Readiness is all...

A policewoman checking students at the entrance to a college in Ahmedabad on July 30. Because of the threat of bomb attacks, citizens may have to give up some of the freedoms they have taken for granted.-AJIT SOLANKI/AP

It is ordinary citizens who bear the terrible consequences of terrorist attacks, so it is not wise to leave everything to the security agencies.

THE bombs that killed, maimed and injured hundreds in Bangalore and Ahmedabad recently and the astonishingly large number of unexploded bombs found by the police in Surat have been the subject of a good amount of comment. The incidents have provoked outrage and anger, a fair amount of which has been directed at the security and intelligence agencies.

There have been over 20 terror attacks, 14 in the past five years alone, since the horrific 1993 blasts in Mumbai that killed 257 people.

On March 13, 2003, a bomb attack on a suburban train in Mumbai killed 11 people; on August 25, 2003, two bombs exploded, again in Mumbai, killing 60 people; on August 25, 2004, a bomb explosion killed 16 people in Assam; on October 29, 2005, three bombs exploded within minutes of each other in Delhi, killing 66 people; on March 7, 2006, three bombs exploded in Varanasi, killing 15 people and wounding 60; on July 11, 2006, seven bombs exploded within minutes of each other, again in Mumbai, killing 180 people; on September 8, 2006, a number of bombs exploded at Malegaon in Maharashtra, killing 32 people; on February 19, 2007, two bombs exploded on the Samjhauta Express when it was near Panipat in Haryana, killing 66 people; on May 18, 2007, a bomb exploded at the Mecca Masjid in Hyderabad, killing 11 people; on August 25, 2007, three explosions, again in Hyderabad, killed around 40 people; on May 13, 2008, seven bombs exploded in Jaipur, killing over 60 people; on July 25, eight small bombs exploded in Bangalore killing one person and wounding over 15; on the same day a person whom the Tamil Nadu Police arrested, and who was found to be carrying detonators, wires and explosives, confessed that his group had planned to explode bombs in Chennai and Tirunelveli; on July 26, 17 bombs exploded in Ahmedabad, killing at least 29 people and maiming or injuring over 110; and a few days later over 20 unexploded bombs were found and defused in Surat.

It was necessary to give this long list for one basic reason: to set the grim, frightening context for this column. The security and law-and-order aspects of all this will no doubt be commented upon by experts. What one seeks to point out is that, first, the locations of these bombs have spread out over the face of the country and, secondly, that those responsible seem to be able to carry out their murderous attacks with seeming ease.

Does this mean that our intelligence agencies are unable to penetrate the networks that plan and execute these attacks? In Britain, though the security agencies were dealing with terrorists ethnically and culturally different, even alien to them, they nevertheless were able to penetrate the network that intended to carry out what would have been a catastrophic series of attacks and round its members up days before they could put their plan into operation. This group had planned to take explosives in liquid form, passing them off as soft drinks, on flights going to the United States and detonate them. The groups members were tried swiftly and sentenced. In India, the conviction and sentencing of the perpetrators of the 1993 bomb blasts happened only recently, and not much is known about when the others will be tried and sentenced, if, indeed, they have been caught.

B. Raman, a former senior executive of the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), Indias foreign-intelligence agency, said in a paper he published some years ago that on more than one occasion information given to our intelligence agencies was ignored. He cites two instances: One, during the regime of President Najibullah in Afghanistan, little notice was taken of the information given to Indian authorities that funds, arms and ammunition sent by the U.S. to the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) of Pakistan to fight the occupying Soviet forces were being diverted to groups in India. Later, in the early 1990s, information passed on by Israeli agencies, after they had interrogated a Palestinian who had studied in South India, of the possible existence of Islamic extremist cells in the south was, Raman says, rejected outright by the local police and intelligence agencies.

And now there are reports that Afghan and U.S. intelligence agencies had specifically warned their Indian counterparts of an imminent attack on the embassy in Kabul. All this is of great concern, reflecting as it does the seeming unconcern of the authorities to intelligence inputs. But that is, as one has said, for experts to analyse and comment upon. What is of immediate concern is the fact that we have to live with the knowledge that more bomb blasts could take place in cities across the country.

One is not saying that the possibility of more bomb blasts reflects badly on the efficiency of the security and intelligence agencies; it may or it may not. The fact is that ordinary citizens have to suffer the terrible consequences of such murderous attacks. This raises the basic issue that is of concern to everyone today: Can we afford to leave everything to the security agencies? As citizens, surely we have a role, however limited. We need to be engaged, to realise, first and most importantly, that none of us is exempt from the effects of the bombs that terrorists may explode in different cities.

Consequently, for our own protection, we need to develop a greater degree of awareness and take those steps that the security agencies have been pleading with us to take. These include taking note of strange or unattended objects and reporting them and taking the full particulars of persons who seek to rent apartments or houses and reporting these to the police for verification. It will make the quality of our lives different, more fearful and wary. We may even have to give up some of the freedoms we have taken for granted if we are to survive in these murderous times, when we are the enemy, not the armed, trained soldiers and security forces who patrol the streets from time to time.

Shakespeare often said things that appear prophetic or relevant, and the quotation that one cites below sums up the situation and the manner in which we must face it: If it be now, tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: The readiness is all.