Vigilance or violence

There can be no two views that the terrorist attack outside the J&K Chief Minister’s Mufti Mohammad Sayeed’s official residence is a despicable act of cowardice in which a number of people were killed and injured. But a very significant basic issue needs to be clarified at the earliest: was the attack actually aimed at the chief minister, or even his residence? The reports convey a confusing message. The director general police, J&K, Gopal Sharma, is reported to have stated that the attack was not aimed at the chief minister, and implied that their target was the BSF party. In fact the chief minister had left more than three hours earlier for Aligarh. Mufti’s daughter and PDP president, Mehbooba Mufti, who was in the house at the time of the attack, has also been reported to have said that she did not think that their house was the target.

Incidentally, the chief minister had spent the night in the house after returning from Aligarh with the terrorists holed up in the building next door; and the courage of the father and daughter deserves commendation. The security forces also performed magnificently in rescuing 30 civilians trapped inside the shopping complex where the terrorists had taken refuge. But we cannot ignore the fact that the attack took place at the high-security zone that marks the residence of chief minister of a state that has been under brutal terrorist attacks for 15 years. The conclusion that there has been a serious breach of security arrangements is therefore inescapable. Access to and on the road along the chief minister’s residence ought to have been fully controlled, especially since an attack had taken place two months earlier on Greenway Hotel — 400 yards away. And whether the chief minister wants less security or not should not be the criteria. After all, a successful attack on him/her would have wide-ranging ramifications.

Details about the handling of the incident are sketchy. One would expect security management and training to provide covering fire to the security post so that no attacker would get away after the attack. How did the two escape into another building across the road without being hit by the other guards? Was it a problem of inappropriate weapons, training, or poor reflexes? Or was it simply that this was not possible under the circumstances? But the officers and others, including media persons, also seem to have congregated at the point, a la Tanda, without ensuring that the area was fully sanitised in the face of the two terrorists having escaped into the building next door. We must emphasise that the nation is totally behind the security forces in their arduous task of counter-terrorism. But the government must make the facts available to the public to enable a rational objective judgment to be made about the challenges faced by them.