India has for the last over three decades been reeling under cross border terrorism which has claimed hundreds of precious human lives and loss of huge infrastructural property. During the course of time, the tentacles of terrorism based on extreme fundamentalist , hate and violent ideology, kept spreading and engulfed almost the entire globe. This full blown global scourge cannot be successfully tackled by individual victim countries except at local levels but an international combined initiative alone was the solution to this great threat to peace and individual liberty. We have seen its spread and might too in Iraq , Syria, Afghanistan and other countries where at one or the other time, not only chunks of territories were usurped and brought under the sway of terror organisations but even to the extent of running their ”Governments” of many areas.
India has, throughout been voicing its concern about this great threat to countries’ peace and security and individual liberty and freedom . It has used almost every international platform to bring home the paramountcy of forging one international opinion against the menace and has been articulating that the comity of nations, through the World Body- the United Nations, had to play a cardinal and most responsible role in this respect. However, it is a matter of great concern that a few countries should play spoil sports even in a matter as sensitive as fighting to the finish, cult of terrorism which was so treacherously well organised not only in generating huge financial support but using the notorious channels of drugs and narcotics for enormous funds raising to keep the wheels of their terror engine duly lubricated and greased . These countries, though a few, were impediments in the course of forging unanimous international diplomatic and military strategies because they cared more for their narrow economic interests as also geo-political considerations.
We have been waiting eagerly, as a victim country of terrorism for over three decades especially for the last nineteen years when the highest seat of our political and democratic power, the Parliament was attacked, for a UN convention which ought to be comprehensive in form and tenor to define precisely what terrorism was all about and what were its forms. Reiterating such a stand of all the successive Governments of India, Vice President Venkaiah Naidu again reminded the UN as also those few countries soft on terrorism that the said International convention was more than overdue . In this connection, it goes without saying that any casual approach or a protracted ”watch and see” policy was fraught with ramifications of irretrievable nature . There were many countries which favoured the stand of India and were quite convinced about the threat of a peculiar nature . However, those who tried to stall such a UN Convention were not only fuelling terrorism and illegal trade in drugs, narcotics and arms but lending credence to the cult propagating undemocratic, mediaeval and intolerant ways and believed in barbaric and inhuman ways of ”reprisals and punishments for non compliance” of their perverted and aberrant ideology.
We fairly know the reasons of the demise of League of Nations which the United Nations sought to improve upon with an implied promise to forge more unity between countries for a peaceful and prosperous world but it is equally a reality to be confronted with that the World Body needed sweeping reforms to make it a vibrant and purposeful International Body in the interests of all countries . Holding a comprehensive UN convention on terrorism , at the outset , would be its major acid test both to know whether it preferred attending to universal concerns or to petty economic and geo-political concerns of a few countries only at a huge cost which may necessarily not arise as a liability immediately but surely was not far away.
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