This war that nobody is fighting

The only good thing that came out of last week’s terrible tragedy was that a group that calls itself the Indian Mujahideen proudly accepted responsibility. The truth is that even if some foreign group like the Lashkar-e-Toiba or the Harkut-ul-jihad-Islam (HuJI) are involved, it is Indian mujahideen who carry out the operation.

We would know more about these local jihadis if the Government of India were serious about fighting terrorism. The first jihadi violence on Indian soil were the bombings in Mumbai in 1993. It took our justice system till last year to convict only the second-rung plotters. Why should terrorists fear Indian justice? Then we saw the Indian government brought to its knees in Kandahar by the hijackers of IC 814. So timid was the BJP government’s response that it did not try once to find the hijackers after the event. Nor did we try to bump off the ghastly men we released in exchange for the passengers of IC 814.

More embarrassing even is that in the five years that Maulana Azhar Masood and Omar Sheikh spent in Indian jails, we did not know that they were two of the most dangerous terrorists alive. After the government’s disgraceful handling of the Kandahar episode you would think that L.K. Advani as the ‘iron man’ of the home ministry would have set up a computerised database of jihadi terrorists. It still does not exist according to Ajai Sahani of the Institute of Conflict Management, who is one of the few people in India who keeps a track of jihadis and Naxalites.

Without a national database available to our security forces, we cannot begin to think of winning this war. When I spoke to him after the Jaipur incident, he pointed out that the Intelligence Bureau has barely 3,000 agents for operations across the country. Not just counter-terrorism but everything. Do we need more proof that the Government of India has no intention of fighting the jihadis? If our state governments were doing better there would be hope. Sadly, there is not a single state government that has invested in modern, sophisticated counter-terrorism systems.

Meanwhile, the terrorists get more sophisticated by the day. They get more fearless as well and openly announce that unless the Government of India changes its policy towards America there will be more attacks. They tell us loudly and clearly that they have every intention of breaking up India one more time by inciting communal violence between Hindus and Muslims.

How does our government respond? It does not. When some terrible tragedy occurs like in Jaipur last week our biggest leaders respond exactly as they would if there were an earthquake or a flood and the relief effort needed to be gauged. They get into their private aeroplanes and fly down to the site where the horror has occurred and ask the sort of silly questions Sonia Gandhi did when she visited the injured in Jaipur’s hospitals. Did you see anything? Where does it hurt? No, Madame, it is not possible to see much if you are being blown to bits and yes it hurts like hell to see such a namby-pamby, cowardly response in the face of such a grave threat to the country.

We may as well surrender and let the jihadis divide India once more in the name of Islam. Enough innocent people have died in a war that nobody is fighting.