Delhi High Court Blast: We need people’s movement to fight terror
It was a routine hunt for stories this week with 9/11’s 10th anniversary beeping on the radar. Quite casually, we were discussing what we should put out as a recall on the victims of the World Trade Centre terror attack a decade ago. Just then, Delhi shook with yet another blast, this time claiming 13 lives and maiming 76 persons in the High Court premises.
Being in the profession which entails routinely following scenes of disaster, terror attacks and all other incidents that take life gruesomely, a certain amount of immunity creeps in among colleagues, just like those doctor stories of those men and women in white coats having lunch over a cadaver. How many dead and how many injured is what comes out as a routine question. Condemnation follows and then one gets down to work — writing soirees on severed limbs, men and women in agony, finding out the one report that will shock as no other, etc.
Over the years, reporters cultivate a somewhat deadened sensitivity to disasters which is defended as defence mechanism to deal with the constant ebb of life and flow of death. In this context, it was nothing new for us to discuss the blast without getting too moved.
But what alarms me most is the casualness with which the public has started taking these incidents. The Government, of course, is getting too brazen in its repeated assertions that it is next to impossible to plug such incidents and that this time it had happened despite the Intelligence inputs.
Actually, the Government virtually washing its hands off the responsibility to plug terror attacks has only made the obvious more clear: That, terror deaths are here to stay and one might as well get used to them.
Nevertheless, it was strange to see that routinely condemning the blast, people were more worried about the roadblocks that would come into place after the High Court incident. They tuned into the radio and, of course TV, to find out about the diversions. The Metro lines were spilling over with most road traffic to central Delhi preferring to take the underline to avoid traffic inconvenience. And, it was business as usual at malls with, well, life moving on.
Indeed, the show must go on and it does. But aren’t we as a population becoming too insensitive to take up issues as grave as this? After all, America is a prime example of safeguarding its borders from any kind of terror attacks for all these 10 years after the 9/11 attack in which they were caught napping. Not a single attack could be managed by the al Qaeda despite its continued efforts to derail American safety measures. India, on the other hand, has its annual blasts saga with gory deaths and gorier inaction by the Government.
Isn’t it scarier than the blasts that our Government hasn’t a clue about the perpetrators — ever! From 1997 to now, not a single concrete arrest has been made in all the terror attacks that the Capital has witnessed — be it the 2005, 2008 or 2009, no one knows who did it, no one, least of all the Government. 26/11 is yet to get to the bottom of the probe or even ruffle Pakistan for its involvement, even though the neighbour grandly maintains that it was the handiwork of non-State players.
India, however, would do well if she was to look within and realise what blind eyed appeasement can do to the security of the nation. All our law enforcing agencies have separate Intelligence wings and one has reason to believe that not all the spooks in these myriad departments are Rip Van Winkles. Yet, intel hardly ever averts a terror attack. Cops often tell you in private how hot pursuit of terror mongers often becomes uncomfortable for the Government because sections of society have to be appeased as votebanks, and that’s when prevention fizzles out.
Other than that, no Government till date has shown an iron will against terrorism. Zero tolerance is just lip service and we are condemned to live with the fact that post-blast all effort just gets reduced to inter-party bickering than any sincere effort whatsoever to plug future disasters.
It is here that the public should step in — as it did in Anna Hazare’s campaign against corruption. It is a hard reality that our public representatives will act only if they come under intense pressure. It is also a reality that the public has the capability to pressurise the Government into acting if it so deems. So why have we not got together and stormed the streets demanding the identification and arrest of terror culprits, the exploding of sleeper cells, the plugging of explosives movement into dirty hands and dirtier minds, busting of safe havens, dissemination and debriefing of mounds of intelligence and the establishment of a body that has enough claws to be feared by the terror monger and deeper eyes to keep a vigil that proves to be impregnable?
