We would know more about these local jihadis if the Government of India were serious about fighting terrorism. The first jihadi violence on Indian soil were the bombings in Mumbai in 1993. It took our justice system till last year to convict only the second-rung plotters. Why should terrorists fear Indian justice? Then we saw the Indian government brought to its knees in Kandahar by the hijackers of IC 814. So timid was the BJP government’s response that it did not try once to find the hijackers after the event. Nor did we try to bump off the ghastly men we released in exchange for the passengers of IC 814.

More embarrassing even is that in the five years that Maulana Azhar Masood and Omar Sheikh spent in Indian jails, we did not know that they were two of the most dangerous terrorists alive. After the government’s disgraceful handling of the Kandahar episode you would think that L.K. Advani as the ‘iron man’ of the home ministry would have set up a computerised database of jihadi terrorists. It still does not exist according to Ajai Sahani of the Institute of Conflict Management, who is one of the few people in India who keeps a track of jihadis and Naxalites.

Without a national database available to our security forces, we cannot begin to think of winning this war. When I spoke to him after the Jaipur incident, he pointed out that the Intelligence Bureau has barely 3,000 agents for operations across the country. Not just counter-terrorism but everything. Do we need more proof that the Government of India has no intention of fighting the jihadis? If our state governments were doing better there would be hope. Sadly, there is not a single state government that has invested in modern, sophisticated counter-terrorism systems.

... contd.