Terror fight: Fragmentation will not do

India is a divided nation when it comes to terrorism and the ways to counter it. This hurts. Terror attacks that  aim at shaking the foundation of the nation  are classified as  Rajbagh, Jammu, Sopore, Kashmir, Delhi, Mumbai and now Gurdaspur attacks, as if these were a localised affair. These were not felt as something that should have instinctively  touched the  collective conscience of all the Indians as a nation. 

 

The Dinannagar attack was a classic example  of the Lashkar-e-Toiba’s “fidayeen strategy” that it adopted post-Kargil conflict in Kashmir. The LeT played out the game of “ choosing death” like “fidayeen”. The fidayeen attack is different from the suicide  attack.  The “fidayeen” walk into a situation  where they fight until they are killed. Their terror play lasts for hours, sometimes even days. Most of the time these attacks are mounted pre-dawn, when the security personnel are bleary-eyed and their responses are sluggish. In suicide attacks, there is one big bang, some people get killed alongside the suicide bomber. That’s all. 

 

To many Indians, Monday’s attack was Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal’s problem or that of  the Border Security Force, which should have guarded the international border with Pakistan more effectively. It was like Kashmir is Mufti Mohammad Sayeed’s problem  or  if something  goes wrong  in  the North-East, the chief ministers of the seven states are responsible. At the most, the paramilitary forces or the Army would  play their role in  neutralising terrorists. That depends from place to place and people to people. That a terror assault in Manipur could  reach our doorsteps is never thought, because the place is distant and the people involved there are not us.

 

Terrorism is not a law-and-order problem. Terrorism has global ramifications, it destabilises  an established political system, cripples the economy and  spirals into a crisis that affects one and all.  The world starts viewing the hitherto peaceful places negatively. This type of fragmented approach to which Indians are used to   is at the root of the biggest weakness in India’s counter-terrorism strategies. Currently,  only  a skewed view is  taken  which disables the broader vision and inevitably  leads to failure in devising an effective strategy  to counter the menace of terrorism. There is hardly any occasion when Indians stand as a nation, except in times of war. Every day there cannot be a conventional war when the soldiers would  fight on borders.   Unlike war on borders,  terrorism knows no boundaries. And, be sure 27/7,  like 26/11, would  neither be the first nor the last terror assault on the Indian soil.  In short, each and every terror attack, from wherever it may emanate, is an attack on India. 

 

After each attack, accusing fingers are pointed at Pakistan. There are solid reasons for that. Yaqub Memon,  a co-conspirator  in the 1993 Mumbai blasts, had spilled the beans and given every detail of Pakistan’s involvement. A farcical trial of 26/11 was underway in Pakistan. Terrorists come from across the LoC and the international border with Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir and Pakistan. 

 

Pakistan has its own internal dynamics that makes it export terrorism to India. It cannot change its ways despite talk of talks with India and repeated utterances of peace with  Delhi.  The latest view is that the Salman Khan-starrer Bajrangi Baaijan’s appeal   is sans borders. This synthesis  gets broken with terror attacks. Besides, the constantly shifting talk on talks, which tend to become conditional once  the Prime Ministers depart with a promise to  meet again, injects distrust. Prominent political scientist, Francis  Fukuyama once said,  “Where there is no trust, neither politics nor diplomacy works”.  For example,  soon after Narendra Modi’s meet with Nawaz Sharief in Ufa, Russia,  a shocking discourse has  started  that Pakistan  is reportedly preparing  a  dossier,  containing a charge  that India was behind the ghoulish  massacre of the Army school children in Peshawar, Pakistan, on  December 16 last year.  

The documented  facts of those chilling times are that Pakistan army chief Gen. Raheel Sharif had sworn action  against Pakistan Taliban (PT) that had claimed the responsibility for the attack.  PT had called it  as a revenge  for Pakistan’s military operations  in North-Waziristan.  PT had spine-chilling logic and was directed at the Pakistani army, “You killed  our families and children, and we retaliated so that you feel the pain of the loss that we underwent.” These militants were the  strategic assets of Pakistan  before they turned against it for its military offensive against them. Where does India figure in it?Immediately after the cowardly attack at the army school in Peshawar, Pakistan Air Force (PAF) bombarded the hideouts of Pakistan Taliban, killing scores of them. The next to follow was the expeditious  execution of  Pakistani terrorists  in prisons. That time, there was no talk of the  Indian hand. Indian Prime Minister  Narendra Modi had stood in Parliament  and condoled the death of the  innocent children and expressed  complete solidarity with Pakistan. It is being done deliberately by Pakistan to enter into a denial mode. 

 

It  was Hafiz Saeed, the founder of Lashkar-e-Toiba,   who gave  birth to a new  and anti-India narrative that Indian agents  were behind the gory act. This   terrorist –floated  spin was picked up by a section  of Pakistanis, who are in the habit of seeing everything going wrong in their country  as something that Indians  had conceived or executed. It’s a result of the perennial  hatred  against India. Pakistanis were caught in the pincer of two narratives, though a vast majority knew that it were their own home-grown terrorists, nurtured by the Pakistani establishment, who had killed their children. With such  an attitude  on part of Pakistan, the grim reality is  that terror attacks will not cease in India. India is  different.  For its own sake, it should  have  a counter-terrorism policy not based on the rhetorical boasts that “a befitting  reply”  would be given. Nor can it be based on shifting theories  on counter-terrorism.

 

Though spoken in a different context, Harvard professor Lawrence Summers’s words are relevant, “One good example is worth thousand theories.” Indian  policy,  if any, gets lost in  the divided political  approach. Once, the terror attack, wherever it takes place, is  seen and felt as  an attack on India, the policy would  appear on the horizon without any delay. Let Dinanagar serve as a wakeup call.