Opinion - Editorials

An act of terror against India

BY ANY DEFINITION of international terrorism, the savage suicide attack near Jammu on May 14 will rank as an abominable outrage with the dastardly purpose of provoking India. This foul message is unmistakably obvious from the tragic but dramatic fact that the brutal "fidayeen" strike was primarily focussed on a camp of the Indian Army as also the civilians among the families of the military personnel there. It will be idle and certainly insensitive at this moment of national grief to compare and contrast the minute details of the new anti-India terrorist crime with those of the two other high-profile atrocities that occurred in recent months — the venomous attack on the Parliament House complex in New Delhi last December and the earlier suicide bombing at the Jammu and Kashmir Legislative Assembly in Srinagar in October. The stark reality at this point is that the masterminds behind the latest terrorist audacity have deliberately sought to undermine the dynamics of the ongoing globalised campaign against the politics of terrorism and to do so with a definitive reference to the Pakistan-India subtext. At one level, Islamabad has condemned the targeted killing of the civilians among those who perished in the new mayhem near Jammu. At another level, Islamabad has significantly tried to downplay the possible involvement of one or more Pakistan-based terrorist outfits that propagate the Kashmir "cause". In fact, if Islamabad's parallel suggestion for an "impartial probe" appears to be out of sync with its own declared commitment to root out international terrorism, the reason has to do with the complexities of the India-Pakistan estrangement.

The timing and circumstances of an altogether new manifestation of political terror near Jammu point to a heinous mindset at work. Discernible indeed is the political signature of "jehadi terrorism" of the anti-India variety. In one sense, the plot seems to be aimed at exposing the relative vulnerability of the Indian security establishment to extraneous terrorist strikes. Any such game plan may have had something to do with the coincidental visit to New Delhi by the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia, Christina Rocca, who is engaged in defusing the abnormally acute tensions that have marked the fragile relationship between New Delhi and Islamabad since the recent terrorist attack on India's Parliament. In another sense, the emergence of a qualitatively new threat to India from the terrorist mafia is implicitly indicated by New Delhi's strong suspicions about the complicity of a mutant of either the Lashkar-e-Taiba or the Jaish-e-Mohammad — two sworn anti-India groups that Pakistan's President, Pervez Musharraf, banned last January. Viewed in this perspective, the purveyors of terror might have wanted to tell Gen. Musharraf that they could strike at will on either side of the Line of Control. The recent carnage in Karachi had exposed the other side of the non-legal tender of terrorism.

What should New Delhi's response be to the latest terrorist affront to its authority? India's enlightened self-interest dictates that all options be weighed with the greatest care in a climate of utmost calm and absolute realism. India must reinforce its moral indignation with a prudent policy of spirited discretion. New Delhi will be well advised to resist the political temptation to opt for even a limited military strike against Pakistan. Two conspicuous factors militate against the feasibility of any form of military solution. First, conventional wisdom and creative prognosis indicate that it will be impossible to accomplish any objective of rooting out the suspected anti-India terror bases in Pakistan through a limited but surgically precise military thrust. In a perceptive scenario, the nuclear deterrences as independently possessed by India and Pakistan will themselves deter any such limited strike. Second, India is still far from sensitising world opinion to its trauma of wounds inflicted by externally sponsored political terror.

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• An act of terror against India
• A realistic move
• Gujarati exceptionalism
• The mosaic cracks
• The U.S. should act now
• Heinous act
• Better security needed
• It is shameful
• LTTE ban
• Role of police
• Gujarat imbroglio
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