Taliban and Al-Qaeda.

The CPM has often tripped on its ideological obsessions. But this time it does so, presumably to its embarrassment, in the glare of strong contrary facts. Even as the party was invoking the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, India’s diplomatic efforts to bring the perpetrators to justice were bearing results. The UN Security Council declared the Jamaat-ud-Dawa, a fraternal organisation of the already banned Lashkar-e-Toiba, a terrorist group. Pakistan, in turn, acted upon this and banned the JuD, and put the LeT chief under house arrest. Details of the Pakistani origins of the ten Mumbai terrorists had already been released by Indian agencies, in part corroborated on Friday when Dawn, a prominent Pakistani newspaper, printed an interview with one terrorist’s parents in their village in Pakistani Punjab.

This was roughly the background that informed Parliament’s discussion this week in an otherwise enlightened effort to find ways and means of persuading Pakistan to dismantle terrorist infrastructure without the use of military threat. The situation does not need obfuscating ideological analyses. Meditations on the shrinking of the non-American — and thereby “secure” — world to Cuba, Venezuela and Iran should be conducted in the private confines of A.K. Gopalan Bhavan.