Empowering our security forces to crush terror

But fighting terrorism requires a clear mandate that will allow our forces to do what is necessary to crush—and I use the word advisedly, for there is no gentle way to defeat terrorism—this hydra-headed monster. I have said this repeatedly, and will reiterate: if they are suitably empowered—legally and technologically—there is not a single terrorist movement in India today that our security forces cannot control within by next Diwali.

But there are no easy options in the war against terrorism. I recall an Israeli scholar’s comment: ‘‘Terrorism is a war without beginning or end. Fighting terrorism, consequently, is a way of life.’’ This is profoundly significant. While our enemies dream of a ‘‘war of a thousand years’’, the timeframes of our responses fail consistently to go beyond the weeks and the months. More importantly, though every Indian sees himself as threatened by this vicious war, he does not see it as a war in which he has any part—it is something that the ‘government’ has to confront, and the actual fighting is the business of the security forces.

These attitudes display enormous and, after all these years, unforgivable ignorance of the character of terrorism, and to expect these to produce people who will actually stand up to violence, resist or help apprehend perpetrators, give witness and help prosecute and punish murderers, is to expect the impossible. Nor can they produce leaders who will go beyond the current mindset that seeks to purchase peace by bribing terrorists and other perpetrators of violence.

At the height of terrorism in Punjab, most political parties in the State were embracing groups of terrorists, and this continues to be the case in theatres of terrorism across India. The tendency to make peace with terrorists and damn the people is rife among our ‘leaders’. But negotiating a settlement with terrorists that brings them to the centre stage of political power is not peace; the absence or cessation of violence is not peace; peace is the absence of fear.

And terrorism and crime are not the only sources of fear. Indeed, almost everyone lives in a state of perpetual fear in India. Each individual who comes in contact with the petty bureaucracy or other instruments of the ‘state’, is totally terrified; only the rich and powerful escape this, confident that they can bribe their way out of everything. But they fear the poor and build high and guarded walls around their tiny islands of affluence. The minorities live in fear; as do the majorities.

In India, every community is a minority somewhere. And wherever any community is a majority, it has behaved atrociously towards local minorities. But the greatest and most pervasive is the fear of not knowing where the next meal will come from; the fear that the tenuous livelihood that puts food on the family’s table may abruptly vanish.

Today, the whole nation is based on an edifice of counterfeit ideas, ideologies and political doctrines. We have counterfeit peace movement, counterfeit human rights, counterfeit secularism, counterfeit development, counterfeit philosophical and political approaches to terrorism – mere slogans intended, not to find solutions or lasting remedies, but to secure personal projection and publicity on politically correct platforms.

Even our ‘revolutionary’ parties and doctrines are counterfeit, seeking power to become, not the harbingers of a society without fear, but inheritors of petty tyrannies and the worst of despotisms. Our whole polity is, today, based on the inculcation of violence in society, polarizing populations into hostile caste, communal and political groups, willing to commit murder, rape, arson and pillage, one against the other.

There can be no permanent restoration of national confidence and capacities unless we are able to restore the authority and prestige of lawful governance in every area within the country, and to provide unconditional security and complete freedom from fear to all who accept the rule of law.