1. The technology of inflicting large-scale violence is becoming easier to obtain, and - per quotient of lethality - less and less expensive. This in turn yields three lemmas:

2. As the technology of violence has become more and more lethal and as it has been miniaturized, the final act can be done by just a handful, indeed just by an individual acting alone. That individual can bide his time. He can choose his place. He has to succeed just once. For that reason, it is not possible to completely insulate a country from the depredations of the terrorist. Superior intelligence is obviously the key to making things more difficult for the terrorist. But just as important is what the targeted society does in the wake of die attack: overwhelming, and visibly overwhelming reprisal alone will deter others from emulating the terrorist who gets through. Potential recruits, as well as the controllers of organizations and countries that backed him must be personally touched by the retaliatory measures.

3. While the final act can be executed by even a single individual, the terrorist requires, terrorism as a means cannot do without an extensive network; from nurseries that indoctrinate youngsters and forge them into lobotomized killing machines, safe-houses, couriers, informers, suppliers of weapons and explosives, those who will carry on businesses to earn the money needed for ammunition and arms, and the rest.

4. By now there are very many groups that have taken to terrorism.

5. They are increasingly intertwined: in India, as well as the world over - look at the range of locations from which persons were picked up in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The knitting together comes about in many ways. Groups in India are encouraged by agencies hostile to India to coordinate their activities; for instance, the ISI has been putting Naxalite groups, the various groups operating in the North East in touch with each other. Often the groups are brought together by "natural" factors; for instance, both groups may be running drugs - they may become couriers, suppliers, customers of each other; they may be securing arms for an arms supplier - and through him they may get to know each other; they may be using the same agents or routes for money laundering....

6. Among the technologies the terrorists have mastered is that of using the instruments of mass media. They use these to arouse sympathy for their cause — look at the shrewd way in which Hamas in Palestine, the Taliban in Afghanistan generate revulsion at what their opponents do by giving selective access to Western media to photograph civilian casualties. They are as adept at using the mass media as Greens and other activists for creating the echo-effect that so often leads policy makers to desist from taking stem measures.

7. "They are wrong-headed," many in Punjab used to say of Bhindranwale1 and his men, "but you can't deny their idealism, their readiness to die for what they think is right." The reality is altogether different- Terrorism has become lucrative business: in the Northeast, for instance, joining one of the terrorist organizations is a sure way to rake in a minor fortune - the proceeds from the "taxes" the organizations collect, the ransom they extract from kidnapping. The terrorists strive hard to cover their loot under the cloak of ideological, even idealist rhetoric: recall the religious rant of the terrorists in Punjab, and the reality behind it - what they were doing to young girls across the state, the properties that their leaders had amassed. Just as the terrorists strain to hide their loot, the State and society must bare the truth about them.

8. To de-fang the terrorist the country has to move on many fronts: their sources of money, those who give them facilities to stay and stage their operations, their sources of weapons and explosives, the network of their couriers. And me moves against these multiple targets have to be carried through simultaneously.

9. For these measures to succeed, all institutions of the State have to act in the same direction, indeed they have to work in concert. For the police to capture terrorists and for the courts to function the way our courts do, for them to go on using norms devised for quieter times, for the Army to track down caches of explosives while the customs men let in RDX - is to hand victory to the terrorists.

10. The lemma is inescapable: we cannot have a flabby State, a somnolent society and a super-efficient anti-terrorist operation. That no one gets convicted for the Bombay blasts2 for eight years is certain to encourage scores to sign up. Customs officers who take bribes for letting in gold one day are certain to overlook arms' consignments tomorrow. Police personnel who let Bangladeshis smuggle themselves across the border in return for bribes will constitute no obstacle to agents of the ISI making their way into the country.

Imagine what would happen if Osama bin Laden slips out of Afghanistan. If he made his way into Iran or China, the international alliance would be confident that he can be executed without any one knowing. If he went to one of the Central Asian countries, the allies would be confident that, if they wanted him for trial, he would be handed over. If he escaped into Pakistan, the allies would be confident that Pakistan could deliver either solution - hand him over or have his vehicle fall off a cliff in an accident. But what if he escaped into India? Acrimonious debates would explode. Should he be tried under the Indian Evidence Act or under the provisions of POTO?3 By ordinary courts or a Special Court? Is the Government not acting under American dictates as to what we should do? His rights as an under-trial...... Another hijacking .....fulsome focus on the wailing of relatives of the passengers.... Released in exchange for letting the passengers go.....

