Comment

The arrests of several people suspected of being part of the Ahmedabad bomb blasts, in a mere three weeks, raises some uncomfortable questions about the way policing is done in this country. It also points to a certain amount of fatigue in the Indian public, judging from the general response to the claims. The eight golds won by Michael Phelps or the anticipation that one of the boxing Kumars will come good on their promise of gold or even whether the relationships of Katrinas, Kareenas, Saifs and Salmans will last the natural course seem to have captured more public attention than one more police claim about SIMI activists being involved in the Ahmedabad blasts.

This is not just because we are becoming increasingly shallow as a society (maybe we are and maybe we aren't) but because no matter how shallow we are, our credulity is being stretched to the limit. When Indira Gandhi was prime minister, she blamed everything that went wrong on 'the foreign hand'. This soon became a joke, not because the various problems faced by the nation were not serious but because the accusation against the foreign hand never led to the hand being caught.

Similarly, with these arrests. How many times have we had the police grandly announce that they had cracked a case only for the whole case to be forgotten, for the suspects to 'languish', to use newspaper terminology, and for some to be quietly released as public interest died down?

Since Indira Gandhi, political leaders who followed her have named the foreign hands, but we still have never seen any hard evidence of them. The Lashkar-e-Tayba (LeT) is blamed seconds after each terror attack. In the case of the Akshardham attack in Gujarat in 2002, within hours of its happening the Union home minister announced that the LeT was to blame and the two slain 'terrorists' were Pakistani nationals. These are the same police who usually cannot even solve a simple robbery in two hours, but can crack an attack of that magnitude in a few hours.

The LeT then gave way to the HUJI, a splinter group which was made up primarily of Bangladeshis and apparently zillions of sleeper cells operate through India at all times. But now the flavour of the month is SIMI, the Students' Islamic Movement of India. The Centre was unable to prove to a special tribunal that the organisation was involved in any terrorist or anti-national activities less than two weeks ago, but SIMI is still blamed for everything. If there is evidence, why does the government not produce it? Surely, that is dangerous? If there is no evidence, then is it not even more dangerous that an outfit that is not involved is being blamed? Are we missing the real suspects because it suits a political dispensation to blame SIMI, in this particular case?

In the Mumbai train blasts case of 2006, the police jumped from theory to theory within weeks, from tiffin box gangs to pressure cooker gangs to cycle gangs but none came to very much and in fact, little headway has been made. The shoddy state of affairs means that the real culprits get away with it and some poor sods — usual suspects — are jailed on some pretext and evidence is made to fit a suspicion or a hunch rather than the other way around.

The lack of public interest is significant as a pointer to the fact that hysteria that is not connected to evidence is not always enough — you can not fool all of the people all of the time. In too many such cases, the initial hoopla is not sustained by actual work and effort and the courts are quite brutal in the way they castigate the police for jobs not done. In fact, you begin to wonder if the authorities really take terrorism seriously, or whether they just look for something, anything, to peg the blame on and then get on with the rest of their lives, leaving us in a state of permanent disbelief.
b_ranjona@dnaindia.net