As Home Minister, Shivraj Patil presided over one of the bloodiest periods in India’s recent history. The four and half years of his tenure were laced with about 20 major terrorist strikes, hundreds of deaths of innocent civilians in internal violence, and an alarming increase in the spread of Naxal activities, to mention just a few elements of internal security.To be fair to Patil, he never got much of assistance from any of the state governments, which are directly responsible for the maintenance of law and order and also for collecting intelligence information at the grassroots level. The states were quite happy to see the responsibility and the blame being fixed on Patil.But his own statements and actions never instilled any confidence among the people who were at the receiving end of an endless cycle of violence and mindless terror attacks.There have been eight major incidents of terrorist strikes in this year alone — including the latest attacks in Mumbai — in which more than 400 people have lost their lives. But all that came out in response from the Home Ministry was some inane statements that, to the hapless victims, sounded hollow, repetitive and impotent, even comic.Even as recently as last weekend, Patil did not forget to mention that the incidents and casualties in the past four years was much less than those that occurred in the previous four and half years. “Yet, the impression created is that terrorism has increased and not reduced,” he said at the annual conference of police chiefs.“Even if one incident occurs or one person becomes a casualty, it should cause us concern and should make us alert. However, it should not demoralise us and give wrong information to the uninformed section of the society,” he said.True, there were a few meetings during which issues like modernisation of police forces and improving the intelligence network was discussed. True states were repeatedly being urged to fill up the burgeoning vacancies in their police forces, to increase their spending on modernising the forces and buy equipment, and to encourage coordination of efforts by various policing agencies.But these were not able to stop the almost predictable cycle of terror attacks. Instead, his penchant for referring to terrorists and Naxalites as ‘misguided brothers’, his ill-advised equation between Mohammad Afzal and Sarabjeet Singh, his adamant opposition to the promulgation of a tough anti-terror law and denying the same to the state governments, all contributed to the perception that Patil was soft on terror. He came to symbolise everything that was wrong with India’s internal security mechanism.So much so that he started getting attention for the number of times he was changing clothes on a day when about 30 people had been killed in a coordinated serial bomb blasts in Delhi.Patil could have resigned — or sacked — after any of the numerous terror attacks in the last three years. But he survived, probably because — as Patil himself mentioned recently — “he had the blessings of the Congress president”. Unfortunately for him though, the Mumbai attacks just proved to be the last straw on the camel’s back. As Prime Minister Manmohan Singh remarked at the all-party meeting on Sunday that Mumbai attack was “different” from all the previous terrorist strikes.
