Terrorist attack leaves innocent citizens helpless, injured, maimed and dead. Terrorists attack in those spaces that people do not have a choice to avoid like local trains, market places, office buildings and so on. People cannot but be here, because they must go out for work. This creates a sense of helplessness, anxiety, uncertainty and finally mental depression. Persons may have terrible psychiatric complications if they are under an unknown fear of death and violence. Besides, there is nothing that the citizen can really do to prevent such actions. Dependence on the State is absolute and complete and this makes citizens feel that the State does not do much. Solution seems difficult because there is no scope for the exercise of human agency. This is the statement of the problem.

Disease, hunger, road accidents are much larger killers than terrorism is. But terrorism is a planned action, controlled by some human beings, worse than any other crime because here the victim and the offender are totally unrelated. It is the total reasoned control of one human of an utterly unsuspecting innocent victim which is really the violence of terrorism rather than the actual incidence of mortality. This also makes capital punishment often seem more heinous than the act of murder, albeit the rarest of rare.

Why does solution on terror elude us all the time? A possible reason could be that the problem does not lie with terrorism per se; we are not worried when Taliban kills a Karzai, or Israelis and Palestinians hurl bombs at each other; the problem of terrorism is always the fact that the common man is affected. Hence we talk of safety as the solution to terror. We jack up intelligence agencies, perk up anti-terror squads, tell people to be vigilant, bold and brave. We talk of celebrating spirits of the cities that are bombed and in all this imagine that there are concrete persons like terrorists, a concrete agenda for war, a finite exercise between the citizen and the terrorists with definable and specific outcomes. When we present such rhetoric we are creating citizens into soldiers against the terrorists and since the terrorist is faceless all that we can do is to de-individualize her and place her into a category, which unfortunately becomes Muslims. Unknown to us, unwillingly such saber rattling of citizen fighting terror becomes communal, riotous, hate filled politics of witch hunting. Pakistan, with all our hate for that country because it divided our India, gets reinforced and rebuild with every attempt at our war against terror.

Acts of terrorism are even more difficult to contain because terrorism is not an act at all; it is the outcome of an activity, the end product when the activity ceases to exist. This is why, we cannot contain terrorism, we can only manage the aftermath. In other words, it does not seem to lend itself to preventive measures and one can treat only its iatrogenesis, meaning reactions of its aftermath.

The other imagined but failed solution is to look towards the State. A facebook status says when will the PM and Sonia Gandhi start thinking on how to address terrorism? I ask her, what are your suggestions and she insists that it is not for her to think of solutions. Not a single comment on the status even remotely attempts to think through the problem of terrorism.  So much for the citizen’s assertions against terror; we are not even willing to think and proudly affirm that ours is not to think why. Such positions give away the huge passivity that Indian citizens really are beneath our posturing that we are against the politicians, black money and some such thing.  

Yet another status says that how there should be an international positioning. This is a status I really agreed upon but when I sat down with pen and paper to actually write out what the contents of that international position should be, I could only think that if the world allows and helps us to launch a massive campaign in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Then I thought that I was assuming that terrorism was a war of Pakistan versus India, which it definitely is not. We have outfits such as the Indian Mujaheedin and Laskar-e-Taeba; and if smugglers, civil society activists, academic institutions, bureaucracies and political parties can have turf wars, then why not terrorist outfits? Indeed they must have internal rivalries and jealousies; then how can I imagine that Pakistan is the location of all such people. And if I do, then until and unless I am also highly bothered about terror attacks within Pakistan which are far more numerous and more lethal than the ones in India, I am again confused about the international positioning until and unless I offer my army and police to also defend citizens of Pakistan against terror. This is clearly again not a solution.

I may, as a part of the above mentioned solution, wage a war against all Islamic countries; like a Holy Crusade. But to fight three bombs, to add a vigilance zone of yet another third of a billion populations is far too much of an investment, not always economically viable.

