The State Minister of Home Affairs has recently announced that the government would welcome it if extremists decide to surrender voluntarily and take necessary steps in accordance with the provisions of law. Since in the eye of law those persons are dubbed as criminals against whom murder and other cases are there; the only step as per the existing law the authorities perhaps could take was to arrest them upon surrender and put them on trial. But this process perhaps would not be acceptable to them. Instead, they would first seek a general amnesty before surrender. As such the announcement though apparently was a good gesture but left many questions unanswered. At present there is no government policy or law to rehabilitate them. A few years back a large number of such extremists operating in the southern districts surrendered under a general amnesty to the authorities with the hope of starting a new life as law-abiding citizens of the country. The authorities also reportedly absorbed some of them in the Police and Ansar departments in different cadres. But later it was reported in the newspaper that most of them deserted their workplace and rejoined their old profession and many of them as alleged, even fled away with firearms provided to them by the state. Perhaps it was not proper to appoint them in armed cadres and hand over any arms to them.
Moreover, the reason of their desertion could be that they were looked down with suspicion by their new comrades or perhaps even were not accepted as their fellow colleagues. Therefore, the entire programme ended in a fiasco. Before embarking upon a similar programme a very critical analysis is required to be made of what went wrong with the programme and what were the mistakes committed by the authorities that led to the failure of the programme and what the government policy would be in such cases. It is also now reported that the pirates operating in the Sundarbans and the Bay of Bengal areas also expressed their willingness to come out of the underworld and surrender provided a general amnesty was granted. Therefore, the issue must be taken very seriously with a view to finding a permanent solution to the problem. Thereafter a suitable declaration may come from the government asking them to surrender, detailing their formal rehabilitation process under a legal cover. It is essential that they go through a rigorous physical, mental, economic and religious rehabilitation programme, so that they could also mentally adjust themselves to their normal life as law-abiding citizens.