Human beings die in many different ways. They are also killed in myriad ways. Nearly 1,00,000 people were killed in the two major natural disasters that took place in recent weeks — the cyclone in Myanmar and the earthquake in China’s Sichuan province. But there is nothing ‘sinister’ in Mother Nature’s acts of fury. Nobody discovers an ‘evil’ or ‘criminal’ intent behind them. Rather, believing them to be the will of the Almighty, society generally takes such tragedies in its stride and moves on to reconstruct destroyed homes and broken lives. What happened in Myanmar and China was indeed a tragedy. In contrast, what happened in Jaipur on Tuesday was a crime. Indeed, it was worse than any ordinary crime; it was an act of war on the nation, albeit an unconventional war. Although the toll of around 70 in the serial bomb blasts in Rajasthan’s capital is much smaller than what it normally is in natural disasters in our own country, the imprint of an evil hand and a sinister conspiracy could be seen in every single image that the media transmitted from the seven different sites of the terrorist attack. By now India has witnessed numerous such acts of unconventional war, where the terrorist is the enemy and innocent people — traveling in a train or a bus, moving in a crowded market place, visiting a place of worship, or doing any other routine chore — are the target. It is a borderless war, in which the enemy can strike anywhere anytime. Some intellectuals do not like to call it ‘war’. But what else is it when it is directed and facilitated from across the Indo-Pak border and, as recent evidence shows, also from across the Indo-Bangladesh border? No act of terror is perpetrated without a purpose. And when such acts do not remain isolated incidents but become part of a recurrent and almost endless series of attacks over an ever-expanding geographical footprint in India, it should be apparent even to the meanest intelligence that the purpose is strategic. The brains behind this low-intensity and long-drawn-out war have themselves stated that their strategic objective, by “bleeding India with a thousand cuts”, is to so weaken and destabilise our country over a period of time that, ultimately, it succumbs to defeat, division and disintegration. Thereafter, the victors hope to hoist their own flag atop the Red Fort. All this and more is recorded in the widely publicised documents of SIMI, Lashkar-e-Toiba, Hizbul-Mujahideen and other organisations that subscribe to the ideology of pan-Islamism. The Holy Koran forbids shedding of innocent blood, exhorting that the killing of even a single innocent person is like killing the entire humanity. But these merchants of death have no qualms in shedding the blood of thousands of innocent Indians in the name of jihad.Export of terrorism to India, using these religiously motivated groups, has long been a policy of the Pakistani state. When they begin to feel the heat from India and the international community, the rulers in Islamabad pretend that they have nothing to do with cross-border terrorism and that it might be the handiwork of some non-state elements which often perpetrate terrorist acts in Pakistan itself. But the fact of the matter is that the Pakistani state has neither mounted a sustained and effective assault on these outfits, nor fully abandoned the policy of using them against India. With pan-Islamist forces having emerged stronger in Bangladesh, and the Indo-Bangladesh border remaining far more porous than the Indo-Pak border, India is now being increasingly targeted from the east by organisations like HuJI. An important component of the terror war on India is to create a wide base of support for it within our country. And this is being sought to be achieved by mounting a systematic campaign of falsehood that Muslims in India are a persecuted lot, that they will never get justice in secular India, that secularism is itself against the tenets of Islam, and that Muslims can lead a truly Islamic way of life only in an Islamic state. This too is not unconcealed in the documents of terrorist organisations or in the speeches of their leaders. All this is known to those in important positions in the government of India. The question is: what are they doing about it? Are they taking necessary steps to check infiltration from Bangladesh, which even the Supreme Court has described as a form of ‘external aggression’ against India? Have they instructed the IB and other intelligence agencies to mount a warlike campaign to bust the modules and sleeper cells of terrorist organisations and their supporters? Have they put aside vote-bank considerations to put in place all the necessary legal and administrative instruments to stop the flow of funds, movement of arms, networking of operatives and provision of local support to them? Have they promoted an intellectual climate in the country whereby no support is extended to terrorists, in the way that many self-styled secularists have done to the likes of Mohammad Afzal, who is convicted in the case of the terrorist attack on Parliament? The answer to these questions shows how bogus is Home Minister Shivraj Patil’s oft-repeated claim that the UPA government has a zero-tolerance approach to terrorism.
