On Wed September 6 2006 10:26 pm, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh wrote: > shiv, i think you are conflating two rather different types of crime, and > of criminals. on the one hand, you rightly state that india has a high > level of corruption, and the rich and powerful can get away with > crime. law enforcement is clearly soft on the rich and powerful. to claim > _from this alone_ that law enforcement is also too soft on possible terror > suspects is absurd. some rich and powerful people may be terrorists, but > most terrorists (and certainly most people suspected of terror) fit a > rather different profile.
You know this is the notion that I carried around with me for qute a while. Ram has peripherally mentioned what he thought wer my beliefs. But after geting involved a bit more deeply into issues of governance it occurs to me that the polity and governance have a deep role in terrorism as well, for several reasons. I would now be very reluctant to dismiss the role of governance. I thik it is naive to believe that "getting terrorists" can be separated from geting the worst criminals in Indian governance and polity. For example - if you look at the Mumbai blasts (or any other terrorist act) you find that they have usually been conducted by teams of people - of whom some have obtained false but valid dicuments to live in India. Obtaining false but valid documents is so easy in India. Putting a stop to that is a governance issue and concerns corruption that is condoned from chaprasi level up. Soon after the July blasts in Mumbai there was great drama in the news and it was said that the verdict in the 1993 blasts case would now be released (in 2006!!!) That was stopped and the verdict has still not appeared. The news suggested that it was Sharad Pawar's intervention that stopped it. Coincidentally Sharad Pawar was in the news yesterday - also named by Abdul Rehman Telgi in the Rs 30,000 crore ($6.7 billion) stamp paper scam. If you look at the source of illegal arms used by the politicians and the criminal mafia - the sources are shared with terorists - who get their AK 47s from the same places. You cannot dry up arms sourcing for terrorists without also drying of sourcing for the political/criminal mafia - but the the latter obviosuly protect their sources using their political and financial clout. Cases in which these folks are implicated - be they murder or arms possession simply do not come to court or are delayed interminably, or witnesses are threatened or the case dries up because of "lack of evidence" A whole lot of guilty murderers in the snti-Sikh riots of 1984 are walking free, as are people from Mumbai 1993, Godhra and any number of cases of violent crime because the courts and the legal system is compeletly ineffective against anyone who has money and/or arms. Finally -finances. Hawala thrives. As do other illegal routes. And they thrives at least in part because politicians are making illegal money to the tune of several thousand crores. How can anyone dry up sources of funding for terror until the politically protected conduits for illegal fund transfer are rooted out? Finally "security". Hundreds of crores are spent on z-category security, but fundamental changes in terms of improvement in ground level policing are not done. Improvement in training and salarties for junior cops and a whole lot of other easily implementable things. For example security cameras in railway stations, malls and bus stops. The funds for these need to be allocated by the polity. But Indians genuinely seem to believe that it is important for Sharad Pawar, Lalu Yadav and Advani to have 20 armed goons each protecting them and it is OK for a few people to die in blasts in railway carriages. We don't ask, and the politicians don't give. Terrorism can never be checked until these things are addressed. Islam/Islamism is a convenient scapegoat. It does play a role - but even that role can be neutralised by good governance. Will expand on that in a different post if need be. shiv
