BlogHer - India's terror trouble: Will we ever take it seriously? - Comments

Complacency

snigdhasen — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 06:37:21 -0500

Well, Nita, you know well how superficial our outrage is: it comes and goes...I'm in India for a bit and I hope to be able to write as frequently as possible.

As usual you have written an

Nitajk — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 02:13:40 -0500

As usual you have written an objective post Snigdha, but was rather surprised that you are writing even while on vacation. Well, I guess you are in Bangalore, the city of the blasts and that is why. Otherwise you are absolutely right, over here the complacency is seen to be believed. People seem to go back to their normal life almost immediately! I don't know what to think...! As you said, we need to shout and demand our right to protection.

Nita

It's been a sad week

snigdhasen — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 10:24:55 -0500

Too many people died in India this past week, Catherine. I haven't seen anything like this in a while.

Stampede kills 145 people in India

Catherine Morgan — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 14:55:07 -0500

This isn't terror related but it's very sad. Apparently many of the dead were women and children.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080803/ap_on_re_as/india_temple_stampede

Thousands of panicked pilgrims stampeded Sunday at a remote mountaintop
temple in northern India during celebrations to honor a Hindu goddess,
sending dozens of people plummeting to their deaths and trampling
scores more. Police said 145 people were killed.

Rumors of a landslide apparently started the panic at the shrine in the
foothills of the Himalayas, said C.P. Verma, a senior government
official in the Bilaspur district.

Contributing Editor Catherine Morgan
at catherine-morgan.com, The Political Voices of Women, Care2 Election

Suebob, thanks!

snigdhasen — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 11:08:42 -0500

Yeah, this has been a threat for decades: it's getting more global now.

Thanks!

suebob — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 19:08:29 -0500

Thanks for the report, Snigdha. It is interesting to see how terrorism affects different countries and how it is a growing threat.

Travel safe.

Fabulous!

snigdhasen — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 10:38:04 -0500

Suzanne, thanks a ton for the link. I will read it. So great that you read widely.

I'm glad it was covered well there. In fact, questions are now being raised about if and when India and the U.S. will start co-operating seriously on this issue.

Thanks Mata!

snigdhasen — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 10:34:56 -0500

Things seem to haev cooled off again. Let's see what these "investigations" reveal, if at all.

Thank you for your prayers.

India and terror

the farmers wife — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 09:27:59 -0500

This has been well covered in the U.S. You are correct in your assertion that we all need to be informed on what's going on in the world at large. I get my information from more sources than the mainstream media. I would like to suggest some reading material which gives a look through a large lens and explains the dynamics currently at play. It's called "The Pentagon's New Map" by Dr. Thomas P. Barnett. When I read it there were many, many lightbulb moments.

He also has a blog which covers a full spectrum of "what's goin' on".

Suzanne, the Farmer's Wife

Sorry, that didn't work

the farmers wife — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 09:27:36 -0500

http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/weblog/

??

the farmers wife — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 09:27:04 -0500

Please be safe

Mata H — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 06:15:07 -0500

Thank you for this article. I am just reading it now. Thank you for opening my eyes. I will be praying for your safety.
~~ Contributing Editor, Mata H. also blogs right along at Time's Fool

You got it, Raj!

snigdhasen — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 00:35:22 -0500

Raj, thank you for this comment. I couldn't have explained this situation better myself!

Yes, this has been by complaint, always. We need to fix the foot soldiers first: equip them to deal with ground realities. This top-down approach is ridiculous. We have been dealing with terror for so many years and we still haven't gotten around to putting an efficient system in place.

Thanks Catherine!

snigdhasen — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 00:29:10 -0500

Concern much appreciated :)

There you go..

snigdhasen — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 00:24:38 -0500

Yes, Ms. Jen, I found this story in most of the leading American websites: NYT, CNN, etc. Just didn't know many people actually followed it. India's war on terror is just as crucial for the U.S.as any other country's. The sooner we realize it, the better for both countries.

India's terror trouble: Will we ever take it seriously?

snigdhasen — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 10:14:37 -0500

I had never imagined my first post from India would be about a series of terror attacks in two economically vibrant cities, 1,000-odd miles apart, which claimed over 50 lives and left more than 100 wounded.

I was in Singapore last Friday (July 25, IST), waiting to board my flight home to Bengaluru (Bangalore), India's tech city, when I heard about the blasts. Nine low intensity explosions (BBC reports seven) in the city earlier that day claimed two lives and injured dozens. The southern city of Bangalore was last hit in 2005, when a professor was gunned down and four others injured by gun-men brandishing AK-47s at the elite Indian Institute of Science.

