Asks Arun Shourie in the 1st part of his latest series of articles.

I won’t quote anything from this incisive article but will make a few comments.

Perhaps, this state of affairs was waiting to happen. When the founding fathers (a much-trumpeted phrase but sounds empty and hollow today) envisaged a free India, they put in some recommendations that guaranteed that every citizen was entitled to be safe within Indian borders. What then, actually happened in all the intervening years that has led to this sorry situation?

Perhaps the greatest mistake was to give supremacy to the Parliament over the Constitution. Thus, any act could be passed by the sheer strength of numbers. Examples are abound: abolition of privy purses, bank nationalization, land “reforms” act–these were essentially populist measures, which pitted citizens of the same country against each other: in a land that boasts of unity in diversity. Privy purses ensured virtual starvation of some of the already-impoverished princes, bank nationalization, done in the name of serving “social objectives” ensured complacence and institutionalized incompetence apart from massively draining the exchequer (anybody tell me the total of the non-performing assets?), and the land “reforms” act ensured legal theft of land. Steal from one section of the society and hand it to the other. And I’m not even talking about reservations, save for a small question: why should reservations be extended to the private sector? 57 years weren’t enough to “bring the downtrodden, oppressed masses” to the mainstream?

But that’s the politics of divisiveness. To hell with national security and other petty concerns.

For every terrorist that is shot, there are a hundred “human rights” petitions; for every terrorist/accomplice/whatever who is interrogated, a hundred “humanitarian” NGOs raise cyclones of protest of “police atrocity.” Most of these protesters have powerful friends in the media, or are in the media itself. The government buckles. No action is taken. It is no secret that the media is dominated by a huge smear of Red.

However, what is most worrisome in the present situation is that the Reds have enough clout (although grossly disproportionate to their numbers) to bring down the government at the Centre. Like I have noted in an earlier entry, is it a mere coincidence that Marxist/Maoist terrorism is on the rise in India over the past 3-4 months?

Meanwhile, I found an excellent site that covers South Asian terrorism very well. Do check it out. I’ll add it to my blogroll.