A major reason why the military is out of decision-making on matters military is that our civilian arm chair warriors think they understand use of force better. Post Indian Navy nabbing some 48 Somali pirates and bringing them to Mumbai, came surprising media reports of Government of India (GoI) making a policy shift in its anti piracy operations, directing the Navy not to arrest any pirates and also not to bring them to the mainland.

Reports say GoI fears its aggressive operations including arrest of Somali pirates and holding them captive may backfire. Admittedly about 10 per cent of seafarers working for shipping companies are Indians but there are equal numbers of Pakistanis, Sri Lankans and Bangladeshis, if not more. GoI directions to the Indian Navy are “Catch Them, Disarm Them and Release Them,” if media reports are to be believed.

The genesis of this policy shift is supposedly an incidence wherein Somali pirates released all prisoners from a ship but took seven Indian prisoners to Somalia. It is also reported that post these directions, the Navy did not arrest any pirates in a subsequent antipiracy operation. One wonders what would be the reaction of Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh in similar circumstances. Just because seven of our sailors working in merchant shipping are taken to Somalia, we are down on our knees – another feather in the softy cap! Hopefully our strategists will not apply similar policy shift for anti-terrorism on land.

Have we not noticed how Chinese are dealing with pirates both in South China Sea and off the coast of Somalia? Our policy experts would do well to do so. What ransoms GoI has been paying will never be known but why should we be scared of killing or capturing sea pirates. There is no need to publicise captures in the first place, if we are so apprehensive of the reaction. Under the circumstances, the Navy should have actually been directed to simply “not take any prisoners” and leave it at that.

The Navy would have been happy enough to arrange seabed meeting of these fellows with Blackbeard alias Osama bin Laden and no one would have been the wiser. Instead, we continue with the naiveté of projecting ourselves as a ‘soft state’, messaging please continue piracy without fear – a happy situation for the pirates; catch Indians and get the ransom moolah without fear of loss of life to home side. Do you see any difference from our response to the IC-184 hijack?

Do we appreciate the enormity of the problem, sphere of Somali piracy having expanded from 105 nautical miles off the coast of Somalia in 2005 to the present 1,300 nautical miles, leaning onto our very shores? Do we know and appreciate that even a small sized country like Maldives has declared Somali Piracy a ‘national threat’ and are going against these pirates aggressively, holding 37 Somali pirates captive for more than one and a half years? Do we know the base of Somali piracy lies in Al Sabaab, a terrorist organisation is holding Somalia to ransom since 2009 and is in complete sync with Al-Qaeda? Why are we playing this great game of ‘appeasing’ Al-Qaeda? Kowtowing to Somali pirates implies their growing infrastructure will be exploited by both Al-Qaeda and Lashkar-e-Toiba.

Do we realise repercussions of some of the over 1,000 unoccupied islands of Maldives (just over an hour flight from Bengaluru) becoming LeT bases. Link this with the fast radicalising Kerala with existing LeT footprints and the Maoist insurgency running north of it. Even an ostrich would see the danger to South India. Should we be content with calling upon UN to do something or hope US will act without another USS Cole being hit? Why are we afraid of doing something on our own?

The views expressed herein are the personal views of the author.