No act of terror is perpetrated without a purpose. And when such acts do not remain isolated incidents but become part of a recurrent and almost endless series of attacks over an ever-expanding geographical footprint in India, it should be apparent even to the meanest intelligence that the purpose is strategic. The brains behind this low-intensity and long-drawn-out war have themselves stated that their strategic objective, by “bleeding India with a thousand cuts”, is to so weaken and destabilise our country over a period of time that, ultimately, it succumbs to defeat, division and disintegration. Thereafter, the victors hope to hoist their own flag atop the Red Fort.

All this and more is recorded in the widely publicised documents of SIMI, Lashkar-e-Toiba, Hizbul-Mujahideen and other organisations that subscribe to the ideology of pan-Islamism. The Holy Koran forbids shedding of innocent blood, exhorting that the killing of even a single innocent person is like killing the entire humanity. But these merchants of death have no qualms in shedding the blood of thousands of innocent Indians in the name of jihad.

Export of terrorism to India, using these religiously motivated groups, has long been a policy of the Pakistani state. When they begin to feel the heat from India and the international community, the rulers in Islamabad pretend that they have nothing to do with cross-border terrorism and that it might be the handiwork of some non-state elements which often perpetrate terrorist acts in Pakistan itself. But the fact of the matter is that the Pakistani state has neither mounted a sustained and effective assault on these outfits, nor fully abandoned the policy of using them against India. With pan-Islamist forces having emerged stronger in Bangladesh, and the Indo-Bangladesh border remaining far more porous than the Indo-Pak border, India is now being increasingly targeted from the east by organisations like HuJI.

... contd.