Nq Edit Terror, Challenges, And Opportunities

Terror and Freedom: Challenges and Opportunities The terrorist attack on soft targets in the mega-city of Mumbai has raised many questions and they will continue to be debated for some time even during and after the general elections due soon. While it is true in every sense that this was an attack on democracy by an international terrorist organization and its networks, we need to pay attention to what exactly ‘attack on democracy’ means and what would be an appropriate ‘democratic response’ to such threats to our very system of governance. This attack will have succeeded in a deeper sense if it makes us lose our rationality and moral moorings. Precisely the opposite has happened. Our response is populist and it comes from the usual hurt sentiments we are famous for. We have now found a definite new hate target, vague but not mysterious. We are voters and would direct our wrath at our government and our present government is one patched up alliance against an opposition that is equally motley. They are concerned more with vote-bank politics and in turning every issue the people face into an election plank. The public, stupid rather than innocent, will revel in their reciprocal mud-slinging. Such degree of planned and ferocious violence cannot be met effectively except with better organized intelligence and defense systems. However, in a plural and infinitely divided secular democratic nation such as ours, we have to ensure that populism does not lead to fragmentation along religious and communal lines. This is something which we can ask our politicians and political parties not just glibly to preach but also to scrupulously practice. At the outset, we need a more responsible parliament and state legislatures. As of now, these are still our weakest political institutions. They hardly transact the business they are elected to carry out at considerable public expenditure. We also need to root out political and bureaucratic corruption that makes both our internal borders and external frontiers sufficiently porous and easily penetrable for external threats and internal treachery. During the Mumbai crisis, I received an SMS from a friend: ‘don’t just worry about those who come by boat; worry also about those who come by vote.’ It is a perceptive comment and a simple and memorable aphorism. We should introspect before we give in to the temptation to mouth platitudes as a knee-jerk reflex response to a trauma that should wake us up and help us to appraise our society and not just our system of governance. Are we politically mature enough to think of ways to prevent violence? Are we sufficiently morally sound to confront violence by civil resolve? Are we rationally adequate to think of a modus vivendi to survive the forces of violence within and around us? We have to be extra vigilant about the freedom that is the basis of our individual and collective life. We cannot compromise our constitution in such circumstances

by mindlessly passing draconian legislations that suffocate our own spirit rather than strangle our enemy. We need to revamp our police act that was installed by the British Raj to suppress its colonial subjects. We need to generously compensate our armed forces, police, and other agencies that protect our life and property. We need to equip them with state-of-the-art arms and armaments, high-tech intelligence gathering and disseminating technology. We have recently succeeded in a Moonmission; but that need not be seen as a symbol of India’s progress. A democracy cannot be a hard state in the sense of being a kind of police state using on its citizens powers that were given by the British Raj to its police to rule a subject people. We already have a surfeit of legislation as though more laws necessarily make a better government. However, our governments easily panic when they fail to prevent attacks on citizens and that is what makes us a soft state. We have too many commissions that look into violation of civil rights but they are often themselves in conflict with the judiciary. With Hindu terror, Muslim terror, Naxal terror, and even state-sponsored terror as in West Bengal looming large, and with many insurgency movements in our Border States we are a nation too easy to infiltrate from the outside and equally vulnerable from within. Finally, when it comes to a body count of attacks such as the recent Fidayeen strike on Mumbai, let us introspect on how many of those people were murdered by corruption and laxity. The man who controls the harbour in Mumbai where smuggled goods are landed is very well-known to the Mumbai police for a long time. So are the hawala operators through whom illicit cash flows to help terrorist outfits. What is being done to catch them? They are certainly not in Karachi or Jalalabad or Peshawar or Lahore? India’s progress is null and void when its citizens suffer at many levels and are vulnerable to viruses as well as to terrorist attacks, to malnutrition and lack of basic education, to poor working conditions and increasing unemployment. We are not just a soft state or a decadent society; we are only just one step out of the dark ages in many ways. Dil ip C hi tre _______________________________________________________________(ENDS)