12/13 The Parliament Attack
Around 11.30 a.m., on 13 December 2001, a white Ambassador car with security stickers entered India’s Parliament complex and parked near Gate 12. When an alert guard approached the vehicle, the driver panicked and backed into the carcade of the vice president of India. Soon, five men jumped out of the car and started firing indiscriminately. Security guards locked the gates of the Parliament building and returned fire, eventually killing all five terrorists.
The media covering parliament telecast the gunbattle live. When it ended, seven soldiers and five terrorists lay dead. For India, this was a 9/11 moment; the national mood of anger and outrage matched the shock at the audacity of the terrorism plot. The Parliament attack could have been a worse tragedy. I had a footnote to add to the tragic episode. In the PM’s personal office, some important files had piled up for Vajpayee to sign off on. He was leaving for parliament from Race Course Road at about 11.10 a.m. when I saw on TV that the Lok Sabha had been adjourned due to some commotion. I jogged behind the departing carcade and asked for it to stop. I told the PM that parliament had been adjourned and was unlikely to meet that morning, so there was no point in going there. A couple of meetings at the Parliament office could be shifted, and we could take care of some urgent files at the office at Race Course Road. The PM looked at me with mock reluctance, but agreed to get to work at RCR.
While my colleague in the personal office, R. P. Singh, was discussing his files with the PM, I got a breathless call from Ravi, an official in the PM’s Parliament office just after 11.40 a.m.: he was hearing gunshots, the parliament building was locked and we should not come there. It’s on TV, he told me. I switched on the television and saw the breaking news story; the shootout was already playing out live on every news channel. I raced to the adjoining room to tell the PM that terrorists had opened fire in the Parliament complex and he should come see it on TV. Vajpayee, whose adult life had been dedicated to parliament, watched the horror in silent outrage before he got on the phone.
That afternoon, a group of officers from the PM’s security, the SPG, came in to my office. They were convinced that the PM was the primary target of the assault and thanked me for my fortuitous morning intervention. Our obsession in the PMO on ‘no pendency’ had prevented the prime minister’s carcade from crossing paths with the terrorists. Five days later, Home Minister Advani would confirm that ‘the terrorist assault on the very bastion of our democracy was clearly aimed at wiping out the country’s top political leadership.’
A US official, Bruce Riedel, later wrote that in the US assessment, the operation was aimed at assassinating the PM or at the minimum holding him hostage. The day after the attack, India’s foreign secretary, Chokila Iyer, summoned High Commissioner Qazi to spell out ‘some of the steps that were required and were also mandated by international law’. These included the arrest of the leadership of Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, stopping their activities and freezing their assets. Advani also revealed in parliament that the assault ‘was executed jointly by Pak-based and supported terrorist outfits, LeT and JeM, organizations known to ‘derive their support and patronage from Pak ISI’. All five terrorists of the suicide squad were Pakistani nationals. An angry security establishment was rounding up their Indian associates.5 A week later, a frustrated government said India had ‘seen no attempts on the part of Pakistan to initiate action against the organisations involved’; so, it had decided to recall High Commissioner Nambiar from Islamabad. India also terminated the train and bus services between the countries.
Parakram
Nambiar had walked into Pakistan during the post-Kargil low in the summer of 1999. He went through a roller-coaster tenure of eighteen months in nuclear times. A year into his tenure, he saw the high of the build-up to the Agra summit and then a deep low as relations plummeted after 13 December. When Nambiar received the summons from New Delhi, they did not specify a date for his return. In the next few days in Islamabad, he went to multiple farewell receptions, including one hosted by the foreign office. On one outing to the Islamabad Golf Course for a farewell round of golf with some friends, he was photographed by the media.
A mischievous and clearly planted story made the headlines, suggesting that the Indian HC was reluctant to leave Islamabad. The Pakistan desk chief in Delhi, Joint Secretary Arun Singh, called up the high commissioner and requested him to return immediately. By the end of the month, it was clear that Pakistan was not about to help in the investigation into its assets, ‘veritable arms’ of the ISI, nor crackdown on the terrorism machine. Musharraf’s establishment seemed to be testing India. How would India react to terrorism emanating from a nuclear Pakistan? Would the fear of escalation stay India’s hand? Just as the Pakistan Army had tested India’s resolve in a nuclear environment with incursions into Kashmir at Kargil a couple of years earlier, it seemed to want to test its resolve in regard to cross-border terrorism. Besides, Musharraf was now not overly concerned about US censure, as a keen, if duplicitous, soldier in the US war on terror being played out to Pakistan’s west.
An angry Jaswant Singh told parliament on 27 December that ‘India’s serious concerns about all the ramifications of the 13th December attack on our Parliament have not been fully grasped in Pakistan’ and ‘attempts to dupe the international community with cosmetic half measures, non measures, or even fictitious incidents are still being made.’ He also announced decisions to halve the strength of both high commissions within forty-eight hours, particularly since ‘officials of the Pakistan high commission have been involved in espionage, as well as in direct dealings with terrorist organizations. Also, the remaining Pakistani officials of the high commission would be confined to the municipal limits of Delhi; and India’s air space would close again to Pakistani overflights. He warned that these were ‘minimal measures’ to get Pakistan to curb terrorism and that ‘India remains ready to take such further measures’. All options for ‘kinetic action’ were thus on the table, and indeed furiously discussed in the security establishment and in the Cabinet Committee on Security.
The anger was palpable. The mood in the country, in the ruling coalition led by the BJP, and within the cabinet, was to ‘do something’. Three factors were weighing strongly on Vajpayee’s mind. One, Kargil had taught him the value of post-nuclear strategic restraint. It got the West to prevail over a clearly errant and irresponsible Pakistan. The US had changed administrations, with a Republican president, George Bush in the saddle, promising to be harder than ever on terror post 9/11. Besides, the services of Clinton were still available to rally global support for India. Two, Vajpayee embodied the idea of India being a responsible nuclear power. He was retrieving global relationships; the Kargil restraint had won him the trust of the US and the West. Any hasty hot pursuit or strikes across the border would undo this work.
Besides, both India and Pakistan were trying to learn about their nuclear thresholds and India had not yet made up its mind where Pakistan’s threshold lay. Vajpayee was acutely aware that his decision to change India’s nuclear status came with a great deal of responsibility. He had taken a call during Kargil of not crossing the LoC and this was a decision his cabinet was inclined to maintain. Three, Vajpayee was not sure it would be in India’s interest to risk conflict with Pakistan on its eastern border, when the US was present on the western border and indeed promoting Indian interests by ridding Afghanistan of the Taliban regime. In one conversation with Advani, Vajpayee said he was clear in his mind that India should not for the moment risk a war while NATO troops were fighting in the region. Both nuclear responsibility and global obligations thus dictated a line of action of aggressive global diplomacy backed by a credible threat of force. India’s policy response evolved into a rapid military build-up on its western border, Operation Parakram (attack), accompanied by global diplomacy to highlight the reactivated terror infrastructure within Pakistan.
The approach yielded some early results. Pakistan came under intense Western pressure to focus on supporting the US-led action on its western border and to curb terror within. A few cosmetic arrests began. India reacted cautiously at the end of the year with a media statement acknowledging ‘information about some actions…against the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba and Jaish-e-Mohammad’, including some arrests and raids. ‘If this information is confirmed, then it is a step forward in the correct direction. We hope that such actions against terrorist activities targeting India, including Jammu and Kashmir, would be pursued vigorously, until cross-border terrorism in our country is completely eliminated.
The article is an excerpt from the book Anger Management: The Troubled Diplomatic Relationship between India and Pakistan written by Ajay Bisaria.