On a question raised by Nidhi Razdan on NDTV Social – On Left Right and Centre tom 10pm- a year after 26/11, any lessons learnt? Are we safer? Or is India a soft state? Do send in your thoughts
My Thoughts-
Lessons learnt -
1> Our defense and paramilitary forces are underfunded and poorly equipped. This is slowly changing, but needs to be MUCH faster.
2> We need more people to join the defense services. We are woefully understaffed. The amount of advertising that these forces do about hiring nowadays shows that it is not a lucrative career any more, even after the last pay commission revisions.
India is a soft state, no doubt about that. One year on, we are STILL holding Kasab as an undertrial. Why??? We are still not able to get the masterminds in pakistan, when everyone and their aunts have tald pakistan to act reponsibly and bring them to justice. There is a se change in attitude needed to respond to terrorism. We haven’t got it right in the last 30 years of extremism, and we still get it wrong. Feels odd to refer to a movie here, but listen to the words of the common man in A Wednesday – “My wife calls me every hour, did you eat, did you take tea…. Thats not what she wants to know, she wants to check if I am still alive.”
Frankly Nidhi, I do NOT feel safer in India. Yes, I got frisked in my own office the other day, but even as a security novice, I could tell you ways of getting into the airport or a defense installation with no documents and ill intentions. Let us not even talk of private offices and hotels. unless we have swift decisive action, uncompromised, unrelentingĀ and overwhelming force to deal with the terrorists and weed out the sympathisers deep within our own society, we will never get this right. Let us hope you and I are alive to see that day