Enough is enough
For the past 2 days, I have been filled with outrage. Grief. Anger. People have been asking me if all is ok with my family. It’s not. It’s just a coincidence that none of my sisters or uncles or nephews was shot. What about the innocent Indians and foreigners who lost their sisters, fathers, kids? Why were they killed? Because they were at a railway station waiting for their trains? Or visiting India and staying at a hotel? Or because they were journalists waiting outside all night, trying to figure out what was going on inside a besieged, burning hotel with hundreds of people trapped inside?
As a nation, India seems to have an incredibly short memory. We keep getting attacked, and we keep forgetting it. That is good, in a way – we don’t let terrorists change our daily way of life. It’s also good for the government, whose incompetence in protecting the state is quickly forgotten. But what of innocent Indians who die? We let, by our government’s very inaction or lack of sufficient action, gruesome murders happen month after month, year after year. What was the Indian intelligence doing all this time? How did they have no idea that such an attack was impending? What is India, the “IT Superpower”, doing in terms of electronic surveillance of terrorists?
It looks to me like attacking India presents no more than a simple logistical problem to terrorists. They have been striking at random, whenever they wanted, wherever they wanted. Be it the Taj Mahal hotel, or the Victoria Terminus, or even the Indian parliament. They have struck successfully at all these locations, and many more. They have struck at weddings and killed scores of people. They have struck at pilgrims. They have attacked every conceivable target one could think of. What next?
Last night I saw PM Manmohan Singh reading from a pre-written speech condemning the attack. There was no ferocity, no anger in him. Just a subdued reading off a page. Where is the strong leader in him? A PhD is not enough to lead a country. What concrete steps has the defense minister decided to take to protect India? I’d like to know.
Think of your cousin, or your newborn daughter, or your elderly father, slaughtered by a terrorist tomorrow. Think of a prime minister mumbling from a paper. Think of a government so clueless that 9 hours after the attacks, “security forces on ground are still awaiting the arrival of NSG commandos”. Does the Indian Air Force have any planes? How many hours does it take to fly in from Delhi? Think of Maharashtra politicians whose priority is not to protect the state, but to ethnically cleanse it of “northeners”. Think of the NYC of India, being attacked over and over, and the state not being able to do anything about it.
The Indian public needs to know, whats happening? Whats being done to protect the country now? What has been done after the 93 blasts? What is the defense ministry going to do this time? We need answers.
Enough is enough.
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