9
an action is construed as an act now depends on how actions were construed as acts
before. Subjects need not remember along history of actions and act construals.
The action chronology methodology developed here is more emic and historicist
than events data, such as WEIS and COPDAB, or KEDS (Banerjee 1998). Actions in
events data are classified according to an array of verbs that range from most hostile to
most cooperative. Events data methods take journalists’ choices of verbs and translate
them into their own arrays of verbs. Journalists, when fixing verbs upon actions,
necessarily consider what the actor is trying to get others to do, whether they are doing
what others have been trying to get them to do, and the past examples being followed or
avoided. Events data methods do not attempt to reconstruct or verify such journalistic
judgments.
The process of act-construal can be illustrated by following a few actions from the
chronology. On 24 December 1999, an Indian Airlines plane was hijacked in Katmandu
and flown eventually to Kandahar. The Indian action was to blame the incident on jihadi
organizations in Pakistan. This communicative action entailed four demands. Pakistan
was asked to acknowledge its link to the hijackers. Upon the US there was a weaker and a
stronger demand. The weak one was to simply condemn the hijacking. The strong one
was to blame Pakistan. There was a further demand on the US that it accept the validity
of the Indian investigation of the incident.
India construed its own action as asserting equal rights within international
antiterrorist norms promulgated mainly by Western countries. As the actor, India
selected the act first, and then fashioned the action to execute it. Pakistan construed the
Indian action as defaming Muslims pretentiously. India was misrepresenting Muslim
resistance as terrorism and pretentiously elevating itself to the status of Western countries
against which certain tactics were forbidden. The US construed the Indian action as
exceeding Indian rights. We have now set the stage to demonstrate the application of act
rules.
On the next day Pakistan said it
“
condemns all acts of terrorism, including
hijacking," and denied any role, and Brig. Qureishi made the accusation quoted above.
The demand on India was that it desist from terrorism allegations. A weak demand on the
US was that it avoid blaming the Pakistani government. The strong demand was to avoid
Convention