How long it will take, if at all, for the country’s intelligence agencies and police to crack the bomb blasts that rocked the capital last week-end, is unclear, but if there’s one thing that is clear, it is that the winners are the country’s enemies. For the quarter-century that India has been the victim of terrorist attacks, in both Punjab and Kashmir, the “foreign hand” has always been evident. So much so that, till not so long ago, the government and various Indian commentators took pride in the fact that India was the only country in the world with a sizeable Muslim population that did not have a home-grown terrorist network. Now, with the Indian Mujahiddin — suspected to be nothing but the banned Students Islamic Movement of India (or Simi) regrouping under a different banner — taking credit for the string of bomb blasts in Indian cities, it is clear there is a home-grown terrorist network in operation. This may get support from global terror networks like the Al Qaeda and the Lashkar e Tayyaba, but is not dependent upon them. If there’s something that Pakistan would have wanted the most, it is this — a self-sustained terror network that, at the end of the day, pits Hindus against Muslims.
Many reasons can be ascribed to this ominous development. There has been the slow radicalisation of the Muslim community over the years, helped by the flow of Saudi money into madrassas, and facilitated by a growing alienation of the community that would have probably started with the demolition of the Babri Masjid. Most observers would point to the events following the Godhra outrage as being another watershed, as evident from what the Indian Mujahiddin have themselves stressed by including in their email the well-known picture of the Gujarat Muslim with his hands folded and begging for mercy. But, important as that episode was, not just in and of itself but also because of the failures when it came to punishing those guilty of the pogrom, it cannot be the sole factor. The same email attacks the Congress for its “secular hypocrisy” and of using Muslims as vote-banks while not caring genuinely for their welfare. Indeed, the manner in which the Srikrishna report (dealing with the Mumbai riots) and the Sachar report (dealing with the general condition of Muslims) has been treated provides room for precisely such a grievance.
The widespread anger in the wake of the Delhi blasts on Saturday evening, coming after similar blasts in other cities, has been directed in part at the home minister, who is widely believed to be incompetent, but also at Muslims in general — thus adding to the communal divide. The BJP, eager to differentiate itself from the Congress, is entitled to seize on internal security as an issue; the problem is that it does so in a manner that, in the desire to garner the Hindutva vote, manifests itself by targeting Muslims, directly or obliquely (just as its goons have been targeting Christians over another set of issues). What the major political parties need to understand is that they are playing with a fire that must be doused before it spreads.
That task will be helped if governments at the Centre and in the states show the competence displayed by the Gujarat government in nabbing the culprits of terrorist outrages. There are obvious shortcomings in intelligence, information-sharing, and proper investigation, all of which need to improve and quickly. But attacks on soft targets (like innocent civilians in crowded, public places) are almost impossible to prevent altogether, and some will occur. The crucial task therefore is prevention, and that can be done only by involving Muslim community leaders and by making serious efforts to bridge the communal divide. This is a quite different agenda from the drum-beating over bringing back a law like the Prevention of Terrorism Act, which was more misused than used and did not measurably help meet the terrorist challenge.