A frequently heard comment after the Pune blasts was that had the Maharashtra brass not been so focused on protecting Shah Rukh Khan’s film, more police force would be available to Pune. Now while it is easy to empathise with the spirit behind this comment, given that the political will to do deal with such issues is often lacking, the connection drawn is worth scrutinizing. Prevention of terrorist attacks has little to do with mere police presence and in a case like Pune, where the attack came in the form of a bomb in a bag, it is virtually impossible to prevent an attack without either very good intelligence or very good luck. There are only so many public places where we can have baggage checks, and the truth is that in a lot of cases where these checks have been instituted, they have far too many gaps which any determined set of extremists can easily exploit. And when it comes to suicide bombing, without prior and specific intelligence there is very little that police presence can do that will be of any help.

In India, preventing terrorist attacks is a massive and extremely difficult enterprise that calls for sweeping and radical in all aspects of the administration . Since terrorism penetrates all aspects of everyday civilian life and comes without warning , tackling it is not a specific isolatable task, it requires the entire administrative machinery to be streamlined and functioning efficiently at all times. The reality on the ground is so far from what is needed that pinning too much hope on our ability to prevent attacks on a sustained basis is nothing but wishful thinking.

We have a police force that is demoralized and defines its role as a protector of the powers that rule the state rather than of the people who populate it. It is very poorly paid and offers abysmal working conditions, apart from being manipulated at will by politicians. Our borders are porous and the huge coastline makes prevention of infiltration extremely difficult. The Indian situation is very different from the American one both in terms of the nature of the problem and in the ability to deal with it. We cannot wish away the fact that we are a genuine federation of very diverse cultures and face fissiparous pressures from many sources. We have various separatist groups in different parts of India as well the Maoists in the heart of India. It is not easy to isolate and track possible sources of threat given the diversity and the complexity of the sources. While there are management issues that compound the problem, it is important to acknowledge that the problem we face is an exceedingly difficult one with very few easy answers.

The Pakistan factor complicates the issue for it gives to our reaction an edge of righteous hysteria. Unfortunately, there is not that much we can do on the ground to back this reaction. Going by current accounts, our options seem to include not doing things rather than doing them. Not talking to them, not inviting their players to a domestic tournament, not showing their television channels- these are the only actions we seem to take succor in. Any large scale military action is ruled out thanks to Pakistan being a nuclear state- and that leaves room for covert action, which even if it were to occur, would never find mention in the public domain.

Given this, perhaps it is time we begin to rethink our reaction to terrorism. Along with quiet and determined action on the ground, a more sober response to random acts of violence might be useful. Terror is created by our reaction to these random acts of symbolic violence; in some way it is a choice we make. For instance, our reaction to the death of 25 policemen in a Maoist attack is much more muted than that to the Pune blast and we have stopped reacting to deaths in Kashmir and the North East altogether. Acts of violence here do not translate into terror in our minds because we think of these as somebody else’s problem.

It is when the cities become targets of random violence that we erupt in shrill anger. Aided by media vituperation, we envelop ourselves in a blanket of fear and anxiety. At some stage, we will need to fight back terrorism by refusing to be terrorized. Otherwise we are allowing too much fear to be spread with very little input from the side of the terrorists. This does not mean that we do nothing but that we temper our reactions in keeping with the reality on the ground. As pointed out last week, the number of deaths on account of terrorism has sharply declined in the last few years.

A less hysterical and more realistic response is not a sign of weakness, on the contrary a noisy rant not backed up by action is. Complex problems need nuanced approaches; and nuance is something we don’t really seem capable of right now.