Sovereignty Under Siege continues...

When the 9/11 attacks took place in the US, several conspiracy theories were put forward, one more preposterous than the other. One such theory claimed that the collapse of the World Trade Center was the result of controlled demolitions rather than the impact of the jets flown into them by the fedayeens of Al-Qaeda. Another theory was that the US government had advance intelligence about the attacks but deliberately chose to ignore it so that they could attack Afghanistan. There are a few others, but none of note.

In our country too, sceptics abound. I recall when I succeeded in getting members of Tiger Memon’s family to return to India from Dubai, several naysayers talked of a ‘deal’ between the CBI and the Memons. Their contention was that the Memons had returned to India of their own accord because they had been assured that the CBI would go easy on them and they would be acquitted. But the Memons were tried like any other accused, three of them were sentenced to life imprisonment and Yaqub Memon was hanged. The conspiracy theorists’ loud voices went silent on the occurrence of these events. Similarly, in 2013 when the Delhi Police unravelled the Indian Premier League spot-fixing scandal, a senior journalist interviewed me for a prestigious TV channel. I was then the commissioner of police, Delhi. The journalist alleged that the entire operation had been stage-managed by us to improve our image, which had deteriorated following the ghastly Nirbhaya incident. I replied to the journalist on camera, rather sarcastically, that I was mighty pleased with the resourcefulness of my force, which could make over thirty people, including three prominent cricketers, agree to get arrested and go to jail to assist us in bolstering our public image.

To be continued............