Common Minimum Programme has it. But this is a venture riven with complexities.

For one, there can be no doubt that terrorism is among the most egregious criminal activities confronting us today — one that targets innocents, who have nothing to do with the perceived grievances of the terrorist. It aims to kill for impact; but the target of terrorism goes beyond the persons attacked to a wider community of human beings who it seeks to coerce, frighten and subdue to its will. Second, the whole world is presently grappling with the fall-out of terrorism. Third, the ever-present threat of terrorism continues to face India and if an incident — like the attack on Parliament — were to repeat itself, the UPA may have to face an angry backlash for having repealed a law that had sought to address the threat.

These are complex, intractable realities and they are the reason why several liberal democracies in the West have had to devise new laws to deal with terrorism. This is why there are numerous UN resolutions calling member-states to ensure an adequate legal framework to deal with terrorism. By committing itself to the repeal of Pota, the UPA is therefore swimming against the tide of logic and the imperatives of eliminating terrorism. This newspaper has often in the past criticised various aspects of Pota and highlighted innumerable instances of its abuse. There can be no two opinions that all laws, especially those that confer special powers, must be administered and enforced with great care. But that is an enforcement challenge. There can also be no two opinions that Pota itself could do with finetuning. Yet, there is no getting away from the fact that if we are to tackle the two-decade-old scourge of terrorism successfully we must have laws that can address the challenge adequately. The UPA needs to think through this conundrum a little more carefully.