Fighting terror: riding hobby horses

The locution of fighting terrorism is showing signs of exhaustion. Getting into the ruts of conventions and ideology and antipathy has telling effect not only on the agencies in collecting intelligence and fighting terror but on the patience of the public at large. No other than an important Afghanistan minister blamed the American soldiers of dropping arms and ammunition to the Talibans and hence arming them. That is second week of April 2008, full seven years into war on terror! The mujahideens fighting the Soviet occupation in the earlier decades would receive arms dropped to them. Has the preoccupation revived?

At the home front the murder of ACP of Delhi Special Operation Squad police Rajbir Singh allegedly by realtor Vijay Bhardwaj is a conundrum. This ACP got several promotion and pats from Prime Minister AB Vajpayee and Deputy PM and Home Minister LK Advani for catching Afzal Guru for the 13 December attack on the Parliament. He seemed to have achieved this feat within two days. He is said to have given 50 lakh to Bhardwaj to invest. Bhardwaj feared that the cop would liquidate him. “For the last six months, Singh Bhaisahab (Rajbir ) was putting pressure on me to pay his dues. I was not able to collect the money. Bhaisahab told me that he would kill me. So I killed him... because I was afraid,” Bhardwaj said. However it is far from clear why the cop should have given his gun to Bhradwaj and how come Bhardwaj should kill the cop with his own gun. How much wealth he still had at his disposal and from where did he get all this. If these are uncomfortable questions to ask they have one truth underlying that you cannot dodge. Such ace cops are carrying on the monumental work of hoarding wealth. The flip side of the monumental work is of course: patriotism. The Iliol house of DG Vanzara where the wife of Sohrabbudin, Kauserbi was cremated is Xanadu which Narendra Modis and LKAdvanis have allowed to come up, with a premium, of course.

These super cops, including APS Gill who wanted to force AGP Sreekuma to toe the Gujarat government line, are knights in shining armour out to grab the booty on the pretext of hunting the proverbial damsel in distress (read, modern day version, terrorism). Vanzara had reportedly accepted two crore to bump off Sohrabbudin. How much ACP Rajbir must have accepted is any body’s guess. All this in the name of the juggernaut of the war on terror! Is there any American still in the hearing distance who can use them!

One must not forget that Rajbir had used the unmentionable word ‘chootya’ about Afzal Guru. First the ACP had denied that he had given interview on a TV channel and when the channel replayed the footage he accepted. That un -parliamentary word he had used would imply a man of utter naiveté. The Special Task Force in Kashmir which had sent Afzal to escort one of the attackers on the Parliament, must have believed in the utter naiveté of Guru that he would do exactly what he was paid for to do. This pharmaceutical agent had allegedly paid two lakh to get the informant’s job with the police.

The obvious question is are these people really fighting terror or are they busy making fast buck as the sun of terrorism is shining, ala their political masters.


We cannot divide the haves and the have-nots when it comes to fighting terror or ours and others’, Naxalits and judwa salam when identifying the terrorists. Naxalists, deshi variety, are as much terrorists as anyone else, then why treat them separately? Shashi Tharoor would like education to fight terror by having better educational institutes or : “The alternative will be to see Indian companies recruiting abroad because the talent isn't available to them at home, and the ranks of frustrated unemployed swelling across India, easy prey for the blandishments of terrorists and (emphasis added) Maoists. If we are to avoid an apocalyptic fate, we must give them a better chance of employment through more and improved educational possibilities.” Tharoor is not alone in this, Bal Thackeray also calls the Naxalists as ours.
There is another quandary the eight accused in the liquid explosives with which they wanted to blow up aircraft from Britain in August 2006 are not frustrated unemployed. Abdulla Ahmed Ali, aka Ahmed Ali Khan, 27, of Walthamstow, Assad Sarwar, 24, of High Wycombe, Tanvir Hussain, 27, of no fixed address, and Mohammed Gulzar, 26, of Barking Ibrahim Savant, 27, of Walthamstow, Arafat Waheed Khan, 26, of Walthamstow, Waheed Zaman, 23, of Walthamstow, and Umar Islam, aka Brian Young, 29, of High Wycombe are well educated and well settled. They cannot be called have-nots of videshi variety.



Their misfortune is not that they belong to any judwa salam. It is their inability to read a variant albeit a tolerant reading of the religious book. There is no compulsion in religion, even in the matter of jihad. It can be fought at different levels, many nuances between jihad al akbar and jihad al asghar. Not far fetched to say that there is hobby horse of extremism that these would like to ride habitually because of the circumstances they are placed in.