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EDITORIAL
COMMENT
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We Want Answers |
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On the night of November 26, India’s financial nerve centre, Mumbai, was frozen stiff by a vicious terrorist attack. It wasn’t close to anything that India had seen in the past, barring perhaps the audacious attack on Parliament in December 2001. The images of both attacks were similar, only this time the attack was more spread out. Young gunmen were running about shooting people, including senior policemen, in train stations, five-star hotels, hospitals, airports. They were rabid, rapid, and rampant, and the last thing they were concerned about was their own lives.
For a reasonably long span of time now, Pakistan’s ISI has been battling the Frankenstein—the Taliban, a band of fighters—that it had funded to fight the Soviets. Most of those fighters are now part of the larger, al Qaeda. Most of them presently have a base in the Federally Administered Tribal Area of Pakistan, but are actually willing to go out and bomb and kill almost anywhere in the world, but mostly in India. Most of them are fighting American and Pakistani forces in the FATA region, while several others (believed to be in hundreds) are busy carrying out highly-damaging suicidal attacks on Pakistani targets from time to time. Some have infiltrated into Kashmir, after having got past an elaborate network of barbed fences, night vision cameras, and the eyes of unmanned reconnaissance aircraft operated by the Indian Army and intelligence establishments.
But worryingly now for India, the ones that apparently made their way to Mumbai, came from Pakistan by boat, a fact admitted by Maharashtra Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh. This is a different modus, similar to the one used to sneak in explosives to bomb Mumbai in March 1993. How they escaped the net of the Indian Coast Guard is inexplicable. The attacks on Mumbai have been relentless. It was only in 2006 that serial bombings inside suburban trains left over 200 dead, and 700 injured. In 2003, multiple bomb attacks killed nearly 300 in Mumbai, on two separate days.
The ISI whose sole agenda has been to destabilize India is now diverting these restless, senseless and marauding fighters in order to save its face in Pakistan. They are also targeting western nationals, so that India becomes a failed-state in the eyes of the West. Wherever a blast has taken place in India this year—Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Guwahati, Hyderabad—there has been a Pakistani footprint. To give the attackers a name—Deccan Mujahideen—this time is an attempt to create confusion. India knows they were ferried from across the border, every other claim is bogus.
The battle is getting nastier. Firstly, the terrorists are getting more audacious. They are prepared to die, now, tomorrow or the day after. If they can choose five-star hotels and top policemen as targets, then clearly neither reputation nor rank deters them. Secondly, India’s intelligence set up has now been found wanting repeatedly. We have a mammoth Army that has not fought a major war since 1971. But India is at war, internally. Why can’t we have the Army come and shut out the terrorists, once and for all, even if that means chasing them in every nook and cranny in the country. Does the land of a billion have to pay a price day in and day out for the incompetence of a few?
India needs answers, and they ought to come fast.
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January 2009
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