It is not enough to say enough is enough; terrorism is not a problem that will disappear because we want it to. The analogies with the American response to 9/11 ignore the enormous cost that country has extracted and paid by its meaningless war against a country that had nothing to do with the attacks. The US has traded the lives of its domestic citizens for those of its soldiers and innocent people living in Iraq; it has voluntarily sent its soldiers to die so that its civilians can live. The war against terror is an extraordinarily difficult one, for many reasons.
A striking thing about the current attack is that it seemed shorn of any conventional intention. When the terrorists came on air and were asked about their demands, it transpired they didn’t have any. The assault was part of a generalized intention rather than a specific one. The terrorist thrives on the way we distribute protection in our world by ignoring the powerful and preying on the vulnerable. Without a specific intention and by acting against random weak targets, the terrorist distributes fear on a mass scale.
Terror is created by our response to terrorism. However horrific the act of violence perpetrated by the terrorist, it is still a symbolic gesture aimed at eliciting an asymmetric response for that sets in motion a cycle of violence. Terrorism thrives on what it will beget. The urge to do something retributive needs to negotiate the inherently amoebic nature of terrorist organizations. The Deccan Mujahideen morphs into the Indian Mujahideen, which in turn can seamlessly become the LeT and so on. We have no one very tangible to attack in return; of course we can target Pakistan, but that would broaden the conflict and let us not forget that a similar urge to do something muscular has resulted in Pakistan being a nuclear state today.
At a fundamental level, the terrorist changes the rules of civilization by waiving the premium that all human beings place on their own lives. This liberates him and entraps us, for it exhausts us of most conventional options that depend on the other side to act in self-interest. Conventional thinking is, therefore, of little use when faced with a problem like this.
The key here is quite clearly to prevent such attacks from happening for once they happen, however good our response, the inherent nature of terrorism will inflict tremendous damage. And this is where we have a really big problem. Preventing terror attacks requires a new kind of policing altogether. It needs massive resources, a network that connects the very local to the global and access to the highest technology. Above all, it needs freedom from politicians and the political process. The police today are nothing more than crowd managers of local politicians. Honourable exceptions apart, they are incapable of anything more intricate than providing bandobast at a political rally. The change needed is dramatic and discontinuous.
India is good with some kind of problems; it can handle problems of attrition, the ones that are knotty and defy easy resolution with a degree of comfort. But our current political system has increasingly become inept at handling problems that call for decisive, discontinuous action. We need an external element to force us to change; the judiciary and not the legislature is very often the source of change in India. The current is too fragmented, too compromised with its own mechanisms to be able to come up with any sweeping change. Witness the shenanigans of the politicians in trying to take advantage of the Mumbai carnage and you know that to expect change to come from this quarter is futile.
Indian polity is structurally unsuitable for tackling a problem of this kind. It calls for big canvas thinking, the courage to make radical changes and the ability to live with the consequences of one’s actions; none of these characteristics are available in our existing system.
Our anger can replace one government with another. That is simply not enough. We need a new set of options, a new menu of imaginations. Until then, we will choose between different shades of incompetencies. Our anger will fester in vain.