The coming Diwali-Id season will be welcomed by many as a relief from the drudgery of daily life, a time for enjoyment and togetherness. The question before us is this: how we can secure the festive season from the sinister designs of those who are looking for an opportunity to sow terror and mayhem? Doomsayers are generally unwelcome on festive occasions, but India’s continued vulnerability to terror strikes should lead us to a rational assessment of the danger quotient.

While the Mumbai Police got a reprieve by solving a part of the 7/11 riddle, the focus on investigation of the blasts has prevented it, as well as other police forces in the country, from uncovering other militant cells. Estimates of their number range from hundreds — a gross exaggeration — to just a handful, an understatement. Thus the foremost factor which portends an episodic event is the inability to neutralise the operative and sleeper cells in the country in the past few months, despite greater awareness of their reach and expanse extending from Coimbatore to Varanasi. The key deficiency in this sphere is human intelligence which enables penetration, rather than technical intelligence which facilitates investigation.

This festive season is particularly opportune for terrorist outfits, not just because Diwali spans the month of Ramzan, but because recent court verdicts against the perpetrators of the 1993 Mumbai blasts and 2001 Parliament attack have provided the malefactors with a warped raison d’etre in the eyes of their sympathisers. Politically, too, the season is extremely favourable. The recent moves Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has taken to revive the peace process with Pakistan have attracted hostile responses from within the country. A terrorist strike would considerably weaken the government’s efforts to initiate out-of-the-box solutions with Pakistan on the issue of state-sponsored terrorism. After all, terrorist organisations are the major losers of a joint Indo-Pak counter-terror mechanism, if and when it fructifies, for it would simply mean that they would be out of their jobs.

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