Jaipur Bombings - A Wake-Up Call for India
By Frank Hyland & Animesh Roul
This column is another in the ongoing series on the terrorist threat to India and the surrounding region by Frank Hyland and Animesh Roul.
The near-simultaneous terrorist bombings in the “Pink City” of Jaipur, India, on May 13th - numbering perhaps as many as nine - in retrospect reverberated most loudly, perhaps, in the halls of the Indian Government. In a nation fully 40% the size of the entire continent of Australia, with a greater number of indigenous languages (approximately 23) than the number of nations on several continents, a nation comprising 28 states and seven union territories, one would think that a centralized national office would exist to deal with the single most serious threat facing India’s citizens. Simply put, that has not been the case. The existing Counter-Terrorism organizations, of course, have done their best, especially considering the budgetary and philosophical constraints that have plagued analogous CT organizations in other nations in the past, including the US.
The negative comments on India’s approach and response began the very next day, with critics observing that, since 2004, India had suffered more loss of life from terrorist attacks than Europe, Eurasia, Latin America and North America combined. Others called for the reenactment of the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA), abolished by the then-newly elected government in 2004 on the grounds that it was draconian and that other laws already in existence and in force were quite adequate to the task. Opposition political parties such as the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), sensing an opening, quickly added their voices to the chorus, complaining loudly that the attacks the day before were a “dangerous indication” of the spread of terrorism into India’s heartland, and that the government’s “soft, weak and apathetic” policies had encouraged terrorist acts such as the Jaipur bombings.
On that same day - the day following the bombings - another observation began to emerge, this one from those involved in one way or another in India’s CT effort. The call was for the creation of a central point in the Indian Government to better coordinate the huge number of national- and state-level organizations involved in CT. As a knowledgeable retired police official then observed, India was struggling with a “structural” problem made even worse when an attack could be planned in one locale, implemented in yet another, and executed in a third location. Attempting to improve India’s ability to prevent attacks such as Jaipur, of course, raised the bar even higher for security and police officials.
Simultaneously, expressions of support for India and its CT efforts flowed in from around the world, including from France, the UK, and the US. The expressions of support, no doubt, included offers to assist India in forming and operating a centralized CT organization with an emphasis on terrorist threats and prevention.
Evidence that the swelling chorus of critics within India had at least been heard arrived, and in only four days following the bombings. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, himself, who had publicly resisted widespread calls for the reinstitution of the POTA, this time publicly issued a strong call for a central authority to deal with terrorism and other crimes. Singh’s address, somewhat surprisingly, made reference to “several states” within India which had expressed what he called reluctance to support the creation of such an agency. The Prime Minister demonstrated his assessment of the seriousness of the situation, saying that “new challenges have arisen and assumed a more menacing form.” Further, the Prime Minister agreed, there was a “systems problem,” in a clear recognition of the structural dimension others had addressed previously.
Additional calls for the creation of a centralized CT organization at the national level in India continue to the present and, notably, are apparently without much opposition. Taken in tandem with the international expressions of support and offers of assistance, it is likely that the Jaipur bombings will be viewed in retrospect as a watershed, a seachange-type of event, one that brought India into the present era in its efforts to combat “International Terrorism without Borders.”
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