ONLY NATIONAL CHARACTER CAN FIGHT TERROR

Much has been said, aired and written in the wake of Mumbai terror attacks about the spontaneous anger of the populace. It is obvious that we have to be better prepared for terror strikes, like Israel and US, for example. The question is: " Can we ? ". I wish i could answer that with a resounding " Yes ! ". The fact is we cannot.

Another hoax, establishing a National Investigative Agency, bill passed in the parliament is befooling people again. Has any Anti-terror law in the world stopped terrorism ? Never. It is the political will and the national character of the politicians, which is more important. If you have love for your country, you are patriotic and not corrupt, terrorism can be controlled in one day. Melerly enacting anti-terror laws is fooling the country. If a politician, bureaucrat, policemen, intelligence etc. knows that they will be heavily punished, if they dont do justice to their duties, that is sufficient enough an act to make these people, control terror. This is the kind of legislation, which is required. Not National Investigative Agency. From where the people will come from in this agency ? Will they be imported or aliens ? It will be the same people, who are a part of our corrupt society. And corrupt societies cannot be patriotic.

One reason is that there is a close connection between corruption, National character, patriotism and security. A corrupt society, where corruption has seeped deep into the veins of every segment, can never be patriotic and secure. Politicians are only as good as the society. It's not only our politicians who are corrupt. A large majority of our bureacracy, govt. depts. police or judiciary are no less corrupt. In fact, we have accepted corruption as a part of life and have stopped addressing it as a cancer that it is.

Take our regional passport offices, regional transport offices, property registration offices and customs for example. All these 4 departments ( among a host of others ) touch our security in different ways.

Out side all the regional passport offices flourishes an industry of touts favoured by the deep rooted corruption of its officials. Even our ministers advice the pvt. sector for greater service orientation, the staff of the passport offices are not even required to wear their name tags, so that you cannot even complain about a corrupt employee who gives you the hardest time over trivia, even when he is willing to oblige a tout who may be producing a fake residential certificate.

What about regional transport offices ? Thanks to this serious rival of the previous department, we can get our licences without ever taking a driving test. The local driving school ( often an organisation of touts themselves ) and those passing for RTO officers can ensure that one does not have to be a real person to own a vehicle. So even if we had the best intelligence agencies, they cant ever trace that truck that expolded in the busy street or the car that was left behind by some terrorists.

Land or property registration offices can, of course, give a run of the sleaze money to any. This incidentally is the only office in the country where you pay a bribe to pay your registration taxes, These are also the institutions where if you are big enough crook, you can manage to register the same property in several different names and collect your sales proceeds from all of them, leaving those poor souls to fight legal battles for rest of their lives in another corrupt institution----namely, the judiciary. Thus, even a Dawood Ibrahim can acquire property in his own name, in our devil-maycare land, at will and also make those papers disappear at will, because his offerings to the priests can be substantial.

And lastly our customs. Relatively speaking, one might have had less opportunity to experience the full power of corruption here, unless ofcourse you have ever undertaken a transfer of residence from the west. The big ticket here involves a nexus between arms dealers and customs officials.

Hundreds of senior politicians, even senior defence personnel, judges and hordes of others have been caught on the videos from time to time with their hands in the till. As a society, we are incapable of acting upon such cases because our investigating agencies, our police and our judiciary together make a huge corrupt and ineffective nexus. Even our routine appointments in govt. services, down to appointments and even transfers of teachers and police constables, are not immune to corruption. If a constable or a teacher has paid a bribe for a position, what commitment can we expect of them on the job ?

What we fail to realise is that any corruption is inherently unpatriotic. And those who are unpatriotic cannot have the moral fibre to guard their society. And if we are unable to address this huge problem of corruption, there is no point blaming our intelligence wings alone.

Israel and US have an upper hand against terror, because they have an upper hand on rank corruption. As a people, we all need a night vigil not against terror attacks, but a day and night vigil against corruption. Corruption erodes patriotism and opens the gate for terrorism.