Pseudo-Secularism

Hindu dharma is implicitly at odds with monotheistic intolerance. What is happening in India is a new historical awakening... Indian intellectuals, who want to be secure in their liberal beliefs, may not understand what is going on. But every other Indian knows precisely what is happening: deep down he knows that a larger response is emerging even if at times this response appears in his eyes to be threatening.

Thursday, July 13, 2006

Terrorism, the undeclared war

Tavleen Singh | Thursday, July 13, 2006 10:54:47 IST

Flying visits make no sense now and are an example of how little the political class understands about the seriousness of this undeclared war on India

As I sit in my Mumbai apartment the morning after the bomb blasts what I feel most is a sense of helpless rage at the inability of those who rule us to understand that terrorism is not a law and order problem. It is war. In the words of Ajay Sahani of the Institute of Conflict Management and one of our leading experts on terrorism, ‘We are engaged in a protracted war organised by Pakistan. And, we haven’t given our fighting men a mandate to fight more than a defensive war’.
Examine for a minute the response of our most important political leaders to the carefully coordinated, highly professional bombings last Tuesday in Srinagar and Mumbai and you see the truth of this. The Prime Minister called an Emergency cabinet meeting and made the usual noises about the ‘cowardice’ of the terrorists in a written statement. Should he not, at the very least, have been on television reassuring the country? He sent his Home Minister to perform this task and Shivraj Patil appealed for communal harmony and in a disturbingly namby-pamby fashion talked of how the terrorists would be ‘dealt with firmly’. How? When we have not yet succeeded in punishing those responsible for the 1993 bomb blasts? Then he and Sonia Gandhi made a flying visit to Mumbai in the middle of the night? What for? What purpose did it serve other than to divert officials from the far more serious task of helping victims of the terrible carnage on Mumbai’s trains. Flying visits may have made sense in the days when telephones did not work and Doordarshan was our only television channel but they make no sense now and are an example of how little the political class understands about the seriousness of this undeclared war on India.

India bows in defeat in the face of terrorism
Had they understood we would have already seen urgent measures to improve the criminal justice system. It is no longer possible to allow terrorist trials to drag on for thirteen
years as the 1993 bomb blasts trial has done.
No longer possible to allow evil men like Omar Sheikh and Maulana Azhar Masood to rot in Indian jails for five years before we exchanged them for the passengers of IC 814. Speaking
of which has our former External Affairs Minister taken the trouble to read Masood’s biography and this description of Indian hospitality and humiliation? ‘In the very front row sat Jaswant Singh, the Foreign Minister of Bharat’s Mushrik government...the cabin crew politely asked us for refreshments but we declined saying that we were fasting. Had we not been fasting we would still have refused for with freedom only a few hours away we felt neither hungry nor thirsty.
‘Furthermore we found it unacceptable to eat anything of theirs…..then the historic moment arrived when the Indian plane with the stigma of defeat and humiliation, with head bowed down landed at Kandahar airport, in Darul Islam Afghanistan.’
Nothing has changed since. Azhar Masood continues his terrorist activities from
Pakistan, Omar Sheikh went on to kill Daniel Pearl and was only arrested on account of
widespread international condemnation of the journalist’s horrific, videotaped
beheading. And, India’s head remains bowed in defeat and humiliation in the face
of terrorism.

Even the Intelligence had no inkling of the blasts
Were it not that way would we have not by now seen major changes in our intelligence gathering? To organise synchronised attacks in Srinagar and Mumbai there would have been massive planning required. Major jehadi organisations would have been at work, vast amounts of RDX would have been transported, local support would have been required in both cities so if our
intelligence agencies were working as they should have been, the lives of 200 people may still have been alive. The Home Minister of Maharashtra, who has spent more time arresting bar girls than terrorists, had this to say about the intelligence failure. “It’s not just the State Intelligence Department and the elite Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) that failed. Even the Intelligence Bureau at the Centre had no inkling of the blasts’.
If our intelligence agencies were working as they would be in a state of war then we would
by now have some recognisable faces on the terrorist side. In New York and London
within days of the terrorist attacks intelligence agencies were able to identify who the
suicide bombers were. In India, all we get are nameless dead terrorists who we are told
to believe were responsible for such and such act of terrorism. Sometimes, as with
the Chhatisinghpura massacre the lie gets exposed and it turns out that the security
forces have been responsible for killing innocent people and passing them off as terrorists.
This serves mainly to reduce the credibility of those who fight on our side in this war
and strengthen the morale of those who believe in the cause of the ‘jehad’ that is being waged against India.
You do not have to look far to find supporters of this ‘jehad’. They function openly from Indian soil under names like SIMI (Students Islamic Movement of India) and the Raza Academy. There are others, many others, but so sure are they of the namby-pamby nature of the Indian state that SIMI went to the Supreme Court against its ban. The Court upheld it on July 6, 2006 five years after the ban. How can we win this war with a justice system that works this way? How can we win this war if we dare not even accept that it is war?

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1 Comments:

At 7/14/2006 10:42:00 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

who has spent more time arresting bar girls than terrorists


Would have been more productive if the bar girls had been offered rewards as confidential informants for passing on any gossip they picked up in their work!

 

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