There is a great deal of talk in India on how to combat the growing terror menace. The most important decision Governments must take is to put in place stringent, even ruthless, laws, and implement them
Every person has an inherent right to proclaim that he is an expert and to announce anything at any time he chooses, that he is the best expert on the subject. When something contrary happens, he hides sheepishly behind a smokescreen that sometimes can be flimsy. The basic trouble is that it’s difficult to say what the chances of that happening are. Individual or lone-wolf attacks too were more likely in the US or Europe than in India; People think that ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are absolute; that everything that isn’t perfectly and completely right is totally and equally wrong. A newspaper in the first week of December 2015 quoted an expert to say India is not immediately vulnerable to a threat from the Islamic State.
A number of Indians have been deported from several countries for their linkage with the Islamic State. The same expert, to cover himself, said that India had traditionally not been a major recruiting area for groups such as the Al Qaeda and the IS but the situation could change if the dreaded group led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi shifted its focus to the country.
There are plenty of anti-Indian terrorists, like the ones in Kashmir valley, who have been hoisting Pakistani flags and raising anti-India slogans, apart from giving shelter to the IS or Pakistani terrorists. Another paper says that two suspected lashkar-e-Tayyeba operatives, identified as Dujana and Ukasha — who allegedly infiltrated in Jammu & Kashmir through Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, following which an FIR was registered — had been planning to attack high political leaders and highly populated cities including the national capital. It is not something new, as previously the Indian Parliament was attacked and Delhi had been bombed at more than one place and on more than one occasion. About the attack in the US, the Islamic State said in an online radio broadcast on December 5 that two followers of the Islamist militant group had carried out the attack on a social services agency party in California, in which 14 people had been killed and 25 were injured.
The couple, who the police say killed 14 people and left dozens wounded here, had stockpiled thousands of rounds of ammunition and a dozen homemade pipe bombs in their home, a sign that they might have been “planning further attacks”.
The FBI is treating the December 2, 2015, incident of shooting as a potential terrorist act. The suspects’ extensive arsenal, their recent travel to West Asia and evidence that one of them had been in touch with people with Islamist extremist views, both in the US and abroad, all contributed to the decision to re-focus on the investigation.
The offenders, Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, and Tashfeen Malik, 27, husband and wife, fired as many as 150 bullets inside the Inland Regional Centre, San Bernardino, California, and then participated in the shoot-out with the police that left the couple dead, officials said. The talks on climate has its own priority. But ultimately, it boils down to every man for himself and god for us all. This is exactly what our Government at least till know has been doing. Despite this, terrorists have been indulging with impunity from across our borders and our own people have been providing them logistic support.
The tool that is the police, has five lakh unfilled vacancies in the sanctioned strength of 21 lakhs, according to a former Minister of Home Affairs. Some States have a huge backlog of vacancies. for instance, Uttar Pradesh has nearly 50 per cent less police personnel.
How can you fight terrorism without an effective tool, supported by the strongest possible lawsIJ Regrettably, our politicians suffer from verbal diarrohea and love to make bombastic statements. When it comes to action, the powers that be shudder, lest they are considered as partisan and non-secular.
Our rulers should first rectify the deficiencies in our system to protect our country. India already stands divided on caste, creed and religion. All this has to end. People must stop throwing mud on each other. The problem is that our powers-that-be are confusing speech with action. The same is being done by the parties which have lost power, which includes the power to indulge in scams and not check the people who are indulging in those scams. If we are strong to protect the country against terrorism and those, seek to destroy it, our strength will speak for itself. If we are weak, words will not be enough.
It is worthwhile to quote the John Kennedy, who once said that “we believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant, nor Jewish; where no public official either requests or accepts public instruction on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source; where no religious body seeks to impose its will either directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials; and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all. For a while this year, it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed; in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew or a Quaker or a Unitarian or a Baptist. It was Virginia’s harassment of Baptist preachers, for example, that led to Thomas Jefferson’s Statute of Religious Freedom. Today I may be the victim, but tomorrow it may be you — until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped apart in a time of great national peril.
There is no point in making a guess on where the IS will attack India. The important thing is not to tolerate use of force by terror groups. The sole purpose of the latter is to kill. The Government’s duty lies in protecting all Indians, irrespective of their religion. By a law, they should be empowered to kill the killers, because who dies or is killed first, is a difference of a few seconds. Indians having links with traitors are themselves equally guilty. But such people should be given the right of a fair trial, with the onus lying on them to prove that they are indeed innocent.
We should not continue the stupidity of giving equal rights even to the non-citizen terrorists, whose motive is very clear. I have my doubts whether this will be done, as a number of busybodies with no work will argue against it. No law or Constitution is eternal, like no individual is. When the Constitution was framed, nobody had heard of terrorism, though Pakistan openly killed non-Muslims and sent trainful of dead bodies.
The Punjabis, the largest sufferers, paid them in their own coin. A number of my own close relatives were killed in 1947. No Indian media even protested about Indians doing such a thing as a purely retaliatory measure. What shall we do with the Constitution if India is decimated. in pieces by the terroristsIJ