THE ROOT CAUSE OF TERRORISM IN INDIA

It is a bit unfortunate that we as a country are facing hostilities from our neighboring countries since independence.  Pakistan since its creation has always harbored terrorist elements against India with an intention to destabilize our country.  China the Big Brother supports Pakistan in their endeavor to divide India.  We face threats from Bangladesh and from Sri Lanka in the South.  Since we have open borders with Nepal, terrorists use Nepal as easy entry and exit points.  Our borders with Pakistan and Bangladesh are porous and not fully sealed.  We face trouble on the North -East side with China claiming Arunachal Pradesh.  These countries hobnob with these terrorists and have helped them to establish their bases from where they can carry out their evil acts.  So, all the expertise for planting Bombs on soft targets comes from these countries.  But not everything can be done from these foreign bases.  So they take advantage of the unemployed youth and others who fall easy prey to their indoctrination and create local groups who forment trouble in all cities across India.  While many of the educated youth associated with fields like IT openly take part in aiding terrorist activities, it is the uneducated and poor who are always at the front of such battles.  Elite people among the terrorists never become human bombs.  They hide themselves in safe comforts and incite the less privileged to carry out evil acts in the name of jihad.  They take help from some political class and the corrupt officials provide fodder for their entry and exit from India.

So Terrorism is not about Muslims only and their quest for Jihad. Not all Muslims are terrorists and not all terrorists are Muslims.  India's 140 million Muslims are a salutary negation of the facile thesis about Islam's incompatibility with democracy. The terrorists that we encounter today are not men who commit evil acts out of revenge.  For these men indoctrinated by outfits like the Al Qaeda and the Dawood gangs, terrorism is a full fledged profession.  The cold blooded killers associated with the serial blasts in and around Dadar today went about with their tasks with clinical precision. They did it because it was a job they wanted to do.  Only few Muslims believe that these phonies are fighting for any cause but their own.  Hindus have stopped fulminating against terror despite the heavy toll it takes each time.  For these terrorists who are invisible, they have no Agenda.  They do it in the name of Jihad or some linguistic or religious cause, which a common man does not identify himself with.   

India earned its reputation as a soft state that can be intimidated into meeting terrorists' demands.  Our then foreign minister in the year 1999 in the month of December personally escorted three terrorists freed by India in order to secure the release of passengers of a hijacked Indian Airlines flight to Taliban controlled Afghanistan.  This act led to the 9/11 attack in New York as one of these very terrorists was later implicated in the 9/11 attacks.  Tough rhetoric and reactive government policies and Draconian acts like the POTA will not serve the cause for curbing such terrorism.  It will only result in violation of human rights and engineer more youth to fall prey to such terrorist organizations.  We have to break out of this trap that we have imposed on ourselves.   

Democratic politics, political freedoms, civil liberties and religious tolerance must be protected at all costs.  The corruption and politicization of the police forces must be minimized.  We need a dedicated and an unbiased police force.  Criminalization of politics and funding for elections must stop.  Instead, we have number of parliamentarians with pending criminal cases.  Some jailed parliamentarians also cast their vote on important National issues which is alarming!  Lack of accountability and Corruption, act as a fodder for these terrorists in many ways.  Terrorism prospers and thrives in such conditions. In a way, Poverty is an incubator of terrorism and a root cause of corruption.  It breeds the Naxalites and the local terrorist groups.   The government needs to be tough in implementing reforms to maintain rapid economic growth and uplift the status of its downtrodden people.

More importantly, India's terrorism problem is largely specific to Kashmir.  There is a difference between terrorists and freedom fighters and one should not equate them.  India must muster International support in this issue and put pressure on Pakistan to stop supporting these terrorists.  India habitually points fingers at Pakistan which is the hotbed and the epicentre of terrorism all around the world.  But merely pointing fingers will not help matters.  For a small country like Pakistan to be able to infiltrate groups of Indians and recruit them to the terrorist's cause indicates failures of the intelligence on the other hand.  We have to look into this fact.  There is no co-ordination between the central intelligence agencies and the states.  Each points a finger at others each time a bomb blast takes place.  This is matched by the flaws of the criminal justice system, which is rudimentary by the standards of mature democracies.  Whether it is the Bombay bomb blasts of 1992 or the Gujarat riots in 2002, justice takes many years to deliver.  Justice has neither been done, nor seen to be done.  India needs to be tough but not reactionary to the causes of terrorism.  Its high time, we learn the lessons and rise over petty politics for the sake of our nation.