Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Learning to live with Terror

Fighting terror can’t be held ransom to vote bank politics, believes Ranjit Bhushan

The spectre of terror, which has haunted India for a better part of the last three decades – first Punjab and then Kashmir, and then onto mainland India – was never brought out more starkly than it was in November 2008 when the deadly attacks in Mumbai were brought home by live media coverage to a disbelieving Indian public.

The sheer audacity and scale of the slaughter and the impotence of the Indian security mechanisms to put deterrents in place until a lot of damage had been done exposed people to their own vulnerabilities as never before.

Have lessons been learnt? More importantly, is there a bipartisan approach on terror attacks? By the looks of it, some more time would pass before such a consensus emerges. While leader of opposition, L. K. Advani, and Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, have traded charges on whose government is more prone to terror attacks – UPA 2004 to 2009 or NDA 1999 to 2004 – it would be safe to say that the Mumbai attacks remain UPA’s Kandhar. There may have been no shameful ministerial escorts for hardened killers as in Kandhar, but the shifting of IPL, which had the potential to be a sporting brand as big as Wimbledon, on grounds that India was unsafe for hosting such events, falls in the same category of ‘crawling when asked to bend’. In other words, there is now no difference between India, Pakistan and Afghanistan.


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri
and Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

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