We're our own worst terrorists

As the front page of the TOI highlighted on Monday, with the exception of war-riven Iraq, India has emerged as the world’s No. 1 target for terror: in the past few years, this country has suffered more fatalities through terrorist attacks than all the Americas, North, South and Central, and Europe put together.

Part of the reason seems obvious. Our neighbour and arch-foe Pakistan is the biggest exporter of terror in the world. And we’re fighting a 'proxy war'with it in Kashmir. Geography is against us. But are we also against ourselves? Do we, through myriad sins of omission and commission, invite such attacks?

It is often said that India is a 'soft', instead of a 'hard', state. This means that we, collectively and individually, are willing or unwilling accomplices to a flagrant flouting of the laws of the land. From the street constable who can be bought for Rs 50 to let an errant trucker or motorist go free, to a chief minister who, indicted in a scam, can openly defy the legal system by saying that he is answerable only to the 'court of the people’, the Indian state — as exemplified by its representatives at various levels — is commonly seen to be up for sale or otherwise open to subversion from within.

Time and again, our top law enforcement agencies have been reprimanded by the judiciary for hopelessly bungling or inexcusably delaying investigations with regard to crucial criminal cases, be they terror related or otherwise.

The inevitable suspicion arises as to whether the perpetrators of such acts enjoy political or other patronage which puts them out of reach of the truncated arm of our law: they are above or beyond the law. On the other hand, many thousands of anonymous undertrials are buried alive in jails for years without hope of release or redress: they are not above the law; they are so far beneath it that the law literally can’t see them.

Every now and then the state, in the avatar of its legal system, finds high-profile scapegoats (a Sanjay Dutt or Salman Khan who make for good photo-ops for our law enforcement machinery but are 'safe'whipping boys in that their fans won’t go on a rampage to secure their release, as the minions of a political or communal leader certainly would) to whom it metes out showcase punishment for relatively minor misdemeanours and feels it has done its job. In the meantime, large swathes of the country have become virtual parallel states, ruled by so-called Naxals. Violent mobs can with impunity smash retail outlets of a corporate major which has dared to try and enter the retail food and vegetable business, for long the unchallenged domain of rapacious middlemen and big farmers.

What is the Indian state doing to prevent all this? Precious little. It is too busy ensuring that no one below 25 can have an alcoholic drink in a bar.

It is such tokenism that has made a mockery of the Indian state, a state which dithered ineffectively before caving in submissively to terrorist demands in the Kandahar hijacking episode by releasing convicted subversives. Little wonder we’re a soft target for terror. We’ve drawn an inviting bullseye around ourselves.

Can we — ought we to — pay the price of becoming a 'hard'state, like Israel? Or the US after 9/11, where civil liberties have been curtailed but where terrorist incidents have also been reduced?

A 'hard'state has to learn to be tough on itself first, in upholding its own rule of law and being seen to do so, before it can be tough against terror. Do we — should we — build the political and ethical sinews to do this? It’s a question for our collective conscience. And till we decide, we’ll have to learn to live with terror from outside, and our complicity with it within.

28 Aug 2007, 0141 hrs IST,Jug Suraiya,TNN
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