Author: Times News Network
Publication: The Times of India
Date: July 14, 2006
URL: How many blasts will it take for the govt to act
New York was bombed once, London was bombed
once, and Madrid, too, was bombed once. But Mumbai, the wannabe financial
hub of the new world, has had it many many times over and over since 1993.
The first attack was laid at the doorstep of the Don, but investigations into
almost all the ensuing terror attacks have stopped at one name: SIMI or the
Student's Islamic Movement of India.
And throughout all these bloody bombings,
if the helplessness of the working Mumbaiite continued to be portrayed as
"its legendary spirit", the political establishment, too, has made
a farce of the mess religiously.
More than a decade on, the political establishment
is yet to rise over their petty concerns to nail or even contain the tentacles
of Simi. Even Maharashtra's own NCP - led by its moral policeman-turned-home
minister RR Patil - has had a history of dilly-dallying vis-a-vis SIMI when
it comes to taking decisive action on the Islamic fringe outfit out.
Circa 2001, the NCP disowns a decision of
its own state government asking the then NDA-led Centre to ban Simi. Its logic:
the move was taken at a politically-convenient moment for the BJP, which was
going to polls in UP.
And when the Centre ultimately banned the
outfit, the then Opposition Congress was guarded in its reaction as two of
its own CMs, Digvijay Singh of Madhya Pradesh and Ashok Gehlot of Rajasthan,
too had demanded it.
But their then spokesman Jaipal Reddy, who
is a Union minister today, was more forthcoming. "Apart from being lop-sided,
the action on SIMI is ill-timed. We are sure that this naked attempt to fan
communal discord is not going to help the BJP in UP," he said then.
The Left's record too is a shade of deep red.
Describing the ban on SIMI as "politically motivated", Comrade Jyoti
Basu said at a meeting in Lucknow on October 6, '01 that the government should
come out with all allegations on the basis of which SIMI has been banned.
Prominent among those who attended the meeting
were the then CPM general secretary Harkishan Singh Surjeet, politburo member
Sitaram Yechuri, CPI general secretary A B Bardhan, national secretary D Raja,
Samajwadi Party leaders Mulayam Singh Yadav and Amar Singh, former prime ministers
VP Singh and Deve Gowda, AIFB general secretary Debabrata Biswas and RSP MP
Abani Roy.
So today, even as a national rage builds against
the perpetrators of 7/11 - Simi, for sure, in tandem with Lashkar, according
to Maharashtra DGP PS Pasricha - it is only natural that the Samajwadi Party
chose to defend the banned outfit.
