Sunday, September 11, 2011

India: A Decade after 9/11


7th September, 2011… terror has revisited the country yet again and this time it has struck the national capital. It has not been long when the country was just been recovering from the lashes of terror attacks at the business capital of our nation, Mumbai on 13th July, 2001, when several bomb blasts tore the state apart. These are not the only ones. There have been several such attacks on the country in the last few years proving the countries ‘extremely laid-back security culture’. Delhi and Mumbai has most of the time been the prime target of these people. They have always managed to take advantage of the country’s weak security measure and have struck again and again. The government has failed time and again to curb terrorism in our country proving its incompetence in providing a secured life to its people. This is quite shameful as probably India remains the world’s only major democratic country which these terrorists can attack anytime, anywhere and every time they leave the security police clueless. And the government’s attitude towards these issues aren’t of much help as every time they end up politicizing the issues and at times they even restore to blame game. For instance the recent Delhi High Court bombing has become the ground for political slanging match with the opposition BJP party blaming the government for failing to check terrorism and a string of unsolved cases and the home minister P. Chidambaram accusing that one such case was with BJP ruled Karnataka.

The most horrific of the terror attacks would probably be the 9/11 incident when the self-proclaimed super power nation, USA was brought down to rubbles.  After this incident neither America nor the world has been the same again… Today ten years down the line there hasn’t been a single terror attack in the US. We can say the same with Western Europe where several terror strikes have been thwarted in the recent times. However, sadly enough same cannot be said with India. Our country has been hit repeatedly in the past few years. It has been a decade since 9/11 and India has more than ten major terror attacks and America had none. Why? Let alone eradicating terrorism completely or even reducing it, we have severely failed to even solve most of the past cases.

There can be several reasons for our government’s failure to curb terrorism - the extremely laid-back attitude of security agencies, its lack of quality intelligence and forensic capabilities. After almost every attack the intelligence department proves its incompetence particularly in connecting the obvious dots to get down to any accurate conclusion. The forensic department is yet another example of incompetency, for instance they are stupid enough not to use hand gloves while collecting evidences from the sites and thus themselves destroying the evidences, and supposedly they have no clue about what they are doing. Again, the media also plays a big role. Today, the 24X7 news channel’s era has rather worked in favor of the attackers. Today in their competition to provide the most amount of updated information to the citizens and eventually acquiring the highest TRPs, these channels end up providing valuable information to the terror groups which they can use in their own favor and in turn confuse the already confused security department of our country.

Lastly, the attitudes of the citizens are also of not much help to the movement of anti-terrorism. There is only a stir in us at the time of such incidents which eventually dies out with time. People have this attitude of forgetting and moving on. People get irritated when they are subjected to security surveillance; they get jittery if they are frisked at the public out lets during security checks. People need to participate more to drive out terrorism. People are reluctant to question the State and its agencies. Though the government has failed time and again we the people are also responsible to a certain extent.

Though the future of our national security does not seem too bright as yet, but there is realization and people have started taking stands. After the recent Delhi high court blast Prime Minister Manmohan Singh observed that “there are weaknesses in our system, we must work hard to plug the weaknesses”. Hopefully these realizations would bring in some positive results. Our country has made tremendous progress in various fields and is counted among the powerful nations worldwide, but deep within it is terribly messed up. It would take a lot of effort to clear up the mess. We should be hopeful that we will come out of it but we should also be prudent enough to realize that this is take a lot of time and effort.

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