Talking Terror

Pic By: Gayatri Pradhan (ToI)

)In an inevitable reaction to repeated terror attacks — against which we seem to be totally and utterly defenceless — everyone is looking for a target for their anger. Obviously, that target should be terrorism. Unfortunately, terrorism does not present itself as a well-defined bull’s eye with the word ‘terror’ helpfully printed smack in the centre of it. The intimate enemy of terror is elusive, a will-o-the-wisp, the shadow behind you. So other targets for frustrated wrath have to be found. The most obvious of these is home minister Shivraj Patil, whose inability to open his mouth without putting a solecism into it has by now achieved the status of legendary folklore. Choice Patilisms include: “We would not like to blame anybody but will not spare anyone involved in it”. There. That should have those dastardly terrorists quaking in their shoes. (As M J Akbar once pointed out, ‘dastardly’ is the adjective of official choice to describe all terrorists and their acts.) Predictably, the opposition has gone at Patil hammer and tongs for his platitudinous blathering in the face of the recurring slaughter of innocents. So has UPA partner Lalu Prasad, and many sections of the media. Everyone’s getting tough with Patil, and with what he represents — a repeatedly demonstrated failure to anticipate and prevent such outrages. Patil and the UPA government, particularly its Congress constituent, have shown themselves to be tragically inept in tackling terror. But was the NDA’s record on this score any better? Even raising the question sets up a ping-pong match of recrimination and counter-recrimination between the ‘hardliners’ (the BJP, particularly Narendra Modi) and the ‘softliners’ (the Congress, Mulayam’s SP and others). The hardliners say tougher laws (like the jettisoned POTA) are essential as an antidote to terror. The softliners argue that tough laws by themselves, without the input of more accurate intelligence, would do more harm than good: a broad dragnet which sweeps in innocents and holds them without the constitutional benefit of habeas corpus will only radicalise moderates and act as a recruitment drive for extremism. This is a debate which other societies, including the US, are engaged in: do restrictive laws, often based on ethnic profiling, combat the terrorist threat or do they compound it? An interesting topic for an academic seminar, but a source of displacement action when it is thrown into the arena of political rhetoric. While our political parties continue to wrangle endlessly about who is to blame, and what should or shouldn’t be done, and who is an ‘appeaser’ and who is a ‘communalist’, the terrorists will have a free hand to strike again, and again, at murderous will. This is why we remain helpless against terror tactics. Because we have come to believe that tough talk (often directed at each other) is a sufficient substitute for tough action, necessarily based on tough decisions. The toughest — and the most obvious — of these decisions is to suspend partisan politics and present a united bulwark against terror. An all-party consensus to set up a federal anti-terrorism agency would be a significant first step; lack of cooperation and coordination between often-competing agencies is routinely cited as the main cause of our failure to forestall attacks. Other measures could include the infiltration of deep-cover agents, or moles, into known or suspected terrorist organisations, and posting sizeable cash rewards for information leading to the arrest of masterminds like the slippery Subhan Qureshi. Would terrorist blood prove thicker than venality? Fight terror not with more, state-perpetrated terror, but with guile, greed, disinformation, divisiveness and other timehonoured stratagems of statecraft. The other option is of course to bumble along as we’ve been doing. And hope that Patil with his terminal banalities solves the terrorist problem by boring the whole lot of them to death.