what india can do

 

The country will have to improve its border management policies, take a leaf out of laws on terrorism in the UK and the US, apart from beefing up its intelligence network. As India becomes a prime target of a cocktail of terrorist groups, the country needs to take a radical relook at the anti- terror laws which leave much to be desired. The pitfalls in the legal system have allowed the accused in the transistor bomb blasts in Delhi to go scot free even after 23 years. With cases like the Mumbai blasts and the Delhi serial blasts stifi unsolved, terrorist groups feel emboldened and have continued to strike Indian targets without fear. “Terrorists have unified command and control system while India’s response is scattered and sometimes absent,” says an intelligence official. Though India has been at the forefront seeking a comprehensive UN convention on terrorism—wanting action against countries providing financial help and harbouring terrorists—differences on the definition of terrorism have grounded progress. The abolition of the Prevention of Terrorism Act (P0TA) in 2004 and the politicisation of its anti-terror response has left India with no effective Central law to counter terrorism. Worse, five states, which have lobbied for their own legislations, have found their bills gathering dust in the judicial division of the Home Ministry. Gujarat’s case for an organised anti-terror law has been pending since 2004, Rajasthan has not heard from the Centre since January 2006, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh have seen their anti-terror bills pending since last year. The lack of an effective anti-terror legislation is worsened by an abysmal police-population ratio of 126 per 1,00,000 (as against Western ratios that vary between 250 and over 500 per 1,00,000); Gujarat has a ratio of 152 per 1,00,000 (above the national average, but well below the 222 per 1,00,000 recommended internationally for peacetime policing). Moreover, policing is primitive in comparison to the modem resources that have been committed for law enforcement in the West. There are deficits in police staffmg levels of between 10-40 per cent in various states.

Globally it has been accepted that terrorism cannot be treated as a simple law and order problem, and with terrorists becoming more advanced and many functioning with active help of countries that harbour them, it requires an extraordinary response to tackle them.
The USA Patriot Act of 2001 (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate ‘fools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001) has allowed the US security agencies to search telephone, e-mail communications, medical, financial and other records and eased restrictions on foreign intelligence gathering within the United States. The US experience of creating a Department of I lomeland Security with the avowed objective of protecting the country from terrorist attacks needs to be replicated in India with the Central Law Enforcement Agency to fight terror.

Countries like Australia have given, stop and search” powers to their police, which allows the police to stop and search people. The country also has a “Control order”, that allows the police to approach a closed court and ask for restrictions to be placed on someone who poses a terror threat. The restrictions can limit who the suspect can talk to, where the person can go and what devices the suspect can use (phone and Internet). The UK’s new Counter Terrorism Bill extends the pre-charge detention of terror suspects from 28 days to 42 days.
Even Bangladesh has implemented new terror laws creating special tribunals to hear terror cases and clear these in six months with a provision of death penalty for terrorism and financing of terrorism. India, meanwhile, careens from blast to blast.
“India’s police and intelligence forces—with tiny exceptions—remain overwhehningly undermanned, under-resourced and primitive in their day-to-day functioning. India has failed even to create a national database on crime and terrorism—despite a mandate to create it and support organisational structures, including the Multi-Agency Centre and the Joint Task Force on lnteffigene in the Intelligence Bureau, that dates back to 2001,” says Ajai Sahni, executive director, institute for Conflict Management.
India needs to take out a leaf from global laws to tackle terrorism besides re-arming its human inteffigence network which Is important to ward ofi’ terror attacks. it also has to set up a
real-time information sharing system with key
intelligence agencies to avert terror attacks. Another important aspect is to work on its border management and control policies,
because ineiThctive monitoring of its porous herders with Bangladesh and Nepal has made these into safe transit points for terrorists. While India will have to fight its own battle against terror, it will have to ensure that its laws have teeth, with checks and balances, to combat the scourge of terrorism.

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The Nation That Failed

India displays its shameful lack of political will to confront the growing threat of radical Islam even as it becomes the easiest target of jihad

 

So it is yesterday all over again, and the sameness of the savagery only adds to the legendary Indian sense of sangfroid. Two spirited cities of India, 23 blasts, more than 50 dead, humireds maimed, and the predictable Day-After theatre of politics feasting on cadavers strewn across the streets of the world’s most
state. This overwhelming banality of horror tells one simple truth: we can take a lot more, we can shed a lot more blood, we have a lot more people
to spare... Enterprising jthadists are welcome, and the incentives you get in the great democratic republic where no terrorist worth his nthiiistic fantasy is denied the right to kill under an equal opportunity scheme is greater than what you can get anywhere else in the world, may be with the exception of Iraq. It should be now official: India is a dangerous place to be in, unless you are a god’s mercenary for whom this wretched country is the easiest battlefield in the war against infidels or an honourable member of the political class that has already abdicated its responsibility to protect the nation.
The frequency of the attacks and their magnitude say a lot about the jihadist and the victim. The killer is precise; he chooses his target for maximum effect; and he seems to enjoy the kind of freedom that is denied to his brotherhood elsewhere. Ahmedabad comes just two months after Jaipur which was preceded by Hyderabad 2007. Mumbai 2006. Dethi 2005 and the audacious attack on Parliament in the afterglow of 9/11. Come to think of it: the most favoured nation for those who want to invest in jthad is not the United States or Israel any longer. It is India.

Not that Washington and Jerusalem have ceased to be less satanic for jthadists. India does not have the political will or consensus to identify the threat of radical Islam and confront it. It does not have that necessary iron in the nationalist soul to ensure that life is not disposable at the diktat of a coward trapped in the make believe of a scriptural Caliphate.
What we have got is an apparition in funereal white floating in Ahmeclabad, mouthing platitudinous inanities as if it is just another routine mission for him in just another death zone. The enormity of our national shame cannot be reduced to the size of the Union Home Minister, but the gentleman is symptomatic of everything that is wrong with those who have the political mandate to act. “We have information but it is not proper for me to disclose that information at this point of time or blame any organisation because it has implications.” It is Shivraj Patil post-Alimedabad, and it is as enlightening as what he had said about the threat to national security iii a television interview immediately after taking over: “The disease within the body is more dangerous”—whatever it means. Effete and evasive, he is the home minister in a Government that can do nothing but cry “ml” in utter exasperation whenever it is under attack. We don’t expect from this Government a department of homeland security or an Indian version ofAmerica’s Patriot Act or extraordinary rendition or, for that matter, a Gitmo in the Andamans for the higher cause of national security. What about an alternative to the “draconian” Prevention of Terrorism Act (P0TA)? State governments like Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan are not even given the permission to pass their own anti-terrorism laws while Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat are awaiting presidential assent to their bills against terror. A government that allows a terrorist condemned to the gallows to become a living symbol for the perennially disenchanted but the vote-rich minorities is unlikely to identify radical Islamism as a threat to India. So it wifi go on triangulate in politically correct malarkey, with the home minister as its bumbling interlocutor.
And India will continue to be savaged. Today, in the post-9/11 statistics of terror, India, a ltheral democracy, is second only to post-Saddam Iraq, liberated but at war with itself. This terrifying truth magnifies the failure of the state—and the entire political class which is never united by grief or fear. Sadly, even when the new generation faces of Kashmir—one of the oldest datelines of Islamic terror—went eloquent about ‘Being Indian’ in Parliament, the war against India in the Valley found no place in their nationalist script. As long as India refuses to shed its shameful political expediency, we can only wallow in our victimhood. We deserve better.

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