I was expecting chaos and heightened security at the new Bangalore International Airport when my flight landed later that night. The process was remarkably smooth. I couldn't tell the city was on alert after a series of bomb blasts if I hadn't heard the news at Singapore airport.

I had barely settled down with my family --- pleased with the relative calm in the city and a crisis contained --- when the very next day, a series of 17 explosions ripped through the western commercial city of Ahmedabad (capital of the state of Gujarat that witnessed deadly communal violence in 2002), including two blasts at hospitals that were treating the injured. The attack has so far claimed 55 lives. Over a 100 were wounded.

In the days that followed, over 20 unexploded bombs were discovered in Gujarat's "diamond city" of Surat. A couple more were discovered in Bangalore and Ahmedabad as well. The country is on high alert, even as bomb hoaxes add to the distress.

This is not our first face-off with terror strikes: India has been dealing with this demon for decades now. This
New York Times story states that according to the Washington-based National Counterterrorism Center, between January 2004 and March 2007, the death toll from terrorist attacks
in India was over 3,000, second only to that in Iraq during the same period.

But our security agencies seem to be struggling to piece together the cases individually and to establish a connection, if any, between them. I am left just as flummoxed as I try to piece together a story from news that is trickling in bit-by-bit everyday. In the past one week, we are still figuring out the basics, and reports are swinging the full 180 degrees:

The blasts may be linked/ They are probably not. Splintered jihadi groups may be behind the attacks
The unexploded bombs in Surat were only meant as a show of strength./The bombs were meant to have a deep impact. After Ahmedabad, security agencies were combing cities for bombs, so the perpetrators had to abandon their Surat plans.
The bombs were of low intensity, so the attack couldn't have been masterminded professionally. /The modus operandi of terror groups are getting more sophisticated. Al-Qaeda's footprints are emerging. Integrated circuit chips were used to assemble bombs in Bangalore and Surat.
Emails of more terror strikes were sent out to media houses (just prior to the Ahmedabad blasts) from an obscure group calling itself the Indian Mujahideen, a group believed to be a new front of the banned Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI). /Cops are unsure about this. While SIMI activists are being detained, al-Qaida-linked Indonesian terror group Jemaah Islamiyah is the new suspect.

Phew! Whoever is behind these attacks, have achieved one huge success: We are confused and struggling to see the whole picture. And if we don't get our act together quickly, they will accomplish more than a few blasts. This is what I am left worrying about all day:

We are weeks away from August 15, India's Independence Day. Is this a dry run? If it is, we are lucky we figured it days before the big day. The country stays on alert and security agencies get a chance to comb the country.
We are months away from general elections next year. Terrorism has to be back on the table, nuclear deal or no...
Which brings us another problematic law: The Prevention of Terrorism Act (link via Council on Foreign Relations) that was introduced in 2002 by a right wing government, and repealed in 2004 by the current government for being draconian and misused. It's easy to want this law revived especially under such circumstances, but I'd like more caution. A law that gives authorities the right to detain "suspects" indefinitely without trial, demands an exceptional level of integrity and efficiency from law enforcement agencies, and I doubt we can claim to have such a system in place.
So do we have a well-conceived, equipped anti-terror unit and plan in place? I doubt it. We've been hearing the "we-knew-this-was-coming-and-warned-the-states" refrain fairly regularly. If we can barely get the Center and our states to co-operate and act on available intelligence on time, we don't have a working system in place.
And then the complaint that investigations are hard because terrorists aren't following known patterns. Yeah, right, that's what they'll do. Make it easy for us to investigate. Bad criminals make bad cops (probably heard that one on The Wire, but how true).
Or have we got too comfortable with these blasts? Such attacks have become so periodic and commonplace and bereft of any twin-towers grandeur that we may have begun to overlook the importance of staying on top.
More importantly, it's time we demanded answers and felt enraged by our government's failure to protect us. A good economy and promises of good lives are at stake. Stability is essential. Too much talk so far, too little action, and a whole lot of omissions.

Leading National (English) news coverage on the blast in India:

Rediff.com

Times of India

Hindustan Times

CNN-IBN

NDTV

BLOGS on blasts and terrorism:

Harini at A Point of View
Nita at A Wide Angle View of India
Musings at Diyasthots (Diya was in Bangalore when the blasts happened )
Life of an Indian Homemaker
The Naive Indian

Snigdhasen also blogs at India Crumbs