Yesterday, there were great displays of solidarity for the victims of Mumbai 11/26 across India. Thousands of Indians got together to light candles in memory of those who lost their lives in the most audacious and daring terror attack ever on India by Islamic jehadis from Pakistan. There was anger too; anger against politicians, the police and Pakistan. But, at the end of it all, it appeared that Indians, like always, had forgotten the attack and had moved back to their old pastime of fighting with each other rather than fighting the enemy who is getting bolder and more destructive with each passing day.Even as the whole nation is almost united in its anger against Pakistan, India's commies, as always, are not able to get themselves to move beyond blaming the BJP. That they had extra-national loyalties to China was widely known, but that they would win anti-India hawks in Pakistanis too is something that no one would have ever believed, had it not been for ex-ISI chief General Hamid Gul's advice to the government of India to listen to the commies' convenient-to-Pakistan views and stop playing 'lackeys' to the US.
Sitaram Yechury, the suave commie whose columns appear regularly in the Hindustan Times, has repeatedly displayed a sickening ability to lie through his teeth to pursue his almost anti-national agenda through his columns, a few of which I have previously commented on. Writing in the paper today, he did not have a word to say against Pakistan or suggest any action plan to tackle the scourge of terror unleashed by that country. His main prescription for facing the challenge? India must invoke an obscure UN resolution passed after 9/11 which obliges all countries to deny "safe havens to those who finance, plan, support or commit terrorist acts". Of course, in what must be music to the ears of Hamid Gul and the ISI, he virtually projects his favourite whipping boy, the BJP, as a greater threat to India than Pakistan, and then goes on to say that "any cynical effort to draw political mileage and electoral dividends by perpetuating a communal divide can only give a further lease of life to such anti-national terrorists"!
In short, what Yechuri and a few of his ilk are saying is that if India has to stop those Pakistani AK47s from claiming more lives, it needs to start and win a war against one of the two principal political parties of this country. There is no need to even look towards Pakistan. Once the BJP is removed from the scene, Pakistan's Islamic terrorists, whose sole aim to claim the whole of India for Islam, will come by boats to Mumbai with flowers and 'Thank You' cards!
Acrimonious mud-slinging has also begun between various organs of the government. Despite a monumental intelligence and police failure, not one officer belonging to the IPS, the cadre which controls all police and intelligence outfits in the country, has been sacked. Similarly, not one IAS officer out of the many controlling the Home Ministry has been fired. Under intense public pressure, the government has finally sacked three politicians.
India's Naval Chief, Sureesh Mehta, reacting to suggestions that the Navy did not act on vague intelligence inputs, has lashed out the media for helping the terrorists by giving out crucial bits of information live. He has specially targetted Barkha Dutt, not just for her role in the attack on Mumbai but for a similar irresponsibility during Kargil that led to the death of three soldiers. Dutt's friend and mediocre journalist Vir Sanghvi, not surprisingly, has come out all guns blazing in her support, berating Mehta for "shamefully rehashing old, discredited lies about the media" and questioning his leadership due to which, according to him, terrorists came to Mumbai so easily.
As if all this was not bad enough, there are also the usual suspects who warn against even thinking of a military response against Pakistan. They want India to 'win the trust' of Pakistan's democratic leaders, poor guys themselves suffering from terrorism, and strengthen their hands so that they can reign in Islamic terrorists there! These guys have obviously just emerged from a time machine that had got stuck two decades back. There was democracy in Pakistan earlier too, under Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, but terrorism was only promoted, not suppressed. Why? Because, terror is a tool Pakistan has deliberately created and deployed to defeat India by inflicting on it 'a thousand cuts'. Why this basic fact has been ignored repeatedly to our peril is something that is hard to understand.
The only change now is that the Frankenstein of terror wants to establish pure Islamic rule in Pakistan too. That is why there have been attacks on Pakistani leaders who are supporting the US. But - and this is the most important part which is being foolishly overlooked - as far as India is concerned, there is no confusion at all: they are all one. That is why Talibanis currently fighting Pakistani Army in FATA have offered their men and suicide bombers to fight alongside that Army if war breaks out with India.
Two decades of talks, toothless diplomacy, restraint after Kargil and mobilisation of the Army after the terror attack on Parliament have yielded no result whatsoever. On the contrary, they have emboldened strong elements in and outside the Pakistani establishment to keep raising the terror bar gradually and increase the frequency of attacks. They know by now that India has put its testicles in deep freeze and that this country, enfeebled to the point of impotence by security-illiterate media, bureaucrats and politicians, is just not going take them out.
"Tough" diplomatic measures that are being suggested again for the nth time mean nothing at all unless the other guy knows that there is a bite behind the bark. Forget the bite, we are afraid even to bark. We are a nuclear power and a much bigger conventional military power than Pakistan. That has not stopped that country from doing what it has been in Kashmir and elsewhere in India, culminating in 11/26. Why are we afraid to respond in self defence? Are we going to allow Pakistan to bleed us to death slowly by inflicting on us a thousand cuts or are we going to at least now show the necessary national resolve needed to give them a credible, practical glimpse of the unacceptable costs and damages that they will face if they do not stop this nonsense?
Exercise of the nuclear option by Pakistan is not as easy as it sounds because of the decimating response that India is capable of giving. Short of that threshold, therefore, there is plenty that can be done to degrade and destroy jehadi elements and their masters in that country. We cannot just keep sitting back and hoping that they will be scared into stopping their merchants of death by mere "tough talk".
It is only one week since 11/26 and we have already forgotten. Petty and almost anti-national political blame-games are back. Pakistan is virtually out of the public frame. What more can those guys ask for? They are already laughing their guts out at our foolishness and fear, and are taunting us openly even on Indian television. Emboldened by our pathetic and hopelessly divided response, they must already be planning an even 'bigger and better' attack than the one that hit Mumbai. Considering that we still have learnt nothing, don't be surprised if that attack materialises much faster than we even want to think now.
We can keep holding candles all our life. That will not make Pakistan's agents of death put their 'candles' away. We light our candles to mourn and remember; they light their candles to make us mourn and not forget. If we want to stop this unending run of lighting candles of mourning, we have to stop fighting with each other and go out there and put out those who hold those candles of death and those who make them hold them. Unless we do that, there will many, many more occasions to show solidarity and helpless anger with the candles terrorists want us to keep lighting till their ideology finally puts them all out.
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Readers may also read:
1. Police fighting terrorists with cars and canes: dismantle colonial IPS
2. Making India safe: cosmetic changes will not stem rot
3. Mumbai 11/26: wake up to Islamic terror, this is just the beginning
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