The Nation That Failed

So it is yesterday all over again, and the sameness of the savagery only adds to the legendary Indian sense of sangfroid. Two spirited cities of India, 23 blasts, more than 50 dead, hundreds maimed, and the predictable Day-After theatre of politics feasting on cadavers strewn across the streets of the world's most fatalistic state. This overwhelming banality of horror tells one simple truth: we can take a lot more, we can shed a lot more blood, we have a lot more people to spare…
Enterprising jihadists are welcome, and the incentives you get in the great democratic republic where no terrorist worth his nihilistic fantasy is denied the right to kill under an equal opportunity scheme is greater than what you can get anywhere else in the world, may be with the exception of Iraq. It should be now official: India is a dangerous place to be in, unless you are a god's mercenary for whom this wretched country is the easiest battlefield in the war against infidels or an honourable member of the political class that has already abdicated its responsibility to protect the nation.The frequency of the attacks and their magnitude say a lot about the jihadist and the victim. The killer is precise; he chooses his target for maximum effect; and he seems to enjoy the kind of freedom that is denied to his brotherhood elsewhere.
Ahmedabad comes just two months after Jaipur which was preceded by Hyderabad 2007, Mumbai 2006, Delhi 2005 and the audacious attack on Parliament in the afterglow of 9/11.
Come to think of it: the most favoured nation for those who want to invest in jihad is not the United States or Israel any longer. It is India. Not that Washington and Jerusalem have ceased to be less satanic for jihadists.
India does not have the political will or consensus to identify the threat of radical Islam and confront it. It does not have that necessary iron in the nationalist soul to ensure that life is not disposable at the diktat of a coward trapped in the make believe of a scriptural Caliphate.What we have got is an apparition in funereal white floating in Ahmedabad, mouthing platitudinous inanities as if it is just another routine mission for him in just another death zone. The enormity of our national shame cannot be reduced to the size of the Union Home Minister, but the gentleman is symptomatic of everything that is wrong with those who have the political mandate to act.
"We have information but it is not proper for me to disclose that information at this point of time or blame any organisation because it has implications." It is Shivraj Patil post-Ahmedabad, and it is as enlightening as what he had said about the threat to national security in a television interview immediately after taking over: "The disease within the body is more dangerous"—whatever it means. Effete and evasive, he is the home minister in a Government that can do nothing but cry "FBI"in utter exasperation whenever it is under attack. We don't expect from this Government a department of homeland security or an Indian version of America's Patriot Act or extraordinary rendition or, for that matter, a Gitmo in the Andamans for the higher cause of national security. What about an alternative to the "draconian" Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA)? State governments like Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan are not even given the permission to pass their own anti-terrorism laws while Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat are awaiting presidential assent to their bills against terror. A government that allows a terrorist condemned to the gallows to become a living symbol for the perennially disenchanted but the vote-rich minorities is unlikely to identify radical Islamism as a threat to India. So it will go on triangulate in politically correct malarkey, with the home minister as its bumbling interlocutor.
And India will continue to be savaged. Today, in the post-9/11 statistics of terror, India, a liberal democracy, is second only to post-Saddam Iraq, liberated but at war with itself. This terrifying truth magnifies the failure of the state—and the entire political class which is never united by grief or fear. Sadly, even when the new generation faces of Kashmir—one of the oldest datelines of Islamic terror—went eloquent about 'Being Indian' in Parliament, the war against India in the Valley found no place in their nationalist script. As long as India refuses to shed its shameful political expediency, we can only wallow in our victimhood. We deserve better.