The threat liberal secularists don’t see

The threat liberal secularists don’t see

FPJ BureauUpdated: Friday, May 31, 2019, 05:50 PM IST
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Army Firing (Pic only for representation) |

Intense pain is never prolonged. Prolonged pain is never intense. Pakistan has inflicted so much pain that we have virtually internalised it. It no longer shocks us if our western neighbor, as part of its policy to bleed India by a thousand cuts, keeps on launching one terror attack after the other.

We have become so used to it that it does not very often even make front-page news. The terror exporter very often relies on its countless agents in Kashmir and outside. Unfortunately, the internal discourse in India has become so vitiated by partisanship that even when the national interest calls for a concerted, united stand against terrorists and their masters across the border we are unwilling to abandon mutual recriminations.

Our politicians, unmindful of the huge danger to national unity, continue to merrily play their divisive games even as a large section of Indians openly aids and abets the agents of Pakistan our soil. It is tragic that for three days in Pampore, some 40 kilometers from Srinangar, three terrorists engaged the army in a fierce gun battle before they could be eliminated.

They had fired on a paramilitary convoy, killing a CRPF constable and injuring several others. Then they besieged the multistory Entrepreneurship Development Institute on the Jammu-Srinagar highway. From there they tormented special anti-terrorist forces, killing three members of the elite army commandos. This was a nasty blow since the Army had built a specialist squad for just this sort of attacks. The terrorists held off the army for three days.

Even after making allowance for the fact that they were heavily-armed and had the advantage of occupying a tall building, the inordinately long time taken to kill them suggests a lack of advance training for the security forces. Maybe handpicked army and paramilitary personnel can hone their skills further by training with the elite Israeli specialists. Pakistan will not abandon the export of jihadi terror in the foreseeable future.

Meanwhile, a very disturbing development which came into prominence in Pampore was the open support the local people lent to the jihadis. Groups of villagers most aggressively sought to prevent the movement of the army squads heading towards the besieged building, all the while chanting support for the terrorists and death for the army and India.

Indeed, from the nearby mosques taped songs and speeches hailing terrorists and condemning India blared out loudly even as the gun battle raged. This was a most audacious act in the long history of jihadi terror in Kashmir. Maybe the anti-India groups in Kashmir felt emboldened by the fact that if in the heart of the nation’s capital, actually in its premier university, anti-India and pro-Pakistan slogans could be openly raised, it was a cinch to raise them in Kashmir.

The so-called liberal-secularist groups ought to pause and ponder the question as to where the madness instigated by the ISI would stop if they wittingly or unwittingly continued to play footsie with terrorists and their supporters who swear by Afzal Guru and seek to avenge his death by visiting death on those who found him guilty after a long but proper judicial process.

Yes, even at the pain of repeating ourselves for the nth time we assert that there is a huge fifth column amongst our midst which overtly and covertly aids and abets the anti-India forces. A sub-continent most foolishly divided on the basis of religion has saddled India with the unfinished business of the Partition.

Kashmir is a most troublesome legacy of the wrongful division of the sub-continent. It is alright to say that we cannot ape the bad ways of Pakistan, but let our liberal, open democracy not become a millstone around the necks of our armed forces. Post 9/11, the most liberal, most transparent democratic system in the world added two words to the vocabulary of every literate person everywhere: Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

No, we are not suggesting even remotely that we have to go that far but we will have to devise a response which ensures that our own people do not prevent our armed forces from fighting jihadis and that our mosques do not blare out enemy propaganda and hail killers of innocents as ‘martyrs and heroes.’ Secularist-liberals ought to know that their ostrich-like refusal to see the threat actually jeopardises freedom and gives comfort to terrorists and their masters in the Rawalpindi GHQ.

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