How to end terrorism? Not to contain it, nor to wear it down, nor to thwart it with counter-terrorism. End it. Put it to sleep. Disappear it.
This is not a question taken lightly anywhere in the world. In 2024, according to the Institute for Economics & Peace’s Global Terrorism Index, 98 of the world’s 195 countries were contending with some form of terrorism. The question is especially crucial for India, because, with a score of 6.41 out of 10, India was at 14th place on the GTI list. It is even more critical for Pakistan, which occupied the 2nd place with a score of 8.374.
State counter-terrorism won’t cut it, because, by definition, it partakes substantially of the characteristics of terrorism itself: counter-violence, often on populations vulnerabilised by the presence of unrepresentative terrorists in their midst; sanctions that immoderately impact these defenceless soak-pits; unmanaged—and often unmanageable—societal disruption caused by the crossfire between terrorism and counter-terrorism.
Clearly, both terrorism and counter-terrorism feed the wolf in an endless spiral of escalation. This happens nearly everywhere in the world. Nearly: but not in some advanced democracies such as in Scandinavia—where multifaceted terrorism does happen, but rarely enough to not attract statal blowback, which is constrained by embedded policies of restraint.
Terrorist attacks in northern Europe are so infrequent that they stand out in public memory. The worst one happened a decade-and-a-half ago, when the rightwing extremist Anders Breivik killed 77 people in Norway in an anti-government rage. In 2015, two people were killed by an Islamist in Denmark. In 2017, an Islamic terrorist killed five people in Sweden. In 2019, a Norwegian rightwinger and a Finn killed one person each. In 2022, two people were killed in a homophobic mass shooting in Norway. Despite these attacks, the Nordics remain the least impacted by terrorism. Only one Scandinavian country features in the Statista list of 10 worst terrorist attacks in terms of fatalities in Europe from 1980 to 2023: Norway. The only Scandinavian country to make it in the GTI’s top 50 states was Sweden—at the very last spot, with a score of 1.84.
Meanwhile, in the countries most ravaged by terrorism—Burkina Faso, Pakistan, India, Russia and Nigeria among them—the government wears tactical gloves of studded iron. These are all countries whose level of democracy is contested within and without. Even in democratic countries, the measures—which are often counter-measures—to shield citizens from ultra-violence risk compromise the very foundations of democracy.
Policy measures such as warrantless searches, arrests on whimsical suspicion, protracted detention without bail or charge-sheet, and phone-tapping may be defended as protection features that need no referendum validation, but they are also civil rights infringements, for the very reason that they are not democratic, consultative decisions.
According to NordForsk, “In the Nordic countries, prevention of radicalisation and violent extremism is based on an existing crime prevention collaboration within the SSP framework (school, social and health services, and police).”
In much of the subcontinent, statal measures to end terrorism resemble designs to scrap it out: immiserating populations of terrorist embedment in order to have them ejected by a public exhausted by their presence; the use of laws that have no place in a democracy; the proscribing of protesting groups; and the deployment of cutting-edge weaponry meant for defence against an outside enemy. This is as true of Pakistan—which has its bugbears in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan—as it is of India, which has ultraviolent hotspots in Kashmir, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and, intermittently, in the Northeast.
In these countries, action and reaction are disconcertingly fungible. One can be mistaken for a mirror image of the other. It is a truism that the law is the government’s domain of implementary privilege, terrorists being scofflaws, and the citizenry being only marginally capacitated.
But it does not necessarily have to be this way if terrorism is to be ‘ended’, its issues resolved, its maddened heartbeat calmed. The Scandinavian countries have what I would call simple terrorism: terrorist events not rooted in a sense of historical wrongs, or irruptions from sovereigntist or subnational impulses. India, Pakistan and many African nations have complex terrorism, where it is almost mandatory that grievances are indurated and long-unaddressed, and the former because of the latter.
So, what works for Scandinavia might not work here—or, at least, not with such comprehensiveness, integrality and efficacy. Nevertheless, what happened in Kashmir in the days following the Baisaran terrorist carnage is a lesson in self-service and holding to account—and, possibly, a way out of this unrelenting hyperviolent action-response mess. Kashmiris poured onto the streets—“for the first time in 35 years”, emphasised Farooq Abdullah, president of the National Conference—protesting the massacre and branding the attackers as zalim (oppressors).
In a move that resembles excommunication, Maulana Mohammed Ahmed Nadvi, head of the All India Imams Council, passed fatwas ordering Muslim clerics to not conduct funeral prayers or provide burial grounds for terrorists. AIMIM president Asaduddin Owaisi distributed black armbands during Friday prayers at a mosque.
The last two might well have been performative. The first was not. Where the state fails, everything is up to the citizenry.
Kajal Basu
Veteran journalist
(Views are personal)
(kajalrbasu@gmail.com)