Opinion - Editorials

Facing terrorism

Behind the inhumanity of the terrorist strikes in Varanasi's Sankat Mochan temple and a railway station there was a clear plan and mission — to generate communal tension and conflict. Responding effectively to the challenge of terrorism demands clarity of understanding as well as intellectual and technological resources. In a recent article, a terrorism analyst pointed to the "unfortunate tendency — more pronounced in India than elsewhere — on the part of political parties to exploit acts of terrorism to highlight or promote their own political agenda." Chauvinistic efforts to draw political mileage from the Varanasi tragedy illustrate this point. No great imagination is needed to determine that the terrorists of the Lashkar-e-Taiba or kindred organisation who bombed the ancient city wished to provoke communal trouble, as Union Home Minister Shivraj Patil has pointed out. But that apparently is not the understanding of the BJP leader of the Opposition and former Deputy Prime Minister, L.K. Advani, who sees the bombings as the outcome of "competitive minority appeasement." He could have addressed Pakistan's unwillingness to eliminate the infrastructure of terror groups operating from its soil, a problem that has had tragic consequences not just for India but also Afghanistan, Bangladesh, swatches of east and central Asia, Europe, and the United States. But Pavlovian Conditioning produced the BJP response that the Congress and its `pseudo-secular' allies were to blame.

The reluctance to address security issues seriously cuts across party lines. Few politicians have shown an abiding interest in the complex challenges posed by terrorism and low-intensity conflict, a problem painfully demonstrated by the errors of fact made by Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav during his press conference on the Varanasi bombings. Without an informed political debate on these issues, desperately needed infrastructural reform of the counter-terrorism apparatus will continue to be stalled. Alone among major countries, India is yet to build a countrywide online criminal database. Hypothetically, had police personnel in a southern city arrested Mohammad Salim bin Aziz, the Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist shot dead in Lucknow yesterday, they would have had no idea that he was wanted in Srinagar; Jammu and Kashmir authorities, in turn, would have had no knowledge for days or even weeks that he had been detained. Barring the Intelligence Bureau's poorly funded Joint Task Force and Multi-Agency Centre, there is no institutional mechanism for sharing information across State lines. For years, experts have called for these reforms, along with better training in both physical security procedures and intelligence-gathering. The Varanasi bombings, which snuffed out 20 innocent lives and injured a large number of people, must not become one more grisly footnote in the history of a diabolical terror campaign that has claimed several hundreds of lives across India.

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