Lost to a cause

It is not a comforting thought. Not at all, when you realise that terrorism is not only at your door step but could well be the handiwork, not of some unidentifiable alien but that young boy in the neighbourhood, lost to a cause that believes in turning you into an enemy in his mind.

It was not a comforting thought even before, because the agents of death that an LeT, a JuD or a HuJI sent to a market in Delhi or a bakery in Pune or to the IISc campus in Bangalore, looked exactly like the neighbourhood kid. The difference was that one thought these spaced- out youth, spaced out through indoctrination, came from some other soil. Of course, they always received support from locals who were most often equally misguided.

That this pattern does not hold good any longer and that there were other home-grown bent minds, whether it is members of the Indian Mujahedeen or a faceless individual, was known for a long time but, somehow, one thought that such instances were more an exception than a rule.

They probably were. After all, one may point out, the Pune blasts took place more than a year after 26/11 in Bombay. Try telling that to the families of those who lost their loved ones and those who were injured. For them exceptions are as damaging as the rule. The trauma such events cause is beginning to create fear; it is showing sure signs of pervading nooks and corners of every community.

For many it is no longer a question of someone flying in or taking a boat to plant a time bomb or use automatic weapons to cause mayhem in highly visible targets. It could be the mall or a small eatery or a vegetable market in one’s own neighbourhood and the perpetrator could be someone from within. That’s what is really worrisome.

You can, for instance, blame Union home minister P Chidambaram, or the coast guard for not patrolling the seas well enough to prevent jehadis from arriving on our shores. But how do you deal with a youngster who may be from a house four streets away, and has now learnt to think that you as an individual may be fine and harmless, but you as part of a community are inimical to him and his beliefs. Not easy to build a security cordon and fight them. 

While these ought to be the issues that should agitate the minds within the security apparatus in the state, it looks like they have to combat not sleeper cells of terrorists but overzealous fundamentalists who vandalise churches and mosques, as was the case recently near Udupi and Bijapur.

These are instances that fully divert the attention of police from their real job and show the state in a very poor light. The day after the Pune blast, for instance, police in Karnataka were busy providing a security shield to loving couples, instead of giving us the confidence that another Bhatkal Rizvi was not hiding in Bangalore waiting to hurl a bomb and that he and his co-conspirators would be dealt with if they ever tried doing that.

It is such a pity that we have to thank Shankar Bidri for a peaceful Valentine’s Day much more than we can thank him for greater vigilance on the terror front. It is as much a sad reflection on the establishment that it has to be preoccupied with the likes of Pramod Mutalik rather than David Headley. Sadder still that the Maharashtra police had to protect theatres screening a Shah Rukh Khan film, rather than ferret out holed-up terrorists. If it is not preoccupied with a Mutalik or a Balasaheb, there is something else equally inane to keep our forces fully occupied.

The establishment, of course, can never make us feel safe enough unless it has the political will to deal with undesirable organisations, whether it is the Indian Mujahedeen or the Sri Rama Sene. The two might be as different as chalk and cheese; one dangerous and the other psychologically harmful. It takes more than vote-bank politics, whether of the minority or majority religions, to have the guts to deal with this.

There is a little bit more that communities within the civic society can do. Each community, each religious denomination, needs to look inwards to identify elements that are either outright dangerous or has the capacity to instil fear through moral policing.

Both need to be ostracised and exposed at the first sign. Just remember the case of one father in Nigeria, a respected banker, who alerted authorities about his son’s altered behaviour after being exposed to a radical rhetoric. Whether his caution saved several lives on an aircraft his son may have intended to hijack is not the issue. His concern for the community, even if it was not his own and on another continent, is the issue. Individuals and communities need to understand that and clean up their own backyard. That might make us feel a bit safer.