Paris attacks: India must push for tough anti-terror convention at UN

Only the wearer knows where the shoe pinches. Nothing can be a starker truth of this harsh reality than the West's duplicitous standards on terrorism.

The US was struck by an unprecedented wave of terror attacks on its mainland 14 years ago and it was enough for the Americans to bomb Taliban out. Years later the Americans were at their old game and created a new jargon in international security lexicon when they sought to differentiate between "good terrorists" and "bad terrorists". America's European allies did not object to Washington's atrocious idea that terrorists can be "good" also and chugged along with the Americans.

Now that France has witnessed its own 9/11 in last Friday's serial terror attacks in Paris, will France say that terrorists can be "good"? Instead French President Francois Hollande has described the Paris attacks as an "act of war".

The wheel has come full circle. The West perhaps now has a better understanding of the good old adage "Only the wearer knows where the shoe pinches".

India has been crying itself hoarse in telling the world about the dangerous implications of supporting or ignoring terrorism. The US was receptive after the September 2001 terror attacks on its soil but as time passed by realpolitik came centre stage again. Europe has all along paid only lip service to combating terrorism.

But not any longer! Paris attacks should change the Western approach towards terrorism and force the Western community to dump its selective amnesia and become an integral part of a new and decisive international war against terrorism.

Time has come for India to play its own realpolitik on the terror issue in wake of the Paris attacks. India needs to galvanise international opinion against terror and give new impetus to its two decades old initiative in the United Nations for passage of a comprehensive convention on terrorism which has been hanging fire since early 1990s.

If the UN in 70 years of its existence has failed to even arrive at a universally acceptable definition of terrorism, it is because of the West.

But now two decades after India mooted a comprehensive UN convention on terrorism, the situation has changed drastically and the global climate for a concerted international action against terrorism is most ripe now.

Three major blocs have prevented solid progress on Indian proposals at the UN on terrorism: African states, the Arab world and Europe.

Africans opposed a uniform global policy on terrorism because many countries in the continent were in midst of nationalist struggles which made defining a terrorist a tedious job. Someone's terrorist was the other's hero.

The Arabs opposed it as they saw it as the West's conspiracy to dub the Palestinians as terrorists.

The Europeans watched the diplomatic sparring with a sense of detatchnent, maintaining that it was not their problem.

But Paris has proven to be a watershed and all the three above-mentioned nay-sayers (behind which Pakistan used to hide) have a completely different view on terrorism now.

The iron is hot and the Modi government must strike now. Incidentally, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will have his blue-eyed boy and the best-ever MEA spokesperson Syed Akbaruddin as India's Permanent Representative in New York by mid-January to push India's case.

This will surely be bad tidings for Pakistan. But that is a different story.