Repeated terrorist attacks on our cities are having a noxious effect on the country and its people in different ways. Public confidence in the government’s will and capacity to stop these attacks is wearing thin. The political atmosphere is getting surcharged, with growing rancour between parties. The communal divide is growing sharper. The credibility of our police and security forces is eroding. Rising internal instability will sooner or later dampen external investment flows into our economy.

Even if allowances were to be made for our fractious politics and fragility of multi-party coalition arrangements, the reluctance to take robust measures to stem the terrorist mayhem is difficult to digest. We are frozen in debate over the need to enact special laws, the suitability of existing ones, ways to apply them better, the risk of abuse of stringent anti-terrorist legislation by state-level politicians to target their political enemies, police corruption, the victimization of Muslims, the impediments created by our federal system, the insufficiency of human and material resources to tackle terrorism effectively, et al. We have all kinds of well-rehearsed arguments to justify inaction, but not action.

India has been bloodied by terrorism for the last 18 years. Pakistan has used this weapon against us successfully, first in Jammu and Kashmir and subsequently elsewhere in India as part of a strategy to weaken the country from within. The biggest faultline in India is the communal one, with roots in Partition. These roots have been nourished by Pakistan’s hostility towards India, expressed openly in religious terms, rendering the stabilizing of the Hindu-Muslim equation in our country that much more difficult. India’s secularism and democracy cannot endure if the mutual alienation of its two principal communities continues to deepen.

Our problems are compounded by the growth of religious extremism and terrorism in our neighbourhood. Our population cannot remain insulated from these developments because radical Islam has spread its tentacles into Muslim communities across the globe. Its ideology, the networks through which it is propagated and its endorsement of violence as a legitimate tool to redress perceived wrongs form an integrated whole. Our democracy is not a sufficient barrier to the appeal of radical Islam to pockets of domestic extremism. Such elements have no attachment to democracy in any case. They view strict adherence to Islamic tenets in governance as far superior.

What we call ‘indigenous’ terrorism is simply a manifestation of the larger terrorist forces at work in our region. If these were not there, or were eliminated, terrorism in India would disappear. What is ‘indigenous’ about such terrorist acts is actually the justification for them, be it the destruction of Babri Masjid or the Gujarat riots. It would be unwise to fall into the trap of distinguishing between indigenous and imported terrorism. Communal riots that have scarred the country for years, have been indigenous to India, but not terrorism, which is a relatively new phenomenon implanted in India by Pakistan in the wake of the jihadi resistance to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan supported by the West and the Arab world.

What makes ‘indigenous’ terrorism deadly in Indian conditions is the unsophisticated means — ingredients, techniques and transport — employed. Our overcrowded streets, poor policing, general disorder, promiscuity of traffic are things that make it easy for terrorists to operate. This is in addition to the other weaknesses in our system of investigation and prosecution. The continuing of such incidents will stretch our social fabric to the point of tearing. The involvement of educated Muslims in terrorist acts will increase divisions between communities and aggravate the problem of stereotyping of the Muslim community as a whole — a phenomenon that justifiably angers the perfectly law-abiding, responsible and decent Muslim citizens of India.

Those behind these attacks would know that their mayhem may assuage their personal thirst for vengeance, but will worsen the lot of their community. The agenda, therefore, has to be the disruption of India’s progress and stalling of its rise as a power. The more we are conditioned to believe that terrorism in India has become local, the more the mentors in Pakistan are off the hook, and the less is Pakistan officially answerable. Its agencies, therefore, get more cover to continue their activities against India. There is no fundamental contradiction between these agencies fighting terrorism at home and aiding it in India. We cannot build adequate defenses if we lose sight of the fact that the rise of the Taliban forces, the bloodletting in Pakistan, and the recent artificially generated uprising in Kashmir are connected to this phenomenon of ‘indigenous’ terrorism.

Democratic societies, by their very nature, are ‘soft’ in terms of law and order and, therefore, more vulnerable to terrorism. To cope with it, they have to toughen the legal apparatus, without compromising basic freedoms. The extent of restrictions that are to be imposed on liberties will attract dissent in democratic societies, which are pluralist in nature. Ultimately, a consensus has to be built around majority thinking. Unfortunately, no consensus exists in India either on the nature and source of terrorism or on the means to combat it.

In a homogeneous democracy, only issues of law and liberty will be debated; in heterogeneous, multi-religious and multi-ethnic societies such as in India, where democracy is structured around interests of religion and caste, carefully worked out electoral mathematics comes into play. The constituents of the United Progressive Alliance have traditionally cultivated the Muslim vote as part of their commitment to a secular Indian polity. The Bharatiya Janata Party’s strategy is to primarily consolidate the Hindu vote behind them, while denying the Muslims any special consideration as a minority.

Can then the government, anxious to win back the Muslim vote, pass tough anti-terror laws, seen by the larger Muslim community as targeted against them in the past? The BJP, responsive to the public mood, accuses the government of being soft on terror and seeks to revive special laws to combat terrorists, not Muslims. Some UPA constituents, highly dependent politically on the Muslim vote, contribute to the government’s ill-conceived steps to deal with the mounting problem. With such electoral considerations in play, how does the country develop a consensual approach to terrorism? What we see is sterile debate, recrimination and the usual trading of charges of appeasement and communalism.

It is important not to tar the entire Muslim community with the misdeeds of a few. But this problem is not easily resolvable in practical terms. When radical Islamic elements are targeting our streets, religious sites, trains, scientific and economic establishments, how do we avoid referring to the religious identity of the terrorists? Is it possible to ignore their motives, rooted in an extreme version of Islam? Is it feasible for the public to always separate Islam from the terrorists when they actually act in its name?

A major responsibility for isolating the terrorists falls on the Muslim community itself. If for a year, every Friday sermon in the mosques was devoted in part to condemn terrorism, would that help in achieving this goal? Would it help if the madarsas included a clear condemnation of terrorism in their curricula? The moderate and modern-minded Muslims must have a voice in shaping the basic thinking of their community. Terrorism is posing a severe test for our system of governance, and the results so far have been quite demoralizing.