Hyderabad Police deserves to be
congratulated for having foiled a Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) plot hatched with
two objectives. The first was triggering communal violence by blowing up
a Ganesh temple near the Secunderabad Railway Station during the forthcoming
Ganesh festival. The second was to attack Americans and Jews and their
interests in Andhra Pradesh to protest against the US's attacks on Iraq
and Afghanistan.
Having said this, one must, however,
condemn its laxity which enabled a crowd of about 200 burqa-clad women,
including relatives of the eight men arrested for involvement in the plot,
to burst into the conference hall of the Police Headquarters, where the
city's Commissioner of Police, Mr RP Singh, was briefing the press about
the conspiracy, and stage a demonstration. Surely, its intelligence wing
should have been able to get advance information about the demonstration
and alerted the Police Headquarters.
After the arrest of the eight persons,
it should have been on the lookout for what their relatives and friends
or the LeT, might be planning-particularly since the latter might easily
have taken the form of retaliatory bomb attacks and other forms of terrorist
violence. Besides, even if Hyderabad Police had failed to get advance information
about the demonstration, it should have been able to prevent the women
from not only storming into the building but reaching its fifth floor.
Its failure to do so speaks poorly of the security arrangements which should have been far tighter given its experience of dealing with the violence unleashed by the People's War (PW) and the fact that it may have to contend with such violence again. Also, what might have happened if the women had carried arms under their burqas and gone on a shooting spree? This, of course, is a hypothetical question but all good security planning is done on the basis of taking into account every conceivable contingency that may arise.
Of course, the police were perhaps stymied by the fact that the demonstrators were women and any action that could be projected as atrocity would have immediately set off shrill protests by NGOs thriving in the human rights business. Many remember how some of these had raised a storm of protest over the encounter death of a young woman, Ishrat Jahan Sheikh, near Ahmedabad in June, claiming that she was an innocent victim of cold-blooded killing.
The storm, of course, subsided after
it was established that she and the others shot along with her, were LeT
agents out on a murderous mission, but the damage in the form of inhibiting
policemen from taking strong action for fear of repercussions has been
done. Worse, the LeT seems to have noted this and realised that the best
way to prevent the police from thoroughly investigating a terrorist plot
is to raise a hue and cry about trumped up charges everytime an arrest
is made. Hence, perhaps the Hyderabad show. The police must not be intimidated
- and the Central and State Governments must ensure this.