: It's time we faced a frightening reality. The Government of India has no intention of fighting jihadi terrorism. The jihadis know this, so they extend their cowardly war across India confident that they can operate with impunity. So sure are they that they sent videos of how they bombed Jaipur’s bazaars to newspaper offices a day after they successfully murdered about 70 innocents with their bombs. And, how did our political leaders respond? They lined up in droves for a horror tour of Jaipur and got pictures taken consoling the injured and the dying.
The chief minister of Rajasthan was right to ask Sonia Gandhi why she needed to come to Jaipur. Is she bringing help? Succour? Because if it is just to make political capital, then she may as well stay at home. If Vasundhara Raje had offered L.K. Advani the same advice, we would have been spared the tasteless picture of him gazing up at the Hawa Mahal. One reason why the killers always escape is because in the first hours after a terrorist attack, the police is preoccupied with providing security to VVIP horror tourists instead of concentrating on the investigation. Not that it matters. In most cases they do not know who they are looking for. So it is always the ‘foreign hand’ that comes in handy.
The only good thing that came out of last week’s terrible tragedy was that a group that calls itself the Indian Mujahideen proudly accepted responsibility. The truth is that even if some foreign group like the Lashkar-e-Toiba or the Harkut-ul-jihad-Islam (HuJI) are involved, it is Indian mujahideen who carry out the operation.
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.
