Union home secretary calls for review of conventional wisdom on terror; India has been traditionally suspicious of Pakistanis and other South Asians, but has had benign assumptions about those with Western passports.
It is time to shed conventional wisdom in the fight against terror, Union home secretary Gopal Krishna Pillai said on Wednesday. The revelations about David Coleman Headley’s role in 26/11 have highlighted that it is not just Pakistanis, or South Asians — the usual suspects — who pose a threat to India. But an American on a business visa with a US passport too can be a harbinger of terror.
This, then, was a call for India to “think the unthinkable”, said Pillai.
“As we have seen from the David Headley case, one [terrorist] can still slip through the radar because we are not looking for them. This is one of the big problems. Because nobody would look for an American citizen, with a US passport and a business visa; you would not think that he is a terrorist,” Pillai said.
He said necessary steps would have to be taken to deal with such situations. The discriminatory immigration rules of India look out suspiciously for citizens of Pakistan and some other neighbouring countries, while almost freely letting through those holding passports of western nations.
Officials said there is “yet nothing on file, but we will have to discuss” on how to better the screening for terrorists from western nations.
There have always been indications that terror targeted against India is not just limited to Islamic terrorists, with roots in Pakistan. However, a “majority of the establishment has not bothered to pursue it,” says a senior official in the security establishment. He compared it to the refusal to take note of the possibility of terrorist action by Hindu fringe groups, when bombs went off in mosques in Hyderabad, Malegaon, Delhi and elsewhere. “It took us a few years to convince the system that we need to look out, and we were able to finally lay our hands on the Colonel Purohit (of the Malegaon blasts) network,” he said.
Similarly, there have been several inputs that showed that terror against India has tentacles outside Pakistan. He said some of the emails and communication linked to Indian Mujahideen had originated from the US.
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