11. Not just the formal institutions of the State, society must act to that end - that is, the overwhelming number of individuals must be acting m concert independently of or in support of what the State is doing. The State apparatus on its own can no longer stem the Bangladeshis' demographic invasion.4 It can only be staunched by creating that atmosphere in the Northeast which will convince the potential infiltrator that he better stay away from this region, as it is hostile territory, a territory in which he is certain to lose life and limb.

12. Not just society in general, the ordinary, individual citizen too must be acting in concert with the authorities. The passenger who kicks up a fuss when he is frisked at an airport, the house-owner who insists that being advised to inform die neighbourhood police station about the new tenant is an intrusion into his private affairs - such individuals unwittingly help terrorism: on the one hand, the terrorist has an easier time establishing the safe-house from which he will carry out his next explosion; on the other, the average policeman is discouraged from doing his assigned duty.

13.For any of this to happen, the balance of discourse has to be reversed, literally reversed in India. Under POTO, die terrorists' lawyer is to have me right to meet him during interrogations. Under it a policeman doing his duty can be tried on me charge that he misused his authority and he can be imprisoned for up to two years - even if he is not convicted in die end, rushing from court to court, as die Punjab policemen are doing today, will be enough. Such are die provisions, and yet die Ordinance is being pilloried out of shape. Esoteric distinctions are being made: the Ordinance provides that me terrorist's property can be seized. "But that should be, ‘property acquired by him from the proceeds of terrorism’. It would be unfair to seize property dial he or his relatives may have acquired by legitimate means." How will we fight terrorism with this mind-set?

14. Temporary expedients will boomerang: giving handsome amounts to me SULPA5 cadre, giving them jobs, allowing them to retain weapons - these steps have resulted in Assam now having not one set of extortionists - ULFA6 - but two. For the same reason, were the USA, for instance, to do what news reports suggest it is considering doing - delivering a package of 7 billion dollars to a society and State as heavily Tahbamsed as Pakistan - it would only be compounding the problem - for neighbours of Pakistan in the immediate future, and for itself eventually. Events have repeatedly thrown up this lesson, and yet few heed it. One reason surely is that those who have a resource - say, money - or are particularly good at one thing - say, technology - instinctively think that that particular resource is what will do the trick.

15. The terrorist must be defeated at every turn, in every engagement. While contending with the IRA youth, Mrs. Thatcher rightly said, "Publicity is the oxygen on which the terrorist lives," Success is the food on which he multiplies: the strikes against the World Trade Center Towers will live in terrorist mythology for decades, they will lure recruits to lethal organizations for long. If the terrorist is able to, execute an operation successfully, he, his organization, their sponsors must be subjected to punitive retaliation of such an order that all of them down me line feel the costs of having inflicted the violence they did. In this matter, we must remember

Those who recoil from what war entails should mobilize the people at the first sign of extremist ideology so that the terrorists are forestalled, and the State does not ultimately have to move against them - in fact, the kind who shout the loudest once war begins are the very kind who in the preceding years have lent a verisimilitude of legitimacy to the fabrications of such groups.

16. The next lesson too is so obvious that its disregard can only be taken to be deliberate: it is a fatal error to judge what needs to be done in an area or in times infested by terrorists, by standards honed from normal places and quieter times. No judge, no human rights organization that today gives lectures about the conduct of the Police in Punjab has set out how the Police was to prosecute the war when the entire judicial system had literally evaporated: magistrates were in mortal dread of terrorists, witnesses - even those who had seen those dearest to them being gunned down in front of their eyes - would not, they could not come forth to testify without risking their lives. Far from falling prey to such specious assumptions, such habitual hectoring, we should beware of the oft- proclaimed device of extremist groups and movements: to use the instruments of democracy to destroy democracy. We should bear in mind Hitler's "legality oath" - he had sworn that die Nazis would use only legal means to attain power; he stuck to the oath. We should declare openly: yes, we will heed the rights of terrorists — but only to the extent to which they heed the rights of their victims.

17. Their access to arms, to money etc. is important, but even more consequential is the ideology of the terrorists: this is what fires them, by internalizing which they become killing machines; this is what beguiles ordinary by-standers into supporting them. More than anything else, this ideology must be exhumed. To accomplish this, there are four things to shun, and six to do.

