Making A Difference

A Quiet Bend In Street Legal

If extradition efforts fail gloriously, there’s reason to see design

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A Quiet Bend In Street Legal
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Prime ministers discuss only weighty matters. And when the PMs of India and Britain meet shortly, one of these weighty matters will be failed extradition requests from India. We may call it another example of delayed colonial bloody-mindedness; but it may well be that we brilliantly succeed in deliberately failing. If our attem­p­ts always founder, there’s reason to infer that this is policy.

For nothing may embarrass us more than a successful extradition. A political refugee in Britain is likely to have a constituency in India and the ear of world public opinion. What would we do with a militant, whether Khalistani, Kashmiri, Naga, Maoist or of the LTTE? Several of them were or are sheltering in Britain, or in Europe or North America, in short, anywhere in the free world. If they were to face due process here, it would lead to political, communal or electoral turbulence. Nehru made it clear in 1961 he did not want Naga separatist A.Z. Phizo extradited; he was perfectly happy that Britain grant him citizenship and keep him. It was exile, but not officially so. In 1999, both Omar Saeed Sheikh and Masood Azhar were sent into effective exile for having hij­acked IC-814; then external affa­irs minister Jaswant Singh even conducted them graciously to the Kandahar airport. The Indian government often finds that the “law is an ass” and judges sometimes concur, as when the Madras High Court refused to have Rajiv Gandhi’s assassins executed. It was simpler to wall them up in prison, partially if not entirely forgotten.

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Encounter killings are routine for this reason: the law is tiring, tiresome, and too many vested groups are able to exploit it. Extradition another of these legal procedures; it’s easier to present the case so badly that it fails and the wanted criminal becomes unwanted. It is little different with non-political offenders, and Vijay Mallya is a shining example. He has been bankrupt for several years but was permitted to plan his relocation to Britain and actually depart before the state began to act. So many are hand in glove with him that nobody wants to call him to account. It looks like a combination of incompetence, corruption, and political manoeuvring; and Indian politics wallows in all three.

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If it is any consolation, India is not alone in preferring exile to bringing an offender home to trial. It’s the strategy of states that don’t have the stomach for bloodshed but cannot manage their domestic political constituencies and public opinion abroad. Driving an offender out so he is forgotten has been the dream of so many states. In The Ten Commandments, the pharaoh sends Moses into the desert instead of executing him and the next pharaoh, Rameses II, suffers the consequences. Britain had Australia, the French had Devil’s Island or Cayenne, Imperial Russia had Siberia, and the Raj had the Cellular Jail in the Andamans.

The aim of exile is to obliterate the offender, but that did not happen always. Russian exiles returned from Siberia or Europe to carry out the Revolution in 1917. Stalin did not repeat the mistake, and he executed or assassinated Trotsky in his Mexican exile, while slaughtering his entire opposition, real, possible, probable and imagined, in serial purges. His successors were softer and preferred exile to incarceration; but the Soviet state could not manage world public opinion, and every exile was more effective than all the nuclear missiles that the United States could deploy. Significantly, the Soviet state did not attempt to extradite refugees. It did not know what to do with Solzhenitsyn, whether immured in the Gulag, free within the country, or wandering in exile.

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Seldom do states enjoy the advantage Israel had with Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi war criminal. Bereft of a constituency, he could be abducted, tried, and executed relatively easily. But even the US, dominating world public opinion, faces difficulties. Thus Julian Assange, of Wikileaks fame, has not been extradited to the US; but he has in effect been silenced at the Ecuador embassy in London. As for Edward Sno­wden, he has found asylum in Russia; but he is muzzled and his campaign halted. Both have ended as impotent exiles. As for the Islamists or those the US describes as such, extradition was impossible; they were kidnapped from various countries and tortured into confessions, but without public trials. At this point, American legality failed, just as it does for India. And so it was with Osama bin Laden, assassinated outright in a foreign country.

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Extradition is not the potent weapon it appears in law; it dem­ands exceptional coordination between sovereign states; and this is conceivable only in asymmetrical relationships, as between the US and Europe. It is not surprising that Indian extradition efforts run aground, whatever the usual failings of the Indian state. But the stability of the Indian state, all things considered, may have converted these failures into an effective policy of exile. Nobody has been able to threaten the Indian state from abroad, unlike the Ayatollah Khomeini against the Shah, or more recently, Fethullah Gulen against Erdogan in Turkey, in spite of, or perhaps because of, their firm alliance with the US. Theresa May is likely to have smooth passage.

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(Madhavan K. Palat is a historian who has specialised in Russian and European history.)

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