Mrs. Sonia Gandhi made a wild proclamation yesterday that India will defeat terrorism. We have two questions for Mrs. Gandhi. If she will be kind enough to answer them:
How does one defeat an‘ism’? Terrorism is a philosophy, a gorilla strategy, a feeling, an emotion, anything but something that can be defeated. You can defeat a person, an army, country. How do you defeat terrorism which, in most cases, is an instrument to inflict damage. For example, do you defeat a hammer or a person holding the hammer and swinging it to hurt people? We, the people of India, would like to know what Mrs. Gandhi meant when she made that statement. Was it a poor choice of words, or a more deliberate attempt to obfuscate and confuse.
1. If she meant terrorists, then our question is even simpler: How? Indian politicians, including our ancient foreign minister, our prime minister of convenience, and our incompetent ex-finance minister– now the incompetent home minister, all have made such claims before. In case they have forgotten, Indian people were attacked many times by Pakistani terrorists this past year. Some attacks were more lethal and some were less but they all achieved two objectives: They had a psychological impact on our nation; and they exposed the complete incompetence, ineptitude and sheer callousness of these so-called leaders and the government apparatus. Already, more than 2-months have passed since the Mumbai Massacre. What has our government to show for its“efforts” in last two months? Nothing, nada, zilch, cipher, zero, shoonya. So we ask our revered prime minister by proxy, Mrs. Sonia Gandhi: How?
2. How do you get past the explicit obfuscation of the Pakistani government, who completely outmaneuvers the sophomoric foreign minister? Where does Pakistan get off claiming that the evidence provided by Indian government is not enough to establish culpability of Laskar-e-Taiba. This statement simply puts Pakistan in the position of power (the judge) over India (the plaintiff). It would be funny if we were not feeling the misery of people who’s loved ones died in Mumbai that India is once again whining to Pakistan and getting nothing but thinly veiled contempt from Pakistan.
If we sound cynical then we are, just like our great nation that has taken so much hurt over the centuries but has held its head high while our elected officials have always let us down. How long we must endure these empty promises by our crass politicians who will say anything without meaning anything.
We’d rather expect that Mrs. Gandhi tell us the truth. If our elected officials are incapable of protecting our great country due to their callousness, ineptitude, avarice, or sheer indifference, please say it. Just don’t take us for fools.
