Third, remember that little can be achieved unless every aspect of governance, is brought up to par. You can’t have a first-rate commando force and a third rate magistracy. You can’t have defence and intelligence personnel who will nab terrorists and courts that will let them off, or, better still, enable them to live off the treasury as state guests for years. And that excellence must reach down to that “head constable/constable” level. When K.P.S. Gill reconquered Punjab for the country, he did so by strengthening and invigorating the local thana.

Fourth, that is only one part of the explanation. A weakened and confused society explains as much — and the responsibility lies as much with those who have dissipated national resolve, who have made nationalism a dirty word. That set includes the media as much as politicians. Sixty-seventy thousand killed by terrorism and we are still debating whether we should have a federal investigating agency. Sixty-seventy thousand killed by terrorists and we are still debating whether we should have a special law to bring them to book.

Of course, we must have the agency. Of course, we must have the sternest law in the world. But having the law is not enough. We must enforce it. One side of the picture is that, to pander to its vote bank among Muslims, the government has been withholding sanction to the law passed by the Gujarat assembly — even though that law is the exact replica of the law that its own party’s government has passed in adjacent Maharashtra. The other side is that, as the Maharashtra government does not use the law it has, those who will give shelter and support to terrorists give them with abandon — you just have to think of the quantum of weapons that the terrorists brought in; the detailed local knowledge they had — of the spot at which to land their boats, of the location of the building in which Jews and Israelis were staying, of the insides of the hotels, to see that they could not have executed their plans without the most extensive local help, help given over months.

... contd.