18. Terrorism is just a weapon, it is just one among an array of weapons. To expect that by killing one band of terrorists, smashing one network, or even by reclaiming one country from the grip of an extremist band, one has taken care of the problem is suicidal. The aim of the terrorist is not to trigger one explosion, his fulfillment is not in carrying out one assassination. The explosion and assassination are instruments. The terrorist is himself an instrument, he sees himself as an instrument - of history in Marxism-Leninism, of me Will of Allah in Islam. For that reason to think that by giving in over Chechnya, by making concessions to Hamas, by handing Kashmir to them, one will effectively deal with "the causes of Muslim anger" is to play the fool. For the believer the "problem" is not Chechnya or Kashmir. The "problem" is that fourteen centuries having passed, the world has not yet accepted his creed - Marxism-Leninism, or Islam as the case may be. His object is not the real estate of Chechnya or Kashmir, or Jerusalem. His object - indeed, the duty which has been ordained for him - is to convert the dar ul harb, the land of war, that is the land the people of which have not yet submitted to that creed, into the dar ul Islam. The believer cannot remain true to his faith unless he persecutes the war till this consummation is achieved.

Ideologues and propagandists have a well-practiced division of labour in this regard. The directors of the ideology intoxicate believers with visions of how affairs will be ultimately - of how total domination will be secured over the whole world. The propagandists addressing the rest of the world, on the other hand, focus a narrow beam — on the next, single objective: Palestine, Kashmir, Chechnya. The beam is as blindingly intense as it is narrow: the aim is to convince ordinary folk that if only this one concession is made, all problems will cease. This focus and suggestion is accompanied by a systematic campaign - through front-organizations, intellectuals, fellow travelers - that raises an "intellectual" debate, and thereby foments doubts in the minds of me victims about the moral rights of the issue. The assault has two prongs. On the one hand violence and terror: these aim at tiring out the victims by inflicting death and carnage. Simultaneously, doubts are fomented in the victims developed about the righmess of their cause — these ripen into a rationale for capitulation; why not yield a bit on Kashmir?, after all; this one gesture will ensure peace, and we will be free to go our way after that; in any case, the world is not entirely convinced of our case.... Victory on that one item in its pocket, the group commences the same sequence on the next target: and doing so is but natural, for the issue - Kashmir, Chechnya — was just an instrument.

19. Believers will inevitably come to internalize this mindset – of unremitting violence — whenever the ideology has the following ingredients:

20. The faith has three further ingredients:

Faced with such indoctrination, two things are imperative:

21. The lethal potential of these ideologies is now compounded by the fact that States such as Pakistan have adopted terrorism as an instrument of State policy. Musharraf has said in so many words, "Jehad is an instrument of State policy." For such States this is a particularly attractive proposition: it is war on the cheap. The ideology that goes with adopting such means, the spread of the gun-culture that invariably accompanies such a strategy, eventually boomerangs - as the Talibanisation of Pakistan shows. But m the meanwhile the decision of a State to adopt terrorism as an instrument is certain to inflict enormous costs on its neighbours. What was said of Mussolini's goons is doubly true of terrorists: "they were nothing without the State, but with it they were unstoppable." In a shrunken world, all countries are the "neighbours" of such a State - as the US has been reminded by the 11 September attacks. The State that patronizes such governments or States should wake up to the consequences its patronage will foment. In any case, the immediate neighbours must.

Often a State can end up inflicting grave injury on another even when it does not bear active hostility towards its neighbour. For instance, the intelligence agencies and sections of the Army of Bangladesh are so closely linked to their counterparts in Pakistan that leaders and cadre of groups such as ULFA operate in complete safety from them. Bhutan and Myanmar exemplify a different sort of situation: the administrative grip of these countries over their own territory is so loose that terrorists operating in India are able to carve out their own areas of influence in those countries.

22. As important as getting at the State which patronizes terrorists is to get at their networks. Terrorists have established numerous fronts: mosques, madrasas, "research institutions", "charity foundations". The range of persons and organizations against whom the US and other countries had to move after the 11 September attacks - from those that had been involved in managing finances to those who had been providing safe houses - gave a glimpse of how the networks, even of just one brand of terrorism, now spread across the globe. Indeed, one of me devices they have mastered is how to use religion and "religious bodies" as fronts: Bhindranwale's conversion of the Golden Temple into a headquarters for terror, eventually into a fortress, the use of charities in Pakistan for raising laundering funds for jihadi groups; the orchestrated appeals from across the globe that the Americans suspend bombing during Ramzan.... For a society to survive, it must have die gumption to tear these veils apart, expose the fronts for what they are, and demolish them.

23. Terrorism constitutes a threat to all: what is being inflicted on one country today can be inflicted on another tomorrow. It is worse than imprudent, therefore, for a State to consort with States that patronize, finance, train, arm, give sanctuary to terrorists. For the same reason, and as the evil are so well knit. States should share their resources, in particular intelligence to combat terrorism. That is what should be. In the real world, a country such as India must remember that no one else is going to fight our war for us.

24. For fighting that war the sine qua non is: when the battle has been won, do not forget those who delivered you - as, to our shame and misfortune, we in India are in the habit of doing.