The terrorism and underworld connect

DNA of a week ago led with three closely related stories. The main headline said US reads riot act to Pak, while the subsidiary reports said Dawood is active in Pak: UK report and Madhuri exposed RAW agents (about Madhuri Gupta, the Indian diplomat recently arrested for spying for Pakistan).

The riot act was read by US secretary of state Hillary Clinton. She was talking about the failed New York car bomb: “We’ve made it very clear that if — heaven forbid — attacks like this that we can trace back to Pakistan were to have been successful, there would be very severe consequences.”

There’s some scope for confusion in that convoluted statement.

Obviously there would be severe consequences if the car bomb had gone off: Times Square is always chock-a-block with people, many of them tourists, and very many people would have been killed. So that’s stating the obvious.

Or did Clinton mean that the consequences would be severe for Pakistan if the origins of the plot could be traced to that country?

Or did she mean that the consequences to Pakistan would be severe if the origins of the plot could be traced there and if the bomb had killed many people?

The US is the patron state and Pakistan the beneficiary, but it’s the recipient which calls the shots. Obviously there are limits within which the US can operate: arm-twist the recipient country too much and nationalistic feelings will be aroused and the effect will be counter-productive with the donor country becoming a villain rather than a benefactor.

But even within those constraints, the US government’s behaviour has been notable for far too much pussy-footing: at no time has it tried to call Pakistan’s bluff. And that bluff can be called. All the aggressive talk coming out of that country is nothing but bluster.

Pakistan needs American money, and the army’s generals have got used to millions of dollars coming in for arms purchases, counter-terrorism activities and all the spin-offs that these make possible.

What will it take for the US to act tough? For a Times Square-like attack to kill hundreds of people? Hundreds of people being killed in India with the attacks proven to have come from Pakistan have not mattered to Washington, but why is it waiting now?

That second story about Dawood Ibrahim living openly in Pakistan is a case in point. The source of the report about Dawood operating from there is not from ‘interested’ India but from ‘objective’ Britain, so at least now the US should ask Pakistan to act to restrain him in a very real way.

The Dawood report ended with a revealing insight into his operations: ‘According to the reports available with the ministry of home affairs, recent betting and money laundering activities around the IPL indicate that a lot of money has been raked in by the underworld, and some of it could find its way into terrorism financing.’

In India we have a puritanical official position on gambling. Yet gambling is second nature to human beings. Countries the world over recognised this instinct and have legalised gambling and betting thereby doing a number of things: by making it official, you remove a bit of the thrill of doing something you are not supposed to do.

By making it legal, the government also collects a massive amount of taxes. Lastly, and most importantly, it cuts out the underworld’s share of the money, and what can be better than that?  

It might be an unexpected fallout of terrorism if the government does decide to be less moralistic and legalises gambling. The relationship of terrorism and the underworld has been well established as has been the relationship between betting and the underworld.

So terrorism and the underworld is the obvious next equation. To do this at least we do not need US help. This is about our domestic policy, so why not start from here?