The past two days have been spent panicking over the next terror target. The fear was always in the air but it's now verily palpable. And while Britain and the US grind their teeth and rub their noses to the ground to ferret out potential terrorists, we in India are coping with a bigger crisis: The Government.
What was India's first reaction after 11/7 (isn't that how WE write our dates instead of 7/11 as most newspapers have been obligingly calling it?) ? None. On the third day, when the whole world was wondering what we are waiting for and when the country was agonising over the deafening silence, PM Manmohan Singh took a ``hard stand''. He said the talks between India and Pakistan ``may'' suffer. Wow!
All dailies lapped up his tough talk and nodded grimly in appreciation. What else did we expect? A complete freeze on all talk of talks with Pakistan? A crackdown on terrorist factories in Pakistan, and mass detention of the trouble-makers from SIMI and allied forces? Pressure on the US to bring Pakistan to book? A complete stop to all those friendly buses plying between the two countries and legitimising the transfer of terrorists and their lethal wares?
Nah! This is what right-thinking countries do. The US and the UK would do. We know what the US did post 9/11. We also know what the UK did after the 7/7 train bombings. Actually, we should leave the US out of this. It went too far. The Bush brand of terrorism which destroys countries is much, much worse than 9/11, by any standards. Many, like my mother, couldnt sleep for days after his attack onIraq, feeling for all the innocents being bombed. I actually began hoping Saddam wont be caught and was positively depressed when he was.
Just a few days ago, Tony Blair branded all subversive acts in Kashmir as terror acts. A big step that finally got India some kind of international recognition that the violence of Kashmir was not a local concern. Something we couldnt achieve with all our coaxing and tomes of proofs for decades, one single act of terroism on his home ground has managed.
Leaving aside its terror act in Iraq, the US too has done some hard sniffing and hard talk. A few days ago, Hafeez Mohammed Sayeed, founder of al Qaida’s political wing, Jammat ul-Dawa, was about to enter Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, to make some pre-Independence Day speeches when US pressure forced Pakistan to detain him in Islamabad. Sayeed’s right-hand man, Jia ur-Rehman Lukhvi, heads the operations in India and operates from Anantnag in Jammu and Kashmir.
I dont know why we are so diffident. India has been very firmly yanked into the terror dragnet of late. But even as terror knocks at our doors every now and then, we are still unprepared to cope. It is still grappling with archaic policing methods, weak intelligence and political will – all of which erode its prevention and detection capabilities.
In May, when 13 kgs of RDX and a cache of AK-47 rifles were seized in Aurangabad, three key terror operatives – Fayyaz Kagzi, Rahil Sheikh and Zabiuddin Ansari – managed to flee in good time. Had they been nabbed, many believe 7/11 would not have happened.
If the police don’t err, the political bosses do. Every time, the cops grab a suspect, they are told to back off. The US and the UK, on the other hand, are known to be brutal in their treatment of suspects so much so that a Muslim constable in the Scotland Yard was stripped of sensitive duties after the 7/7 bombings last year. While that amounts to discrimination, what we have in India is reverse discrimination.
Nobody had heard of Raju Khan until he got a summons from a local police station inquiring about his recent visit to Dubai. The next day, Khan, who we now know is the son of choreographer Saroj Khan, was all over the papers. Some more Muslims were detained for questioning in different parts of the state, causing a first mention on byte-starved TV channels and then a full-fledged outcry in Asian Age. How dare they? fumed Seema Mustafa. (Only namesakeness, nothing more here!) Feeling left out, other papers including Times of India joined the chorus. Soon, police chief A N Roy was defending himself before the media and his political bosses, in that order for acts of omission he hadnt quite committed. ``We are questioning 3000 persons out of whom 800 are Hindus,'' he said plaintively.
What gives? Why can't he simply say yes, we are questioning everyone we think is suspect. If you don't want us to, dont complain when you get bombed. We could be wrong but then, we could be right too. We havent quite killed or tortured anyone yet. We are damned if we dont get a lead on the blasts, and we are damned if we question someone for a lead. How can this approach work?
Look at Australia. It has told the hardline Islamic radicals to buzz off if they want to crib about the country. Not very kindly too. Nobody found anything amiss. Imagine anyone even whispering something like that. They would be roundly packed off to oblivion.

In Mumbai at least, the police force is in a sorry state, thanks to weak will. A senior officer such as Hemant Karkare came back from a useful stint with central intelligence agencies to the Anti-Corruption Bureau instead of being lapped up by an intelligence wing—and that, after a three-month neglectful wait.
Similarly, many feel that the crime branch, which was once an elite force, should have been asked to lend its might to the Anti-Terrorism Squad in busting the blasts. As somebody told me, the line between terrorism and underworld is very thin and sometimes, not quite there. The crime branch’s inputs would have been invaluable, had it been pushed into service. The only hitch: who will tell the cat, our politicians?

Indian agencies has a long way to go before they achieve the wizardry and sophistication of their US counterparts. The book `The true face of Jehadis,’ by Pakistani journalist Amir Mir quotes from Gerald Posner’s book, `Why America slept..the Failure to prevent 9/11’ to narrate the skills used by the US to make a top al Qaida operative sing.
Pakistan was forced to hand over Abu Zubaydah, captured from Rawalpindi in March 2002, to the US. According to Posner’s book, the man was taken blind-folded to Afghanistan to a simulated Saudi jail with a created Saudi environment that made Zubaydah comfortable. He is alleged to have then told all about terror’s political patronage and Pakistani military sympathizers. This degree of conception, planning and execution is still unthinkable for us.
But if we aim there, we might manage a little better than we do now.