Terrifying prospect

The bomb blasts in Malegaon, and earlier in Mumbai, seem to belong to a new category of ?pure? terrorist acts.

The bomb blasts in Malegaon, and earlier in Mumbai, seem to belong to a new category of ‘pure’ terrorist acts. No one has acknowledged responsibility for them, so they serve no other cause other than to spread mayhem, confusion and fear. As of now we do not know who the perpetrators are, but we do know that these and other terrorist events in Maharashtra are taking place on a palimpsest of an intensely communalised polity. Speaking earlier this week on the subject of internal security to a group of Chief Ministers, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had spoken of “externally inspired and directed terrorist outfits”. This was an acknowledgement that the perpetrators could well be locals. There is considerable evidence that in the small towns of Maharashtra, a few rootless and unemployed young Muslims have been influenced by extremist organisations. Earlier this year, the authorities unearthed a vast hoard of arms and explosives in Aurangabad and Malegaon and spoke of the threat to a number of religious places.

If the danger of a few young and radicalised Muslims should worry the police, so should the possibility that there could be a similar, but far more dangerous, phenomenon taking place within the majority community. In April this year, two persons died while making bombs in the house of a known Bajrang Dal and VHP activist. The police conducted brain-mapping and narco-analysis on a survivor and a witness and they admitted to being part of a group of terrorists who were responsible for bomb blasts at the Parbhani mosque in 2003 and the Jalna and Poorna blasts also aimed at mosques in August 2004.

Clearly, the developments signal the  need for a drastic overhaul of the police and intelligence apparatus in the country. The current system of policing has its antecedents in colonial arrangements and is too centralised to be effective. More police personnel are needed on the beat, as it were, as well as intelligence networks that effectively knit information from the Centre and states into a rapidly actionable form. But perhaps the greater need is for the political class to introspect over the fact that competitive politics and blatant recourse to communal loyalties has undermined our polity. The recent acts of terrorism indicate that the country stands on the brink of the gravest danger, and it is the responsibility of our political leaders to get together and draw the poison out of the system.