Why can’t we strike shock, awe?

This comment is made not just with contempt but anger, and could have been one of the reasons why the man us secularists consider a monster, Narendra Modi, was seen as such a hero by the voters of Gujarat. It was the perception of him as a strong leader — a man who allowed revenge for Godhra — rather than his administrative skills that won him his landslide victory. Wandering around rural Gujarat just before the election I remember meeting any number of Hindus who believed that Modi had ‘‘saved’’ them from Muslim terrorists. Equally, there was the perception that the Indian government had failed over the years to save Hindus from terrorists in Kashmir.

This argument was put to me most chillingly by a young man, charged with being involved in the massacre of more than 30 Muslim women and children in his village, who felt no remorse because he saw what he did as avenging the deaths of Hindus in Kashmir. ‘‘Don’t talk about Gujarat,’’ he said, ‘‘If you want to see a blot on the face of India why don’t you go to Kashmir and see what has been happening to Hindus there for years.’’

Last week’s massacre of 24 Kashmiri Hindus in the village of Nadimarg is going to exacerbate feelings of this kind and, after the assault on Iraq, there is likely to be even more pressure on the Indian state to show that it has the ability to save innocent citizens from terrorist violence.

It will have to do more than make the usual noises. These follow a pattern that has become tedious and unconvincing. A judicial inquiry will be announced, the Home Minister will fly to the massacre site to make his own report, there will be allegations of Pakistani involvement, then our security forces will end up killing some hitherto unknown young men who will be described as those ‘‘responsible for the Nadimarg massacre’’.

The irony is that the Indian state is far from being feeble or soft. When it comes to dealing with its own citizens it is brutal and ruthless. Torture, violence, rape and other forms of brutality are routinely used to ‘‘extract confessions’’ so it is not softness that is the problem so much as ineptitude and an inexplicable inability to improve the functioning of our intelligence agencies.

It would be wrong for me not to add that part of the problem lies with the press. Not only does yesterday’s massacre get forgotten by the end of the week but unless it is some VIP who gets killed we tend to ignore the horrific human tragedy that lies behind most of the massacres. So we know that two-year-old Suraj took more than an hour to bleed to death after he was shot last week, and we know that there was nobody to help him because his parents had both been killed but we know little else. And, we know almost nothing about the other victims. It becomes easy then to forget, easy to refer to Nadimarg merely in statistical terms. Twenty- four more dead.

Supposedly ‘‘liberal’’ journalists are even more to blame because often they end up supporting the terrorists by hinting that the killers could have been members of India’s security forces. Anyone who went to Chittisinghpora when the Sikhs were massacred three years ago would have learned quite easily that the killers spoke Urdu (not Kashmiri) and said they had come from Pakistan. Villagers admitted that they had passed through the village many times before the massacre and had said they had come to fight in the jehad for Kashmir’s freedom but Indian journalists writing in important Western newspapers told quite another story.

They hinted darkly at ‘‘unknown killers’’, the inability of survivors to identify them as Pakistani and the fact that they came in Indian army uniforms. And, it took no time at all for General Musharraf’s spokesmen to use these doubts to absolve Pakistan of blame.

Since Western governments tend to read Western newspapers they have also been inclined to share the perception that Pakistan is less to blame than India says it is and the result is that General Musharraf continues to be described as America’s ‘‘staunchest ally’’ in its war against terrorism.

With all eyes on Iraq it is that much easier for America’s staunch ally, meanwhile, to organise massacres in Kashmir whose purpose can only be to ensure that Mufti Mohammed Syed’s government fails in its efforts to persuade Hindus to return to the Kashmir Valley. Mufti’s government runs with Congress support but this is no time for political differences to come in the way. It is not the credibility of his government that is at stake but the credibility of the Indian state.

Write to tavleensingh@expressindia.com