Fighting Terrorism

Fighting terorists today is not easy for any state agency, since the very nature of today's terrorist tactics consists of being hidden in plain sight amongst families, women and children and old and so on, denying their own acts except in media and not identifying their own fighting personnel to the enemy.

Ancient India had other ethics, where not only a war was fought away from the civil society, but there were very strong ethics of a stronger person and a fighter not raising a weapon or arm against someone weak, old, unarmed, too young to fight, or even simply unwilling to fight; there was no question of anyone getting away with harming a woman or a child or anyone weak and unarmed, and even a fighter would not attack another one without fair warning of an attack and an acceptance to the effect, a shown readiness.

India was later invaded by another sort of ethics that was prevalent elsewhere, and some time ago a European colleague from a country in central Europe remarked that he "could not understand the ethical injunction against soldiers who were victorious in a war availing themselves of the opportunity of taking every possible advantage of the women of the defeated society, in fact (he said) he would definitely have done so". And a look at the way the two world wars were fought shows the fact of the matter - allies kept the ethics, at least US and UK did, about not attacking the civilians of the defeated enemy in Europe; the other side did not.

The war being waged today with terrorist organisations is waged most often against civilians of the nations and people that the terrorist organisations wish to destroy, and fighting the terrorists with scruples about their civilian populations can be afforded perhaps by large nations with huge populations where a few hundred or even a few hundred thousand suffering at the hands of terrorists are glossed over, forgotten, taken in stride, whatever, as the train and bus and market blasts in India have been (until the rich were attacked in their very own den at the luxury hotels); a little nation not retaliating with adequate measures will only be complying with their enemies' promise of "pushing them into the ocean" as they promised a half century ago.

A couple of decades ago the terrorism in Delhi was beign waged in a way that had an eery similarity to that happening for last few decades in Israel, with no function of joy be it a wedding or a child's party remain without a threat of attack with several dead. The agenda in either case is simple, the population under attack must be made unable to forget terror for life and to enjoy life in any way.

Fighting this and hunting terrorists down is no simple task, and their beign able to argue civil ethics in their favour - notably as has been recently employed by another nation refuting or confounding every attempt by India to track down the source of terrorism and the masterminds hiding amongst the population there - merely amounts to enabling the terrorists not only continue with impunity but with glee about the attacked being no good at fighting back.

A few years ago Atlantic Monthly carried a long article, well researched, about a video that until then was in circulation, depicting a young boy hiding behind his father dying in crossfire. It ought to be easy enough to find and go through. The arguments are almost scientific and if there were any possibility of a refutation it would have made headlines in most media. Instead the story died down. Similar two stories have also met the same fate, when questioned by investigative agencies of various global organisations, one in Kashmir against Indian military, '90 or '91, and another very famous in Lebanon, early eighties.

And genocide of sikh population, known innocent, has met with no investigation or uproar of the sort that is raised against happenings in western states of India - for that matter, Bhagalpur remains forgotten as does Calcutta of '46. This shows agenda of the terrorism - attack any society or part thereof that is prosperous, with a relatively well functioning society with civil structure. Destroy their happiness and peace. Claims about such a society being bad to minorities are never raised much less acted upon in case of a totaliatarian regime or a poor society where similar things happen in far more horrible way - which shows that the agenda of terrorists has nothing whatsoever to do with fighting injustice anywhere, only to shout injustice against anyone prosperous, happy, progressing and maintaining a reasonably good civil structure.