Opinion - Editorials

An opportunity to unite people

Not many hours after police in Nagpur succeeded in repulsing a terrorist strike on the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh's headquarters, politicians of the parivar began to seek political mileage out of the episode. Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi announced a cash reward for the policemen who defended the RSS headquarters — munificence he is not moved to display for even one of the dozens of police and military personnel who die defending India in Jammu and Kashmir every year. L.K. Advani, for his part, claimed that the attempted strike was a consequence of the United Progressive Alliance's "soft" policy on terror. Aside from the irony of such a judgment coming from a leading light of a regime that surrendered three of India's most dangerous terrorists into the hands of the hijackers of Indian Airlines flight 814, the response dishonours India's uniformed forces and its covert services, who brilliantly demonstrated their competence at Nagpur. Intelligence Bureau personnel succeeded in penetrating the three-man Lashkar-e-Taiba suicide squad, and their Director, E.S.L. Narasimhan, personally briefed the RSS chief about the threat to his person and organisation. Finally, on Thursday morning, the Nagpur police gave the world a picture-perfect demonstration of just how an installation ought to be protected from a suicide-terror strike.

Over the past two years, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has taken on the chin blame for every security failure in every part of the country. He is certainly entitled to a share of the applause for the Nagpur triumph. His Government needs to do more to pressure Islamabad into terminating the activities of the many terror groups that operate from Pakistan. It must also work harder to shape a coherent response to the growing power and influence of Islamist terror groups in Bangladesh. Better funding and training of police forces must become a national priority. Few State police forces have the technological and legal resources to mount a credible offensive against street crime, so how can they be expected to face the special challenges posed by terrorism? The UPA Government can certainly do better in addressing India's security challenges; but it functions in the knowledge that the performance of the two BJP-led regimes over a six-year period (1998-2004) was demonstrably worse. This goes beyond the shocking security failures represented by l'affaire Kandahar and the December 13, 2001, terrorist strike on Parliament. One form of violent fanaticism begets another. The small but growing flow of Indian nationals into the ranks of Islamist terror groups is, in a political sense, the gift majoritarian communalists handed out to the likes of the Lashkar-e-Taiba — through barbaric acts such as the demolition of the Babri Masjid (1992) and the Gujarat pogrom (2002). What happened in Nagpur ought to be an opportunity for constructive debate that unifies people across the country.

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