Dozen more reasons

Five blasts in Srinagar. Seven in Mumbai. Twelve more 8216;incidents8217;. So what should the government do, beyond the usual blather of 8220;investigations are progressing8221;? Something must be seriously wrong with our domestic intelligence apparatus that we almost never apprehend those who kill in the name of politics and faith. Difficult as engendering improvement is in a government set-up that is Kafkaesque in its bureaucratic inertia, the process is made all the more difficult by a complicated set of political factors that has made the UPA government seem like it doesn8217;t quite know how hard it should be on terror. We have seen this, in a variety of ways, after the Delhi Diwali blasts last year, after the Bangalore attack, after the Varanasi bombs, after many Kashmir killings. That India8217;s current home minister isn8217;t exactly an inspirational political face of the fight against terrorism doesn8217;t help. That the style of his leadership has affected the general Central security administration doesn8217;t help either.

Bluntly put, the message that India will be intolerant of terror and will hunt perpetrators isn8217;t being effectively put out. The government8217;s leaders haven8217;t found time so far to ponder the limits of political spin. Citizens may soon reach a verdict though. They may argue that while trying to make communal political capital out of terror is dangerous and unsupportable, trying to finesse terror so as to sound 8216;politically correct8217; is unacceptable. It is on days like Tuesday, when the country watches a dozen blasts hit two state capitals, that people tell themselves that a government8217;s highest duty is to protect its citizens and then they ask what is being done about it?

The terrorists are asking also asking a question 8212; how effective will targeting points of the economic system be? This is especially true of Kashmir, where the only economic activity, tourism, seems to be the favourite target for terrorists. Thanks to unimaginative government packages that mostly allow imaginative siphoning off of funds, Kashmir8217;s local economy is hopeless minus tourism. The terrorists seem to understand better than ministers and officials the impact of a dead local economy on civilian morale. And Mumbai? Choked by terrible administration, already a target of terrorism more than once, still India8217;s economic capital, how will Mumbai cope? It will find a way. But the government will have nothing to do with it.