| Blasts in India |
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| Sunday, 20 May 2007 | ||||||
Friday's blast at the Makkah Masjid in Hyderabad, the capital of Andhra Pradesh in the south, is the third such attack on Muslim worshippers in India over the last year. There is no doubt that the attacks were designed to trigger communal clashes between Muslims and Hindus. That should make the identification, arrest and punishment of the evil forces behind these crimes the topmost priority of the security forces. Unfortunately, this does not seem to be the case yet. They are still singing the old songs that had mass appeal at one time. True, after this third massacre, the Indian authorities have not, as in the past, immediately blamed Pakistan-based terror organizations, their Indian satraps and Islamabad’s intelligence service, the ISI. Home Minister Shivraj Patil, visiting Hyderabad in the wake of the blast, warned that nothing could be certain and counseled people to stay calm while the police investigated. Inter-communal violence, he said, was just what the terrorists wanted. The violence immediately following the explosion, which had already caused panicking police officers to open fire on the crowd showed how justified Patil’s warnings were. However, such sentiments, laudable as they are, are not enough from the country’s home minister whose responsibility it is to prevent such things from happening. We have it on the authority of Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Rajashekhar Reddy that the central and state governments were fully aware that “terrorists” were targeting Hyderabad. In that case, Makkah Masjid should have been one of the places that should have received first attention from the agencies. Why was it not done? What is more worrying than such intelligence failure is the tendency on the part of the authorities, at government and security levels, to pretend that they have the answers to all questions. Even while Patil was issuing his warning against speculating about the identity of the terrorists, there was a flurry of statements putting the blame on a number of suspects — all Muslims. Bombing mosques is a recent development in India’s security scenario. Two explosions occurred last year — at a mosque in Malegaon in western India in which 32 people were killed, and at the Jama Masjid in New Delhi. Investigating agencies and analysts said at that time that members of the banned Students Islamic Movement of India “could have been” behind the blasts in coordination with Pakistan-based militant groups. These “could-have-been” speculations are a dangerous game. SIMI, Pakistan’s terrorist outfit Lashkar-e-Taiba or any other Muslim organization could have been responsible for the blasts. So could have been any of the many radical Hindu organizations whose record for violence is not any less revolting. So, the right course for the authorities when such incidents occur is not to rush to the media claiming knowledge they do not have. That might get them two minutes of fame on the TV screen. But it will, repeated one time too many, achieve for the terrorists what they tried to get with their bombs: a burning India. These are times to keep investigations going and mouths shut. Source: Arab News
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