UPA's Kandahar Excuse

I have had many posts on this blog about the inability, or unwillingness, of the current UPA government to fight terror with conviction and effectiveness. Much of my material was without numbers and without instances, and I am happy to read Shekhar Gupta, the Chief Editor of The Indian Express, expressing the same views as mine, and perhaps a lot of other Indians.

It is not just the absolute absence of convictions, breakthroughs in terrorism and anti-Indian activities, but the extreme incompetence that the UPA seems to be going on about it. If I had to put my money on a theory, I would put it on the Congress's classical political strategy of minority appeasement. We've seen it in their economic policies, both at the center and the Congress ruled states, and we are seeing it in the political arena.

If a terrorist murders numerous Indian citizens but is not convicted because he/she belongs to a minority community and their conviction 'might' hurt the religious sentiments of the community, I think the government should be convicted first of traitorship. Why just minority appeasement, but the Government's record in handling the Naxals, the insurgency in the North-East, are all lacking in many ways.

This country will pay with its blood if these terrorists headquartered at 10 Janpath, New Delhi are allowed to be in power again. Terrorists will hit this country with a greater force than before and the Con'gress practice of associating inaction against terrorism with minority votes will only be strengthened, and many, many more lives will be snuffed.

Internal insecurity - Shekhar Gupta, The Indian Express

For nearly five years now the world media had been celebrating India’s rise. From the state of its stock market to its demographic advantage, from the strength and depth of its democracy to the vast reservoir of talent that flourished in its diversity, it was as if the world could see nothing wrong with India. There are now signs that some of that is changing.

And no, it is not just because of those thousand-rupee bundles displayed in the Lok Sabha. It is because of something much more serious, in fact a failure so serious it could, by itself, lose the UPA the next election. These four and half years are the worst in India’s history of fighting terrorism. Surely somebody in the UPA will bring out statistics to show that overall deaths were more in some other regime’s five years. But this is not just about numbers. It is a spectacular four and a half years of mayhem when not one terrorist has been caught, not one major case solved. Even by the modest standards that Shivraj Patil’s home ministry may have set for itself, this is a spectacularly disastrous record.

Last week, Somini Sengupta of The New York Times quoted a stunning fact from a report of the Washington-based National Counter-Terrorism Centre. It said, between January 2004 and March 2007, India had lost 3,674 lives to terrorism, second only to Iraq. And we can’t even claim that this is happening because some imperialist occupation army is running amok here. In fact that number, by now, must have crossed 5,000. If this notion spreads globally, it would do more to damage India’s image as an oasis of democratic stability, pacifism and economic growth than any twists in its politics, or even a half-decade reform holiday.

So far the UPA government has had one standard response: compare this with the record under the NDA: Kandahar hijack, Parliament attack, Akshardham. But there is a short use-by date on these arguments. You cannot take them into your next election campaign. Soon enough, the memory of those incidents would have faded, been replaced by new ones: Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Kabul, Mumbai trains, Samjhauta Express and so on. And then the unchecked Naxalite attacks.

Most amazing is the sense of cool with which this government, particularly its home ministry, has responded to these losses. While they can pretend that Naxalite strikes are some sinister happenings in places that are out of sight, out of mind, somebody — most likely the voter — will soon remind them that, while those managing internal security may not care for the lives of policemen in faraway states, never in the history of insurgencies have we suffered casualties like these.

It is rare for security forces to suffer double-digit casualties in insurgencies. Even during the Kargil conflict it was a rare day’s fighting on which the army lost so many lives, against an entrenched foreign army. The two most striking things here have been the equanimity — frankly, cynical and sometimes sanctimonious indifference — with which this security establishment has treated it.

The talk of Naxalism in a week when two of our most important cities saw serial-bombings and a third had 23 unexploded bombs recovered, is not a digression. It underlines the unmoving, thick-skinned, incompetent and pusillanimous response to terror from this government. What is worse, it is even politically loaded. And while, ultimately, the UPA may be made to pay for it electorally, too many lives are being lost meanwhile, and too much damage is being done to India’s image. The government cannot ride out an entire five years claiming that their predecessors’ record was worse.

Over the past year or so we have all got focussed on what we saw as the communalisation of our foreign policy: don’t vote against Iran at the IAEA because our own Shias would get upset, don’t sign the nuclear deal with Bush as that will irritate all our own Muslims, conduct your relations with Israel by stealth for the same reason, even stop the two missile development projects with them, no matter how badly your armies may need them. Last week we saw the prime minister fight back on this, and successfully too. But can he do the same with internal security?

Then, the same “communalised” politics interfered in police investigations following the serial blasts in Mumbai trains and Hyderabad. Ask senior police officers there — even Congress chief ministers if they’d dare to speak the truth — and they will tell you how they pulled away in fright, under pressure from the Centre for targeting and upsetting Muslims (voters) in their investigations. This proceeded neatly alongside the utterly communalised discourse on the Afzal Guru hanging issue. Each time this government and its intellectual storm-troopers proffered the minority argument in support of this soft policy, it emboldened the terrorists. They figured they were dealing with a political leadership which had already committed a self-goal by equating counter-terror with Muslim alienation and which had, in the process, totally demoralised its intelligence agencies and police forces.

And if it is not guilty of communalising our internal security policy, how does it explain sitting on special anti-terror laws in all BJP-run states when exactly similar ones have been passed for the Congress states? Now you can say special laws are good or bad, but they must be equally so for all citizens in all states. If these laws are good, or necessary, then citizens in BJP-run states have as much need — and right — to get their protection as those in the Congress states. Unless the message is: you want protection, you better vote for us. You vote for others, you are on your own.