Author: Shankar Raghuraman
Publication: The Times of India
Dated: August 28, 2007
The US and UK may like to believe that they
are leading the war on terror globally, but the country that has had to face
the worst of terrorist attacks on its own soil, barring war-torn Iraq, is
India.
In fact India, since 2004, has lost more lives
to terrorist incidents than all of North America, South America, Central America,
Europe and Eurasia put together. All of these vast swathes of the globe lost
a total of 3,280 lives in terrorist incidents between January 2004 and March
this year. India alone lost 3,674 lives over the same period of three years
and three months.
In yesterday's edition of TOI, in our front
page lead report on the Hyderabad blasts, we had said that terror groups have
left India with perhaps the highest number of civilian victims of terror (apart
from wartorn countries like Iraq).
Later, on Sunday, when we looked in detail
at the worldwide numbers, we found that India not only had the highest number
of deaths after Iraq, but also the highest number of terror-related incidents
and injured among all countries (again, barring Iraq)-more than all the war
zones around the globe. India has been hit by terrorists at will and with
chilling regularity-Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Malegaon, Varanasi,
J&K-the list is endless.
It's only on one count-hostages taken by terror
groups-that India's at No 3, to Iraq's No 2. Guess which country was No 1?
Nepal, that too by a huge margin, thanks to large-scale kidnappings by the
Maoists.
Indeed, if one had to pick a terrorist hotspot
on the globe it would have to be South Asia. Outside of Iraq, 20,781 people
were killed in terrorist violence between January 2004 and March 2007, according
to data available from the Worldwide Incidents Tracking System (WITS) of the
US National Counter-Terrorism Centre (NCTC). Almost half of them, 9,283 to
be precise, were killed in South Asia.
