Where we can trip

They are certainly supported financially, morally, ideologically by forces outside India 8212; forces rooted in Pakistan, Dubai, Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Saudi Arabia. Support may be official, formal and acknowledged from state agencies in these countries, or informal, unacknowledged, below the line and cloaked in official deniability, or from rogue elements within state agencies supported with winks and nods by governments or rogue elements beyond the control of governments or from individual and non-official 8216;philanthropic8217; supporters of terrorism indulging in fanatical and lunatic private enterprise on their own.

The physical work of planting bombs is probably outsourced to psychologically unstable young males from neighbouring countries who resemble Indians who can look at a Pakistani or Bangladeshi and tell them apart from Indians? or even to Indian nationals susceptible to psychoses based on grotesque beliefs or grievances, real or imaginary.

Destruction of mosques which are rechristened as disputed structures or inter-religious violence which is given voyeuristic coverage in the electronic media with ongoing and credible accusations of state connivance in these riots surely does not help and both are quite likely a motivator for recruits among otherwise unemployed, restless youth powered by high levels of macho testosterone and belief in absurd medieval doctrines that justify vicious violence against anonymous enemies.

There is no point in berating the Mumbai police or Indian intelligence agencies. The FBIs and CIAs blessed with multi-billion dollar budgets could not predict 9/11; Scotland Yard not only missed out on 7/7, but demonstrated unique incompetence in mistaking Latin American Roman Catholics for Middle-eastern Moslems and in attacking terrorist hubs which turn out to have no basis! Putting pressure on our over-worked agencies means that we run the risk of encouraging publicity-hungry cops doing silly things like making high-profile arrests or indulging in intrusive search and seizure processes, which boomerang by violating the civil rights of innocent Moslem households, thus creating and perpetuating a vicious downward spiral of grievance, victimhood and possibly increased susceptibility to becoming participants in future acts of senseless terror.

Terrorists seek to exploit the asymmetry inherent in the face-off between civilisation and barbarism. They make mischievous use of our openness. They hope to provoke over-reactions from us. They rely on the proverbial bumbling, serendipitous incompetence of untidy civic societies with democratic aspirations, if not pretensions. The more we indulge in self-flagellation and institutional finger-pointing, the more we fall into a trap.

We must pursue them with diligence but not establish a Homeland Security bureaucracy with an inflated budget feeding the ever-thirsty Indian state and encouraging it to consume taxpayer resources and deliver committees and commissions that are disposed of, based on tactical political considerations rather than any impartial, credible conviction of the guilty and protection of the innocent. In this respect we are no different from countries that are richer than us and who have more pretentious claims to superior knowledge, expertise and efficiency. RAW8217;s track record may be poor. But almost any intelligence agency in the world has performed better than the over-funded CIA, and RAW certainly is in this 8216;better than CIA8217; category.

And while our agencies are decidedly not in the same league as the Mossad, it seems to me that if India tries to recreate a Mossad it will not only fail, but it might in the bargain get a Frankenstein like the ISI. Think of the damage that the over-empowered ISI has done to our hapless neighbour. Even as the ISI persecutes people in other countries, it fails to defend its homeland. Karachi has many more bomb attacks and casualties than mercifully Mumbai can aspire to.

Net-net terrorist activities are beyond doubt planned, sponsored, guided, managed and operationally executed in a weird shadowy manner that cannot be fully unraveled. It is a waste of time to indulge in needless public recriminations. Our best response is to ignore the incident treat it as a force majeure happening no different from floods or car accidents or air crashes and return to work in a hurry. This incidentally is exactly the response of most Mumbai citizens, that is, if the electronic media will just let them be.

If we give these savage assailants of civilisation no publicity and carry on with our humble, peaceful, unpublicised, peaceable, day-to-day, matter-of-fact, ordinary, boring acts of drudgery that involve the process of earning our livings, then we would have automatically check-mated our collective adversaries and denied them the sweet success of public visibility which thy desire. On behalf of the non-hypertensive citizens of Mumbai may I request the pundits of global academia and media to leave us alone? We should also not be intrusive with the Mumbai police or the Intelligence Bureau and hope that they get along with their work, always acknowledging that theirs is a battle where there never will be complete success. We should wish each other well and accept our contemporary existentialist destiny on this planet with a stoic shrug. As the Compassionate Buddha would have said, 8220;We are aware of the existence of evil Maras in this world, but let us ask Mother Earth to witness that we have maintained detachment, we shall not succumb to the temptation to torture ourselves or react with violence against our tormentors. Ours is the middle way which seemingly demonstrates our weakness but is the source of our eventual claims to humanity, sanity and equanimity.8221; As the great American writer William Faulkner told us humankind, in this case represented by the hapless citizens of Mumbai will 8220;not only endure, but prevail8221;.

The writer is chairman and CEO, Mphasis