Should India ease up on its tight gun control laws to arm citizens so that they can put up a fight next time they are attacked in their hotels, train stations and even a hospital as it happened in Mumbai last month?

Some people are arguing that if the people, or at least some of them such as hotel security staff and police at a railway terminal, had been properly armed there would have been some form of resistance to the Mumbai attackers instead of the spectacle of them moving around a city of 18 million as if they owned it.

You wouldn’t have had a situation where the gunmen killed at will and with such deliberation, shooting up a popular cafe, and then joining their comrades at the Taj hotel.

 Or the other pair that marched up and down the train station emptying their machine guns into commuters, hopping over to a hospital to kill some more in the vicinity. And all this while the police, armed with only batons, watched cowering in the shadows.

There was plenty of heroism, to be sure. Like the policeman who local media said took bullets, so that one of the gunmen could be captured alive. He is really now the key to the Indian position that this was an attack launched and controlled from Pakistan. Or the hotel staff  who stepped in front to take bullets instead of the guests.

[Taj Hotel,Mumbai,Reuters pic by Arko Datta]

But if they could take bullets, why couldn’t they return them? None of the security staff at the Trident-Oberoi had weapons thanks to India’s tight gun laws that make it virtually impossible to get permits, said chairman P.R. S. Oberoi.

Or take the Jewish outreach centre where there were some reports early on that bystanders tried to pelt the militants with stones only to retreat when they opened automatic fire on them.

The gun control laws date back to British colonial times when the authorities severely restricted gun ownership following the 1857 independence battle/sepoy mutiny (depends on which way you look at it). 

Independent India repealed the laws but brought in an equally tight regime, setting up a licensing authority with a carte blanche to deny permits. It also restricted private manufacturing, while banning imports.

Unsurprisingly these restrictions  have meant that there is a thriving black market for arms and ammunition, ensuring a steady supply to all manner of criminals — people who don’t bother about the niceties of remaining within the purview of the law.    

[School children pay homage to Mumbai victims, Reuters pic by Pawan Kumar]

Citizens must jump through several hoops to get an arms licence and then pay high prices for ordinary products. But black market firearms are available at a small fraction of the cost of legal firearms. A country-made single shot handgun can cost as little as US $ 20, imported handguns go for US $ 500- $1,000, and AK-47’s (like the ones that were used in this attack) cost about US$ 1,500 or thereabouts on the black market according to this piece in the The American Thinker.

“There never was a clearer real life example of how gun control takes guns out of the hands of decent law-abiding folk and puts them right into the hands of criminals,” it said.

But can you really open up a nation of a billion people to guns and especially one where sectarian tensions are never far from the surface? Will it not lead to more violence? Is this a remedy worse than the disease?

Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari has said non-state actors may have been behind the attacks in Mumbai and therefore big nations shouldn’t allow themselves to be held hostage to their actions

But what is the world to do if such actors operate from the territory of a state and the state is unable or unwilling to act against them, especially because they were created by its intelligence agencies in the first place, asks leading U.S. scholar Robert Kagan at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visiting the region to try and limit the fallout said even if non-state actors carried out the attacks, it would still be the Pakistani government’s responsibility to take “direct and tough action.”                                                                         

[U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice with Pakistan PM Yousaf Raza Gilani. Reuters photo by Mian Khursheed]

But Kagan isn’t sure the government in Islamabad could act and certainly not Zardari, who keeps saying he himself is a victim of terrorism, and therefore recommends foreign intervention.

The international community, he argues in a rather extraordinary piece for the Washington Post, must take matters into its own hands in such a situation and re-define the whole issue of sovereignty of a nation.

So in the present case, given that an outraged Indian people are demanding decisive action for the attacks, and Pakistan is unlikely to cooperate in the way the Indians want, the only way to forestall a conflict would be to “internationalise the response” to the attacks, he says.

Which means get the international community to declare that parts of Pakistan have become “ungovernable and a menace to international security.” Second, set up an international force to work with the Pakistanis to root out militant camps in Kashmir as well as in the tribal areas.

That way an India-Pakistan war would be avoided and Islamabad might even be able to save some face since the international forces will re-establish its authority in areas where it has lost it.

But what about Pakistan’s sovereignty? Yes it would be violated, Kagan says, but advocates the principle that the Bush administration has already been quietly pursuing: if a nation cannot control the territory from where militants, even if they are “non-state actors” operate, then it cannot justifiably claim sovereign rights especially over that part of the territory.

“In Pakistan’s case, the continuing complicity of the military and intelligence services with terrorist groups pretty much shreds any claim to sovereign protection,” he writes.

Hence the unrelenting U.S. Predator “drone” missile attacks into Pakistan’s tribal areas near the Afghan border over the past few months and even a ground raid by U.S. Special Forces in September. In the 21st century nations such as Pakistan will have to earn sovereign rights; you no longer can take them granted especially if there are militants operating from there, Kalgan says.

[Closed circuit TV footage of gunmen at a Mumbai station. Pic by Reuters TV]

Is this at all workable? As Bill Roggio writing in The Evening Standard said it’s not just Pakistan’s tribal areas and Kashmir that the militants are concentrated. They are in the North West Frontier Province and Baluchistan. They could be in Islamabad as last year’s assault on the Red Mosque showed or in the teeming streets of Karachi and even the garrison city of Rawalpindi where former prime minister Benazir Bhutto was killed in a gun and bomb attack last year.

So where do you start?