INDIA has won the international community's praise for its deft handling of the internal situation after every terrorist attack. Even after the Mumbai attacks, described as India's Sept. 11, local authorities managed to maintain law and order and prevent any backlash against any particular group or community. But there is a darker side to India's war on terror as highlighted by a recent conference in New Delhi. This is the indiscriminate arrest of Muslims, mostly youth, after a terror attack. Some say lack of effective policing continues to be the chink in India's anti-terror armor. This is only one side of the story. The other is a tendency on the part of law-enforcement agencies to attribute blame without even a shred of evidence. All too often, they drop hints assigning blame to some Muslim organizations, real or imaginary. Sometimes this is based on some anonymous calls or e-messages supposedly coming from organizations claiming responsibility for the attack. A too obliging media give wide publicity to such rumors and statements by officials some of whom name culprits or suspects even before the first body has been removed from the site of a bomb blast or terrorist attack or the first injured person has been taken to hospital. In the aftermath of the bomb blasts at Ajmer Sharif Dargah (2006), Malegaon (2006), Makkah Masjid (2007) and Samjhauta Express (2007), Indian intelligence agencies claimed that these gruesome attacks were the handiwork of “Islamist terrorist groups". As is only to be expected, this leads to communal polarization. Many Muslim men are picked up, illegally detained, tortured and jailed. Some die in police custody, some are killed in what the India media euphemistically describe as “encounters" with police. There has not been any perceptible change in the attitude of the police even after Swami Aseemanand's confession confirmed the connection of some Hindu groups with terrorist organizations. True, most of the people arrested and tortured by police were later acquitted by courts across India. The state administration in Andhra Pradesh has announced compensation to those wrongly confined in connection with the Makkah Masjid blasts. But this is of little or no consolation to those arrested and humiliated by the police. Their lives and careers have been irreparably damaged. Even their families suffer. Neighbors and even close relatives shun them. Such is the extent of the lawlessness and violation of human rights in India as part of the war against terror and Maoists that a prominent political weekly in the country in its latest issue ran a cover story posing the question, “How can Chidambaram (Minister of Home Affairs) sleep well at night?" Well, neither Chidambaram nor his officers appear to be losing any sleep over the children butchered in the name of fighting Maoists in Chhattisgarh or the Muslims hounded as part of the battle against terrorism in Bihar. However, the Indian public can sleep secure in their beds only if the government changes its tack, and realizes that it is following a flawed strategy. The Indian government needs to be resolute in its fight against terrorism, but it must understand that brute force employed without imagination can prove to be disastrously counterproductive.
