India can’t possibly hope to fight terror attacks effectively till it is able to deal with the all-pervasive corruption.
India is at war and united to fight terrorism. That’s what the nation was told from the platform of the Parliament, by leaders across the political spectrum, on December 11, 2008, in the wake of the terrorist attack on Mumbai a couple of weeks earlier. Here’s how we are fighting it.
On that very day, I was returning to Kolkata from a trip to Santiniketan. It was noon, the going was good, and the daylight was as broad as it could be. Then something happened that I wasn’t expecting at that particular moment. As Belghoria Expressway climbed down to meet Jessore Road, not too far from the main airport crossing, a truck, loaded dangerously high with some unknown (to me) cargo, was signalled to stop by a policeman. I had to stop, too. There were other policemen around, including a sergeant. As I waited, expecting a check of the truck’s load and resigned to a delay, I saw a hand pop out of the left window of the driver’s cabin, followed by a head. Then I saw the cop stretching out his hand, too. Palms touched and something passed from one to the other. Then the hands promptly withdrew. The cop moved back and waved the truck on.
It was too familiar a scene, but, after Mumbai, it came as a shock. What if there were guns in that truck?
Next day, in a major Bengali newspaper, I read the following: A Bangladeshi, Narayan Chandra Byapari, carrying valid travel documents and visiting his relatives in West Bengal, was beaten up by an Indian policeman at the Petrapole border crossing for protesting against what he thought were underhand dealings. Byapari’s queue was hardly moving, but he saw people not in the queue just exchanging glances with the policeman and getting by. When Byapari, a lawyer, demanded to know what was happening, he got a thrashing for an answer. Later, he filed a complaint with the police station in Bongaon. What happens next is anybody’s guess.
That, too, is familiar. Everybody talks about how porous our borders are, how easy it is for our militants to infiltrate our territory, how hundreds of illegal Bangladeshis come across the border every day. But, after Mumbai, it didn’t look like fun and the shock was ruder. Where’s the jolt, the shake-up, the awakening? The unity? The determination? The fight? How do we know there were no terrorists among those whom Byapari saw ducking the queue at Petrapole and being waved on by our policemen?
There’s something else that’s familiar as well. It came out in a section of the English press, also the day after our Parliament expressed our deep sense of national hurt and our intense feeling of outrage and anger. The Indian Motion Pictures Producers’ Association has started receiving requests for title registrations for intended movies on the Mumbai tragedy. It’s quite a long list already, indicating that Bollywood is ready to pounce on the wounds of the nation to make a box-office killing. Anyone who knows Bollywood also knows how good it is in turning patriotism into enjoyable fun, pain into sentimental spectacle, and horror into melodrama. There will be songs, and dances, and intrigues, and intersecting love affairs, and 26/11 will be reduced to three- to four-hour packages of solid entertainment provided by celebrity stars and meant to stuff the tills.
Perhaps this is our way of coping with disasters. We’ve Bollywood where great dreams are made, we’ve Parliament where great speeches are delivered, and we’ve politicians in 24x7 media limelight, shielded by aggressive-looking commandos, to give us courage and assurance. What else do we want to see us through bad times? What can terrorists do to hurt us? We always manage to bounce back. We call it getting on with our lives. We are happy to let time pass because time is the surest remedy. Wounds will always heal. Memory will always fade to become meaningless rituals. Life will always return to its normal rhythm.
So, my shock is uncalled for, my anger unwarranted. No terrorist can take away our traditions, our means of survival. No attack can destroy the idea of India, because it has always been only an idea in our mind, never a concrete reality. So why stop policemen from taking their cuts? After all, it’s part of their livelihood and has always been. Why prevent unlawful aliens from crossing our borders? They, too, have been doing so for ages, to expand the vote banks of our political parties and generate additional income for our ill-paid border guards. And why fault Bollywood? After all, it represents the true spirit of India in its new incarnation, full of pomp, pageantry, and melodrama, signifying nothing. If we’ve survived the Mughals and the British, we can survive the terrorists, too.
