Losing the Battle against Terror

If “war” is the appropriate description for the struggle against terror that the country is now engaged in, then it is a war very different from the conventional understanding.

Four attacks in major cities in as many months – the latest being the lethal Delhi serial blasts of September 13 – may represent an escalation, but the war really began well before. The precise date chosen is a matter of almost arbitrary choice: by one mode of reckoning, the attacks on Srinagar’s legislative assembly building on October 13, 2001, and on India’s Parliament on December 11, 2001, could be deemed the formal start of hostilities. On another scale, the war began on October 29, 2005; middle class markets in Delhi were gutted on the eve of a rare conjunction when Diwali and Eid-ul-fitr were celebrated on the same day.