The meaning of the Gurdaspur attacks

What the country saw in Gurdaspur was a police force in neglect as it made up its deficiencies of equipment and training with its courage A smarter force better equipped and trained would have tried to capture the terrorists alive An even better security and intelligence apparatus would have not let them come in so deep into India in an area bristling with the security apparatus In all this we were lucky to have averted a major disaster that could have taken place had the bombs planted on the tracks not been discovered by two alert Indians Darshan Kumar and Satpal This attempt was presumably the main purpose of the terrorists The group had ample time to plant the bombs and was escorted by a lookout team All of them ndash we do not know how many ndash have now disappearedPunjab Police fire at armed attackers who swarmed a police station at Dinanagar in the Gurdaspur district of Punjab on July 27 PicAFPThere will be endless dissections of who did it and why was it done Was it Islamic Sikh both or a criminal terror nexus Did they have local support We thought we had sent a highdecibel message with our raid into Myanmar Udhampur Gurdaspur Jammu and Anantnag were probing missions to test our responses Demanding release of suspects or complaining to the world will just not work The only response has to be equal and immediate if possible or at least at a moment and place of our choosing In the real world others respect a country that defends its interests relentlesslyUnfortunately our politicians continue to snarl at each other instead of getting together to meet the common menace and have politicised counterterror Sections of the media glorified yesterdayrsquos terrorist as todayrsquos martyr gave his burial the prime slot and relegated that of a most loved President to a secondary slot Worse Baljit Singh of Punjab Police and three other home guards who gave up their today for our tomorrow were quickly forgottenIntelligence is not about postevent analysis especially when the administrators and politicians have no interest in learning anything from these incidents Intelligence is about foreknowledge to try and prevent terror or security violations Ideally therefore a strong state ensures as far as possible that terror attempts are aborted before they happen or reacts appropriately and immediately both at the time of the incident and against the point of originMoreover attacks also occur because our systems allow them Security and intelligence reforms in our country have remained episodic and half hearted Implementation of reforms has remained at the mercy of competitive agencies protecting turf or apparatchiks sitting in the comfortable surroundings in Lutyensrsquo Delhi who understand little and empathise less with the needs of intelligence and security agenciesWe must accept that terror will never end We mistake a decline in terrorist incidents to mean terror has subsided or the reverse is assumed to be true Peace is a tactic for Pakistan and today ironically it wants to sit at the table accusing India of terrorism against them Pakistan for decades sheltered and encouraged Sikh terrorists and nurtured Islamic terrorists against India It has thrown drugs counterfeit currency and jihadis at us There is little point in blaming Pakistan for this It is in their DNA Their surrogates spoke of Caliphates in India long before the Islamic State talked of a Caliphate in SyriaIraqToday one reads reports that the Islamic State seems to have declared India as its next target if some recent American publications are to be believed If true the IS will use Pakistan and its jihadi hordes whose primary aim is to launch what some of them call Ghazwa e Hind as their base Besides Pakistan will get an alibi In the process however Pakistan will have moved from being a Deep State to becoming an ultraradical Salafist Islamic State This is Pakistanrsquos vulnerability and it is longer a choice it can make The only possibility that this can still be stopped is if Pakistanrsquos Deep State realises that it is not that it needs to hate India less it is just that it needs to love Pakistan more This is unlikely to happen and India must consider alternative ways of deterring Pakistan that is not restricted to periodic chatter Beyond a point a statersquos fortitude is seen as appeasementAre we ready for an eventual onslaught via Pakistan Perhaps the coming of the IS is only a scare but it is something no intelligence organisation can afford to ignoreThe writer is a former chief of Research and Analysis Wing RAW