The Bigger Threat From India's Blasts

India is reeling from the impact of two bomb blasts within four days - and from the revived memories of serial explosions of the nineties. And no one has greater reason to rejoice than political forces that seek to thrive on a selectively defined threat of "terrorism."

The far-right forces could not react immediately with a familiar show of passion and indignation to the blasts in a Sufi shrine and a cinema hall in two major states of north India. The political front of the "parivar" (the far-right "family"), the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), is in power in both states. It rules picturesque Rajasthan and shares power with regional party Shiromani Akali Dal in Punjab, the country's wheat and rice bowl bordering Pakistan. The BJP, however, is beginning to recover from its initial embarrassment and resume antiterrorist rhetoric of a predictable kind.

Before coming to that, a brief look at the blasts. Disbelief and dismay were the spontaneous response of millions to the explosion of October 11 in the shrine of saint Khwaja Moinudeen Chishti, a major draw for tourists as well as devotees from all faiths. The shrine is a symbol of India's famed unity in diversity as well as its still-flourishing version of Sufism. The bomb was timed to go off at the time of Iftar, of the feasting after the day's fasting during the month of Ramzan, when crowds thronged the holy premises. One person was killed on the spot and two died in the hospital.

On October 14, the day of Eid marking the culmination of Ramzan and a Sunday, another bomb went off inside a cinema hall in Ludhiana, a bustling industrial town of Punjab. Considering the holiday crowd, it seemed a miracle that only seven lost their lives.

Investigations have thus far yielded no concrete results or even credible clues. Sections of the media and some police officers, along with politicians who could not keep away from the crime scenes, of course, waited for no proof to attribute the blasts to Kashmiri terrorists with "cross-border connections." In the Ludhiana case, the authors of instant investigations also hastened to see the hidden hand of Babbar Khalsa International, an organization of Sikh secessionists supposed to have been defeated decisively two decades ago.

The two incidents could not have been timed better, if the purpose was to present terrorism as the top-priority issue before the country and the people. They came when the newspaper columns and television channels were already reopening old wounds. Reports of long-delayed verdicts of special courts on serial bomb blasts of 1993 in Mumbai (formerly Bombay, the country's financial capital), and of 1998 in Coimbatore (a textile city in south India), have already been occupying much media and public attention. Debates were already raging on whether any of the accused deserved sympathy or even due process of law.

Such continuous talk of terrorism round the corner creates a collective siege mentality and, thus, a tailor-made situation for the BJP and its nominally nonpolitical band. It creates conditions that help make a monster of the country's Muslim minority and give the Hindu majority the complex of a harried minority.

It creates an atmosphere in which several obvious questions are not asked. Amid the smoke and debris, few ask how many more are killed on India's bumpy roads daily than in blasts over months. Not many care to compare tolls in incidents of terrorism with the country's infant mortality rate or with figures of deaths due to floods and droughts over large regions still denied elementary infrastructure.

Not many more put less-basic but very logical questions to minority-bashers. Immediately in the wake of a series of such blasts, it sounds impertinent to ask about the extraordinary delay in bringing to book the guilty of the Gujarat pogrom of 2003, which claimed a toll of thousands of lives. Questions about the unsettled cases of the anti-minority violence of 1992 in Mumbai, in which many more were killed than in the subsequent serial blasts, are just shrugged off. Posers still remain unanswered about repeated blasts, killing four in all, in a town called Nanded in the State of Maharashtra in April 2006 and February 2007, the police showing no particular interest in investigating incidents apparently involving a Hindu-right organization.

The topic of terrorism provides a major opportunity for fresh attempts at reversing the India-Pakistan peace process, such as might have survived the various vicissitudes in both countries over the recent past. The far right and even official agencies have never waited for any formal inquiry to blame any bomb blast instantly on "cross-border terrorism." The line, however, was slightly altered after the serial train blasts of July 11 2005, in Mumbai. The hand of "local jihadis" was seen behind the horrendous incidents described as India's own 9/11 or 7/7. The local groups were subsequently projected as "sleeper cells" with "cross-border" or even "al-Qaeda links."

Not only the bureaucracy under the BJP's control in Rajasthan and Punjab, but also New Delhi now sees the same nexus behind the Ajmer and Ludhiana blasts. New developments in the neighborhood, it is suggested, compound the cross-border dimension further.

Reports, obviously based on official briefing, say that the latest blasts are a result of a perceived loosening of state control over the jihadis in Pakistan. President Pervez Musharraf may have faced much flak from the same sources earlier for providing succor and sanctuary to anti-India terrorists. Dilution of his authority is now presented as a direr threat to this country.

These reports do not represent a responsible official attempt at relaxation of the blast-wrought atmosphere. They, on the contrary, talk of a warning by intelligence agencies of a flurry of further terrorist strikes as a foreseeable possibility.

The BJP and its allies are seeking to seize the opportunity for a stepped-up campaign against New Delhi's "softness" on terrorism. They are reviving their demand for a restoration in another form of a draconian anti-terror law which the former government of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee enacted in compliance with a call and a command from the George Bush administration following 9/11.

The Congress Party, which heads the coalition now in power in New Delhi, promised to scrap the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) in its election campaign of 2004. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's government has kept the promise. It remains to be seen, however, whether it will continue to resist the BJP's demand, expected to grow by several decibels in coming days.

The entire issue may come to occupy the political center stage in the months ahead. The BJP has made it clear that "terrorism" will be its trump card in the coming state-level elections in Gujarat, where Chief Minister Narendra Modi, author of the grisly pogrom of 2002, will seek yet another term of office. The party hopes to make political capital of the issue also in the run-up to the general election of 2009, expected to begin soon after the Gujarat polls in November.

After Ajmer and Ludhiana, there is much talk in the media and elsewhere about the need for vigilance against terrorist strikes. Freedom from terror, the people are being told, lies only in a future of metal detectors and police frisking anywhere and everywhere. Not much is heard, as of now, of the far more vital need for vigilance against the threat from the far right's "anti-terrorism" to peace in India and South Asia.

A freelance journalist and a peace activist in India, J. Sri Raman is the author of "Flashpoint" (Common Courage Press, USA). He is a regular contributor to Truthout.

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