The State can be very vigilant, checking and constantly checking citizens, purses, bags, umbrellas. But what about bombs in the metre boxes? Okay, then check every metre box, overhead and underground water tank, remove garbage bins to create heaps of rubbish in market places; ridiculous because every spot on earth cannot be invigilated and there would always be possibilities of slips. Nice way of creating jobs for security companies and equipment manufacturers but an ineffective way of dealing with the problem.

The State can catch terrorists at random and through speedy trials hang each one of them quickly and steadily; up the hangman’s fees and many would be more than willing to come. But many more will be born each day to avenge the death of their fellow persons. The chain of violence and counter violence must be broken and not sustained. When struck by electricity, you stand on a slab of wood to cut the circuit; punishing, invigilating, harassing will only reinforce witch hunting and the violence circuit.

Then what should be our solution? Agatha Christie once wrote a book called Why Did They Not Ask Evans? Evans held the key to a murder and yet it was she who everyone actually failed to notice. In all our posturing against terrorism, our attempts to link Muslims and terrorists, our imagination of Pakistan as the nation and ethnie of the terrorist, our idea that there is a concerted war out there against us without any idea of its purpose, we are missing out the crucial witness to the whole crime scene. Yes, the Evans in this case is the terrorist him/herself. Ask her/him. Terrorists have spoken a lot; it is our misfortune that we have never heard them because the language they speak has no resonance in our cognition. They have spoken and it is in their words that we have a clue to the solution. The book Black Friday written by Hussian Zaidi tells us the inside story of how some of the terrorists were created out of rather ordinary citizens. We will shortly return to this.

A facebook friend has tagged me a tearful note on how she had been in Mumbai while building up her life and how exactly those very places in which she spent many a wonderful moment have been torn asunder by bombs and that she could have been one of the victims and indeed among the victims could be some who were a part of her landscape in Mumbai. It is a very sentimental note, worth reading up. In this note she has listed out the various terror attacks in Mumbai, starting from the present to the earliest one on the Black Friday of 1993. This is the clue; just go back before that, before the time of the terror calendar. What happened before the Mumbai blasts? Think hard.

The Babri Masjid fell. After that riot after riot. Huge raths were drawn out announcing the need to wipe Muslims out from the face of the earth. Police engineered massive killing of innocent Muslims. It was a wipe out exercise. While Muslims are easily traced, arrested and condemned to death, no Hindu has really been punished for acts of violence against the society at large. The Babri demolition was without any provocation except that the BJP wanted to gain power over the Congress. In a complex set of forces, communalism and Hindu right formed an important mentality of the Indian middle class, and just as it supported a model of development through killing tribals, empowering both the army and the Salwa Judum to exterminate them, so many of us thought it was so smart to reclaim “our land” from Babur, a man who curiously lived on then despite the British interlude. The Muslims who were supposed to be our conquerors in this new construct of India, had to be fought and sent back. This great imagination of the Indian middle class produced a politics that hurt many a Muslim. Somehow, this time the hurt was much more than even the Partition, because during Partition the State was with them; now that no longer was the case. Muslim women who were raped sent bangles to Dawood to say how he the brother could remain silent when his sisters were being left unprotected in an “alien” land. The demolition of the Babri Masjid spelt the end of an India where Muslims too belonged. That was the start of the chain, the original source of electricity of the terror circuit.

When The PM or Sonia Gandhi think about how to quell terrorism, they think of punishing Hindu terror equally, calling foul their propaganda of a wrong done by Babur, ghostliest story upon earth. But they retreat for the fear of the Hindu backlash and the upper hand the BJP would gain by such a thing. I oppose such a solution because it again enlivens the violence circuit. Punishing the Hindus is not a solution.

Then what is the terror solution? The solution is to return back before where it all began. It began with the Babri, only the Babri can solve this. It is a solution that actually the citizen can undertake, all on her own, exercising her bravado, her agency, her spirit. Let every Indian irrespective of caste, class, colour, creed, language, region, age and gender contribute a rupee each, just a single coin to collect the billion rupees and restore the Babri Masjid. Let us, just as we go out on candle march go around with our boxes in schools, colleges, offices, villages, towns and cities to collect the single rupee to rebuild the mosque. This act of the India will stun the world; the reason for terror will dissolve.