Terror and Freedom: Challenges and Opportunities

The terrorist attack on soft targets in the mega-city of Mumbai has raised many
questions and they will continue to be debated for some time even during and after
the general elections due soon. While it is true in every sense that this was an
attack on democracy by an international terrorist organization and its networks, we
need to pay attention to what exactly ‘attack on democracy’ means and what would
be an appropriate ‘democratic response’ to such threats to our very system of
governance.

This attack will have succeeded in a deeper sense if it makes us lose our rationality
and moral moorings. Precisely the opposite has happened. Our response is populist
and it comes from the usual hurt sentiments we are famous for. We have now found
a definite new hate target, vague but not mysterious. We are voters and would direct
our wrath at our government and our present government is one patched up
alliance against an opposition that is equally motley. They are concerned more with
vote-bank politics and in turning every issue the people face into an election plank.
The public, stupid rather than innocent, will revel in their reciprocal mud-slinging.

Such degree of planned and ferocious violence cannot be met effectively except
with better organized intelligence and defense systems. However, in a plural and
infinitely divided secular democratic nation such as ours, we have to ensure that
populism does not lead to fragmentation along religious and communal lines. This
is something which we can ask our politicians and political parties not just glibly to
preach but also to scrupulously practice. At the outset, we need a more responsible
parliament and state legislatures. As of now, these are still our weakest political
institutions. They hardly transact the business they are elected to carry out at
considerable public expenditure. We also need to root out political and bureaucratic
corruption that makes both our internal borders and external frontiers sufficiently
porous and easily penetrable for external threats and internal treachery.

During the Mumbai crisis, I received an SMS from a friend: ‘don’t just worry about
those who come by boat; worry also about those who come by vote.’ It is a
perceptive comment and a simple and memorable aphorism.

We should introspect before we give in to the temptation to mouth platitudes as a

knee-jerk reflex response to a trauma that should wake us up and help us to
appraise our society and not just our system of governance. Are we politically
mature enough to think of ways to prevent violence? Are we sufficiently morally
sound to confront violence by civil resolve? Are we rationally adequate to think of a
modus vivendi to survive the forces of violence within and around us?

We have to be extra vigilant about the freedom that is the basis of our individual
and collective life. We cannot compromise our constitution in such circumstances
by mindlessly passing draconian legislations that suffocate our own spirit rather
than strangle our enemy. We need to revamp our police act that was installed by the
British Raj to suppress its colonial subjects. We need to generously compensate our
armed forces, police, and other agencies that protect our life and property. We need
to equip them with state-of-the-art arms and armaments, high-tech intelligence
gathering and disseminating technology. We have recently succeeded in a Moon-
mission; but that need not be seen as a symbol of India’s progress.

A democracy cannot be a hard state in the sense of being a kind of police state
using on its citizens powers that were given by the British Raj to its police to rule a
subject people. We already have a surfeit of legislation as though more laws
necessarily make a better government. However, our governments easily panic
when they fail to prevent attacks on citizens and that is what makes us a soft state.

We have too many commissions that look into violation of civil rights but they are
often themselves in conflict with the judiciary. With Hindu terror, Muslim terror,
Naxal terror, and even state-sponsored terror as in West Bengal looming large, and
with many insurgency movements in our Border States we are a nation too easy to
infiltrate from the outside and equally vulnerable from within.

Finally, when it comes to a body count of attacks such as the recent Fidayeen strike
on Mumbai, let us introspect on how many of those people were murdered by
corruption and laxity. The man who controls the harbour in Mumbai where smuggled
goods are landed is very well-known to the Mumbai police for a long time. So are
the hawala operators through whom illicit cash flows to help terrorist outfits. What is
being done to catch them? They are certainly not in Karachi or Jalalabad or
Peshawar or Lahore?

India’s progress is null and void when its citizens suffer at many levels and are
vulnerable to viruses as well as to terrorist attacks, to malnutrition and lack of basic
education, to poor working conditions and increasing unemployment. We are not
just a soft state or a decadent society; we are only just one step out of the dark ages
in many ways.

Dil ip C hi tre

_______________________________________________________________(ENDS)