Human beings die in many different ways. They are also killed in myriad ways. Nearly 1,00,000 people were killed in the two major natural disasters that took place in recent weeks — the cyclone in Myanmar and the earthquake in China’s Sichuan province. But there is nothing ‘sinister’ in Mother Nature’s acts of fury. Nobody discovers an ‘evil’ or ‘criminal’ intent behind them. Rather, believing them to be the will of the Almighty, society generally takes such tragedies in its stride and moves on to reconstruct destroyed homes and broken lives.

What happened in Myanmar and China was indeed a tragedy. In contrast, what happened in Jaipur on Tuesday was a crime. Indeed, it was worse than any ordinary crime; it was an act of war on the nation, albeit an unconventional war. Although the toll of around 70 in the serial bomb blasts in Rajasthan’s capital is much smaller than what it normally is in natural disasters in our own country, the imprint of an evil hand and a sinister conspiracy could be seen in every single image that the media transmitted from the seven different sites of the terrorist attack.

By now India has witnessed numerous such acts of unconventional war, where the terrorist is the enemy and innocent people — traveling in a train or a bus, moving in a crowded market place, visiting a place of worship, or doing any other routine chore — are the target. It is a borderless war, in which the enemy can strike anywhere anytime. Some intellectuals do not like to call it ‘war’. But what else is it when it is directed and facilitated from across the Indo-Pak border and, as recent evidence shows, also from across the Indo-Bangladesh border?

... contd.