A weak-kneed Government needs a public pressure group to keep it on track and not let it lose its way in a maze of political compulsions and ineptness. The time to do so is here and now. The need is to look for and find an Anna Hazare against terror.
Source: Sunday Pioneer, September 11, 2011, http://bit.ly/osP4et
Being in the profession which entails routinely following scenes of disaster, terror attacks and all other incidents that take life gruesomely, a certain amount of immunity creeps in among colleagues, just like those doctor stories of those men and women in white coats having lunch over a cadaver. How many dead and how many injured is what comes out as a routine question. Condemnation follows and then one gets down to work — writing soirees on severed limbs, men and women in agony, finding out the one report that will shock as no other, etc.
Over the years, reporters cultivate a somewhat deadened sensitivity to disasters which is defended as defence mechanism to deal with the constant ebb of life and flow of death. In this context, it was nothing new for us to discuss the blast without getting too moved.
But what alarms me most is the casualness with which the public has started taking these incidents. The Government, of course, is getting too brazen in its repeated assertions that it is next to impossible to plug such incidents and that this time it had happened despite the Intelligence inputs.
Actually, the Government virtually washing its hands off the responsibility to plug terror attacks has only made the obvious more clear: That, terror deaths are here to stay and one might as well get used to them.
Nevertheless, it was strange to see that routinely condemning the blast, people were more worried about the roadblocks that would come into place after the High Court incident. They tuned into the radio and, of course TV, to find out about the diversions. The Metro lines were spilling over with most road traffic to central Delhi preferring to take the underline to avoid traffic inconvenience. And, it was business as usual at malls with, well, life moving on.
Indeed, the show must go on and it does. But aren’t we as a population becoming too insensitive to take up issues as grave as this? After all, America is a prime example of safeguarding its borders from any kind of terror attacks for all these 10 years after the 9/11 attack in which they were caught napping. Not a single attack could be managed by the al Qaeda despite its continued efforts to derail American safety measures. India, on the other hand, has its annual blasts saga with gory deaths and gorier inaction by the Government.
Isn’t it scarier than the blasts that our Government hasn’t a clue about the perpetrators — ever! From 1997 to now, not a single concrete arrest has been made in all the terror attacks that the Capital has witnessed — be it the 2005, 2008 or 2009, no one knows who did it, no one, least of all the Government. 26/11 is yet to get to the bottom of the probe or even ruffle Pakistan for its involvement, even though the neighbour grandly maintains that it was the handiwork of non-State players.
India, however, would do well if she was to look within and realise what blind eyed appeasement can do to the security of the nation. All our law enforcing agencies have separate Intelligence wings and one has reason to believe that not all the spooks in these myriad departments are Rip Van Winkles. Yet, intel hardly ever averts a terror attack. Cops often tell you in private how hot pursuit of terror mongers often becomes uncomfortable for the Government because sections of society have to be appeased as votebanks, and that’s when prevention fizzles out.
Other than that, no Government till date has shown an iron will against terrorism. Zero tolerance is just lip service and we are condemned to live with the fact that post-blast all effort just gets reduced to inter-party bickering than any sincere effort whatsoever to plug future disasters.
It is here that the public should step in — as it did in Anna Hazare’s campaign against corruption. It is a hard reality that our public representatives will act only if they come under intense pressure. It is also a reality that the public has the capability to pressurise the Government into acting if it so deems. So why have we not got together and stormed the streets demanding the identification and arrest of terror culprits, the exploding of sleeper cells, the plugging of explosives movement into dirty hands and dirtier minds, busting of safe havens, dissemination and debriefing of mounds of intelligence and the establishment of a body that has enough claws to be feared by the terror monger and deeper eyes to keep a vigil that proves to be impregnable?
A weak-kneed Government needs a public pressure group to keep it on track and not let it lose its way in a maze of political compulsions and ineptness. The time to do so is here and now. The need is to look for and find an Anna Hazare against terror.
Source: Sunday Pioneer, September 11, 2011, http://bit.ly/osP4et
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