Following almost any significant terrorist attack on Indian soil, the media and political leadership instinctively embark on two refrains. First, they speculate, sometimes idly, on the party or parties responsible. And then they angrily demand that the government take some form of punitive action, although it is often unclear exactly what or against whom.

The prevention of individual attacks, like the Jaipur blasts, is always immensely difficult, even with a massive, highly professional intelligence-gathering apparatus, which India lacks. Explosive materials are increasingly easy to procure or manufacture. Individuals who have not committed a crime are unlikely to be on any list or database of suspect terrorists. The means of delivering the explosives are wide-ranging and often inconspicuous. The timing of the attacks is unlikely to be accurately forecast. The latest bombings also appeared to mark another case of what US intelligence used to call ‘ad hoc’ terrorism, or terrorist activity not carried out by an organised, or even necessarily a named, group. This phenomenon has become more widespread around the world in the last two decades, and is likely to pose as much, if not more, of a threat as activity by known terror networks.

But more restrictive in its effect on the Indian establishment, in some senses, is its overarching counterterrorism policy, one that must by necessity be fraught with contradictions. Terrorism is both a tactic and a strategy. To counter it, the Indian government has to strike a balance between short-term security guarantees to its public and long-term solutions targeting the political, economic and cultural roots of terrorist activity, all the while trying to maintain the freedoms expected of a liberal democracy. This problem, at the heart of counterterrorism, has been wrestled with by a number of countries. The US, Israel, and Western European nations provide good comparisons due to their democratic governments and the wide variety of terrorist threats that each has faced.

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