Author: Kanchan Gupta
Publication: Sunday Pioneer
Date: July 27, 2008
There's something obnoxious about the anchors
of 24x7 news channels, headquartered in Delhi, that makes you feel nauseated
and infuriated at once. Apart from pretending to know all and being disdainful
of those with a contrarian (and substantive) point of view, they also try
to impose their tuppence worth of opinion and vacuous concern on viewers.
This point was reconfirmed by a 20-something
anchor late Friday afternoon when I switched on the television set in my office
to catch the news on the serial bombings in Bangalore. The channel had managed
to get Ms Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, who heads Biocon and has played an admirable
role in helping India's biotechnology sector acquire an international profile,
to comment on the bombings. Ms Mazumdar-Shaw was expressing her disquiet,
and justifiably so, over the terrorist strike and how it would have an adverse
effect on the residents of Bangalore who were bound to feel unnerved and insecure.
At this point the anchor barged in: "Don't
you think it will affect foreign investors? Won't they flee Bangalore? What
will happen to all the investments they have made?" That's not the issue,
Ms Mazumdar-Shaw tried to explain, but was cut short. "What about the
foreign investors? What about their investments?" the anchor kept on
repeating these two questions, imitating Long John Silver's irrepressible
parrot. Look, we need not worry about investors right now, said Ms Mazumdar-Shaw
(did I detect just a hint of irritation in her voice?), adding, what's more
important is the security of the people; we should worry about whether people
feel secure. But the security of the people of Bangalore - or, for that matter,
any other part of the country - was of no interest to the anchor and possibly
of even less importance to the channel. So, the anchor piped up, "Thank
you for joining us. That was Ms Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw telling us how the serial
blasts will affect foreign investments and investors." Or words to that
effect. I reached for the remote control.
It would, however, be unfair to blame either
the anchor or the 24x7 news channels for such callous disregard for the fearsome
consequences of terrorist attacks which, as Ms Mazumdar-Shaw pointed out,
leave people shaken and shattered, both metaphorically and literally. If television
channels are eager to shift attention from serious and real issues related
to internal security to frivolous and bogus issues of 'investor confidence',
then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is desperate to ensure that 'distractions'
such as serial bombings and loss of innocent lives do not prompt questions
about the willingness of the Government he heads to combat terrorism. Just
how unwilling the Government is to curb and contain terrorism can be gauged
from the fact that Mr Singh is prone to losing sleep over the plight of terrorists
and rewarding their families if they are killed by security forces which,
he believes, violate human rights every time they despatch a jihadi to jannat
where houris wait with open arms. It is, therefore, not surprising that Mr
Singh should accuse BJP leader LK Advani of "sleeping" on his job
as Home Minister in the NDA Government even as the barbarians ran amok, causing
death and destruction.
There's a problem, though, with Mr Singh's
assertion. A tally of human lives lost in Islamist terrorist attacks outside
Jammu & Kashmir after he became Prime Minister (with Mr Shivraj Patil,
who thinks Mohammed Afzal is a lad gone astray and deserves no more than a
rap on his knuckles, as his Home Minister) will show that 598 people have
died till now, most of them in serial bombings. Many more have been maimed
and scarred for the rest of their lives. During the six years when the NDA
was in power, and Mr Advani was Home Minister, the corresponding figure was
237. Even the most rudimentary knowledge of arithmetic, as compared to the
awesome intellectual prowess of an economist who has served the World Bank,
would suggest that terrorist slayings during the NDA years were far less than
those during Mr Singh's watch. If we were to add the number of people killed
by Maoists, terrorists in Jammu & Kashmir and separatists in the North-East,
the total would cross 15,000. With a strike rate of 3,750 lives lost to terrorism
of various shades every year, the UPA Government's record is nothing to sneer
at.
Meanwhile, within hours of the serial bombings
in Bangalore, which coincided with - as PTI and UNI, mindful of the Press
Commission's guidelines, would report in the 1980s - 'members of a certain
community coming out of their places of worship after Friday noon prayers',
the Intelligence Bureau had put out, with the help of obliging journalists,
how it had warned the Government of Karnataka about an impending terrorist
attack. Minister of State for Home Affairs Sriprakash Jaiswal reiterated this
point when he told mediapersons, "The Intelligence Bureau had received
inputs that terrorists could target the cybercities of Hyderabad and Bangalore.
Both the State Governments were told to be on high alert." Alas, nobody
in Bangalore paid any attention to the IB's 'inputs'.
And for good reasons, too. It remains an abiding
mystery as to how much of the 'inputs' provided by IB is actually based on
actionable and credible intelligence; it is equally opaque as to how pin-pointed
this information is. To alert the Government of Karnataka about a possible
terrorist strike in Bangalore means nothing: Anybody with any intelligence
can figure out that given the city's high profile, terrorists would be tempted
to attack it, if only for the assured media coverage beyond India's shores.
Nor does it take an exceptionally bright mind to figure out that serial bombings
like those in Bangalore or in Ahmedabad late Saturday are meant to "spread
terror", as Mr Jaiswal has sought to enlighten us. Since imitation is
the best form of flattery, Mr Jaiswal is no doubt keen to emulate the Prime
Minister and accuse the BJP Government of 'sleeping' while terrorists go about
committing their deed.
But should we blame State Governments for
'failing' to act on intelligence 'inputs' that are often shockingly vague
and criminally inadequate? Are we to believe that the intelligence apparatus,
which has been harnessed for achieving political objectives like winning confidence
votes in Parliament, is collating and processing real time 'inputs'?
If the IB had been doing its job then we would
not have had to agonise over whether the next bomb will go off somewhere close
to us or our children. Ah well, we can lose sleep over the creeping threat
of terrorism. But I doubt if the Prime Minister is staying up nights so that
he can't be accused of sleeping on his watch, an accusation that Mr Singh
has hurled so effortlessly at Mr Advani.
