Blasting peace

The blasts in Hyderabad on Saturday, in which 40 people were killed, raise questions at several levels. At strategic/diplomatic level, one question is whether a Pakistani terror group or some part of the Pakistani establishment, operating out of there or from some other country, is trying to derail the current peace talks between India and Pakistan. That could well be so. But does President Musharraf know? The easy answer is to assume that he doesn't and this is all being done by the anti-Musharraf group which doesn't want any rapprochement between India and Pakistan. But General Musharraf is not anyone's dummy and it is improbable that he is unaware of the broad strategy. How much he approves of it is a matter of speculation. But it is hard to imagine his being quite as much in the dark as Nawaz Sharief claimed he was about the Kargil offensive. That is not how these things work, not in Pakistan when an army man is in charge.

The second level of questions must concern the quality of intelligence service that India has. It is no one's case that all terrorist actions can be prevented; that is next to impossible, especially when the terrorists go for soft targets like unprepared and unarmed civilians in crowded public areas. However, an effective penetration of terror networks can give proper forewarning of major attacks being planned, and this should not be too much to ask for. While no one can be fully informed on such a subject, on the evidence available, it would seem that the intelligence agencies are failing the country and its citizens.

At domestic political level, one other question is whether the Congress, in its quest for Muslim votes, has been soft on terrorists "" as the BJP has repeatedly alleged. The record shows that since August 15, 2004, there have been six major attacks in which over 300 people have been killed. With one exception "" Varanasi "" the rest have all been in Congress-ruled states: Assam, Delhi, Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh. There was one attack in UP when Mulayam Singh Yadav was the chief minister. This may or may not be a statistically significant sample on the basis of which to come to any firm conclusion, and it may be far-fetched to suggest that it is Congress-quality governance that makes terrorist attacks possible. A more plausible argument would be that the Congress has a better chance of ruling states that have a large Muslim population, and for that very reason it is easier in those states to get the local logistics support required by Islamist terror groups for planting bombs "" hence Congress-ruled states become more vulnerable to terrorist attacks.

At Jihadi level, the question is why bombs should be aimed at Muslims and Muslim-majority areas. The attacks on the Samjhauta Express and on the Mecca Masjid in Hyderabad are good examples of this. It is also necessary to ask if the Al Qaeda has become very active in India. Full answers will probably never be known and in any case they may not be uni-dimensional. The minds of terrorists and their masters work in strange ways and are not easy to fathom.