The odds are steeper because that issue was communalised first. It began with the last election campaign and the composition of this alliance. There may have been a sound case against POTA because it was misused, but both in public discourse and political action its repeal was made to look like a favour to the Muslims. Then, the same “communalised” politics interfered in police investigations following the serial blasts in Mumbai trains and Hyderabad. Ask senior police officers there — even Congress chief ministers if they’d dare to speak the truth — and they will tell you how they pulled away in fright, under pressure from the Centre for targeting and upsetting Muslims (voters) in their investigations. This proceeded neatly alongside the utterly communalised discourse on the Afzal Guru hanging issue. Each time this government and its intellectual storm-troopers proffered the minority argument in support of this soft policy, it emboldened the terrorists. They figured they were dealing with a political leadership which had already committed a self-goal by equating counter-terror with Muslim alienation and which had, in the process, totally demoralised its intelligence agencies and police forces. And if it is not guilty of communalising our internal security policy, how does it explain sitting on special anti-terror laws in all BJP-run states when exactly similar ones have been passed for the Congress states? Now you can say special laws are good or bad, but they must be equally so for all citizens in all states. If these laws are good, or necessary, then citizens in BJP-run states have as much need — and right — to get their protection as those in the Congress states. Unless the message is: you want protection, you better vote for us. You vote for others, you are on your own.

... contd.