With leaders like these, you don’t need enemies

42 innocent Indians were killed by the serial blasts that took place in Hyderabad last Saturday.

What happened in Hyderabad was not an isolated incident. India has been under siege for over 50 years. No country under the sky has lost so much of innocent lives to jihadi and leftist terrorism as India has lost.

As Times of India report puts it, “India has since 2004 lost more lives to terrorist incidents than all of North America, South America, Central America, Europe and Eurasia put together. All of these vast swathes of the globe lost a total of 3,280 lives in terrorist incidents between January 2004 and March this year. India alone lost 3,674 lives over the same period of three years and three months”

How to prevent these attacks? Nobody has ever heard our leaders discussing that.

When Hyderabad was attacked -

“The Govt won't be cowed down by terror” –screamed Shivraj Paltil, union Home minister.

“This is an act of cowardice” –Renuka chowdary quipped.

And there ended the matter.

After two days -

“City life bounced back to normalcy”, “That’s the spirit of Indians” – Newspaper headlines cheered!

When there is a need for clear and decisive actions, our leaders throw only words.

If words had any killing-power, most of the terrorists would have been killed by now!

When you need some consoling words, you won’t get even them!

Consider this: on July 7, the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his wife visited the tube stations of London where the terrorists had planted bombs and killed innocent British citizens. They placed flowers at the spots of the blasts and prayed quietly for their fellow citizens. Contrast this with our own Dr. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Very next week, on July 11, he kept himself away from the functions that paid tribute to hundreds of those who lost their lives to serial blasts that took place on the same day last year in local trains of Mumbai.

When Muhammad Hanif, a Muslim doctor, was detained on terrorism-related charges in Australia, Dr. Singh said he lost his sleep. Perhaps he might have even got a sleep debt! But when it comes to the victims of terror attacks, not a single expression of solidarity!

Noted security expert B. Raman has this sad tale:

“How many acts of jihadi terrorism we have had in India since the present Government came to power in Delhi in 2004? Delhi, Varanasi, Mumbai, Malegaon, Bangalore, Samjota Express, Hyderabad. There has been no satisfactory progress in any of these investigations. In the past, our Police might have been criticized in some instances for its inability to prevent acts of terrorism, but it had generally received very high praise for its successful investigation. We all felt proud of the Mumbai Police of the 1990s recently when the case relating to the Mumbai blasts of March, 1993, in which about 250 innocent civilians were blown up by jihadi terrorists, ended in conviction. There were many other cases in which too the Mumbai Police of the 1990s had covered itself with credit. So too the Delhi Police. So too the Police of other cities. Why there is a perception now that they are not as good as they were in the 1990s? Has there been deterioration in their competence?

“No. In the 1990s, they received the full backing of the political leadership of those years, which took active interest in the investigation. The political leadership of those years did not give sermons to the police not to do anything which might be viewed by the Muslims as stigmatizing or targeting their community...The political leadership of today gives sermons and no leadership. It avoids active monitoring and supervision of the investigation lest the Muslims misunderstand.”

And that’s the fact.

With leaders like these, you don’t need enemies.

Do you?

© G. Anil Kumar, 2007