Author: Editorial
Publication: The Indian Express
Date: July 28, 2008
URL: http://www.indianexpress.com/story/341208.html
Introduction: Why are there such gaps in the
Centre's political and procedural response to terror?
Terror is pathology. But so it seems, in
India, is the government's response to terror. The one score and some serial
bombs in Bangalore and Ahmedabad were met with cringe-inducing official harrumphs
from Delhi that warnings had been given. It is time to ask what the Union
government means when it says warnings were available. Is it the case that
the Centre's, or specifically the home ministry's, radars are always buzzing
efficiently with actionable information that is not acted upon by inefficient
state governments? If so, why doesn't the Centre say it straight? They have
a duty to the nation to say it. And if that is not the case, as one strongly
suspects is not the case, why take this, to put it bluntly, awful way to pass
the parcel? It has to be said, in the context of this trait, that the UPA's
whole approach to terror has been scarily confusing.
The present home minister will demit office
as having made a spectacular non-impression as far as his leadership of national
security efforts go. It took the prime minister, that too after more than
half of the UPA's term in office was over, to say Naxalites were a high-priority
threat to the idea of India. Can you recall the home minister taking political
leadership of this national security issue? Can you recall him owning up to
his remit as home minister vis-a-vis terror? And let's remember that while
strong and clear political positions are no guarantees against stopping terror,
their absence severely weakens the government's fight against it.
More than four years after the UPA took over,
not a single terror attack has been brought to closure in terms of catching
the perpetrators and putting them through the mills of justice. There's investigative
failure of a scale that would have in normal circumstances consumed the career
of several ministers - but in the UPA the home ministry seems to have acquired
immunity from even the most obvious of questions. It's long been known that
security agencies are in part handicapped by a certain absurd notion of political
correctness - a notion that implicates the very people it professes to protect.
The convenient political assumption in India is that voters don't punish governments
who appear to be ineffective against terror. This government really has pushed
that assumption to its limit.
