A soft state is a soft target. This is the brutal, inescapable lesson of Mumbai. The point is not whether our soldiers and policemen and firemen battled selflessly against terrorists. They have always done so. But rather what it is within our system that makes us so vulnerable to repeated attacks from bomb-throwing, gun-wielding thugs and hoodlums. Arun Shourie was right on the money when he said, “For God’s sake, don’t keep running to Mummy.” Those words should be etched in stone on the side of every government building in India. It is a powerful exhortation to Indians not to blame others or go running to superpowers whenever we are under attack. This behaviour is for sissies.
That India is a target and has been a target – for whatever geopolitical reason – has never been in doubt. But why is it such a soft target? Shourie’s plea is that we look within and buffer and strengthen our resolves from within in such a way that any country or terrorist group will think a million times before sending a bunch of 20-something murderers to spray bullets and bomb public places.
This is also the voice emanating strongly from the special reports that tackle this issue in this month’s gfiles – a nation hopelessly fractured and divided. No one has done this to us. We have done this to ourselves. Our highly politicized governance has played havoc with every institution in which a strong state should be reflected – police, military, security, bureaucracy. Our will to act forcefully and with determination has been emasculated by political convenience, corruption, venality, and putting self above service.
Only when two brothers quarrel can an enemy of the family enter your house. In India brothers are not only quarreling but are at each other’s throats, the family be damned. Outsiders see for themselves our inability to tackle a two-bit demagogue like Raj Thackeray when he wants to pull the idea of India apart. They watch with glee how we create our own Bhindranwales in Punjab, in Darjeeling, in the South, in our Northeast. How a band of Gurjjars seeking tribal status can block all access to Delhi within 12 hours. How the Amarnath shrine in Kashmir is turned into a vote-catching football that leaves Indian deaths in its trail. How politicians quietly back “liberation” movements in Assam and Mizoram. How parties in Tamil Nadu openly support the terrorist LTTE that assassinated Rajiv Gandhi. How those who run this are supported by and then protect criminals and accused murderers from arrest and prosecution. Governance is paralysed. The quintessential symptom of a soft state is a paralysed governance.
If you were looking at India from outside, what would you see – a country that is riven with secessionist and fratricidal tendencies, promoted by the ruling elite for political and personal gain, in which the steel frame of governance, even though it knows what to do, is unable to do it because it has been stymied. Starting from the 10th Century, this is what foreign invaders and occupiers – Ghori, Ghazni, Abdali, the Dutch, Portuguese, French, British – perceived. And this is what India’s enemies now see. A country ripe for the picking.
No amount of tinkering with the system, like making new laws or setting up a national intelligence agency, will stem the rot. The need is not for palliatives but for rebirth, rebuilding, and recreating a nation that must reflect the might and bravery of its ordinary people rather than the effete, self-serving and venal interests of its rulers.
