What more must Pakistan and its terrorists gangs do before this BJP-led government stirs itself to combative action? We have already seen and suffered twelve long years of bloody mayhem in Kashmir, loss of more than 54,000 lives, unending and escalating terrorist attacks--in towns and villages, on buses and railway stations; on hapless innocent Muslims and Hindu pilgrims and on entire minorities of J&K; on police posts, army convoys and military establishments in the state; and, even more spectacularly, on such fortified and proud monuments of the Indian nation as Delhi’s Red Fort-and now the national parliament.

What will it take to make the lumbering Vajpayee dispensation give up its procrastination in the face of the grave provocation from the diabolical ISI-Mullah machine in Musharraf country? When will “the right time” come to deal a decisive blow to the murderous fanatics and mercenaries? Doesn’t the government see that its inaction is causing a heaving ground swell of bewilderment and anger in the country?

When the J&K assembly was bombed, the prime minister speedposted a letter to the US president: See what these bad boys have done, please do something about it. Yeah, very bad, said the Big Guy in Washington, but you should continue to be a good boy and do nothing. So, predictably, we did nothing. For domestic effect, Mr Vajpayee said something about India’s patience not being unlimited. Now parliament is attacked and the prime minister declares that the non-unlimited patience is wearing thin. Yeah, ok, says Uncle Sam, but don’t take any retaliatory action. Having thus spake, Uncle Sam returneth to his “global war” against terrorism in some yet unbombed caves of Afghanistan!

So while the United States goes across continents to bomb the hell out of a poor country in search of one Osama bin Laden, we cannot strike at the Laden-Musharraf bases in PoK, an area which we claim and which legally is part of India! In fact, there would have been no PoK had we done what any other country would have done in the circumstances when Pakistan first invaded Kashmir--thrown them out of the whole state rather than accept the motivated West-dictated ceasefire even as the invaders were fleeing for the lives.

It has been an unbroken caravan of blunders ever since. Space does not permit cataloguing them all but seeing how the original injury has gone on bleeding one cannot cease to regret such blunders as giving up critical areas in Kashmir recaptured in the 1965 war; believing the willy Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto that he would bury the Kashmir hatchet forever and therefore again returning all the captured areas, and much else, even when Pakistan was down on its knees in 1971; being content (undoubtedly under US ‘advice’) with simply retrieving, at the cost of several hundred lives, the areas seized by Pakistan in Kargil, rather than dealing them a punitive blow across the LoC.

It is unfortunate for any country if its leaders lack foresight; infinitely worse if they also lack hindsight. Recall how our present-day leaders while in opposition had lambasted those in power for compromising national honour and national interests in our dealings with Pakistan. Catapulted to power, the same people have made a shambles of our Pakistan policy, abandoned independent thinking and under American encouragement, adopted infinite restraint as a cardinal creed. Newton discovered a law of Physics: Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. This government has evolved its own variation: Every action (against India) has an equal and opposite inaction!

And it has embellished it with high rhetoric of the inane variety. To take the latest, the fidayeen attack on parliament, like all previous suicide attacks, has been described (by both ruling and some Opposition leaders) as “dastardly/cowardly”. Utterly and even insanely perverse, yes, but, pray, what is cowardly about a man prepared to die for his cause? “The worst terrorists attack”? Extremely sad that half a dozen brave men died in thwarting the attack, but the fact is that in terms of casualties there have been far greater tragedies at the hands of terrorists. “Unprecedented in the annals of democracy worldwide”, says the PM. Would it have been a less serious outrage had it been precedented? (And wasn’t the bombing of the Kashmir assembly a preedent in the sense intended?) it was an attack (PM again) on “the largest democracy” in the world. Would it have been less condemnable had we been a smaller country?

What purpose do such utterances serve? Is it a case of unconscious cerebration? Whatever opinion one may have of the intelligence quotient of our political establishment, it is difficult to believe that the pedestrian, cliche-ridden reactions are without purpose. And the only purpose that offers itself is to evoke certain alleged sensibilities in the West generally and in the US in particular by indulging in the “democracy” rhetoric. If this is indeed the purpose then we are being naive in the extreme. When has the West and the US especially really bothered about democracy abroad? To believe that the US will sit up and at last come to our aid because of the “attack on the symbol of democracy” in India is to betray political juvenility.

The United States is going to do nothing of the sort--and it is amazing that we don’t realise this even after the experience of the last three months. Recall the government’s touchingly innocent expectations that President Bush’s avowed resolve to destroy terrorists and their sponsors and harbourers everywhere would mean action in PoK and against Pakistan as well as in Afghanistan. That the so-called global war against terrorism has turned out to be nothing more than a revenge localised in Afghanistan does not seem to have opened our eyes to American duplicity.

Even after the latest terrorist outrage in New Delhi, witness the reaction in official Washington. This time it is not just the perennial advice to exercise restraint. They want us to desist from action across the LoC and, ridiculously enough, share the evidence with Pakistan and hold a joint investigation into the attack! What else should our new-found bosom pal say to make us realise that it is no friend of ours, nor honest about its vow to fight terrorism that affects other countries, least of all Pakistani terrorism against India? In the event, it would be perfectly in order for New Delhi to advise the Bush administration, even now when it has already wreaked havoc on Afghanistan, to share its own evidence agains the WTC terrorist attack with the Taliban and hold talks with Osama bin Laden on how to deal with his Al Qaida!

It would need someone like an Indira Gandhi or a Sardar Patel to do this. No one in present-day New Delhi has the spine to stand up to American chicanery. But a question they cannot escape is: Where do we go from here? Continue to look up to Washington and hope that it may yet come to our rescue Or, at least, permit what we may decide to do on our own? If the answer is yes, then we must be prepared for an endless wait and, meanwhile, face more depredations, more attacks, more killings by Pakistan’s terrorist network. Are we going to accept this?

The longer this government fails to take the necessary action that less representative it will be of the Indian public opinion. As reported in newspapers, the comments and jokes among the people in Delhi’s Connaught Place immediately after the attack on Parliament (“Attack on MPs in public interest”, “Nation’s hopes rest on the sixth grenadier holed up inside”) may raise a laugh but the government and the entire political set-up would do well to discern the seething popular anger behind the ‘black humour’.

Enough is enough, Enough of prevarication, enough of kowtowing to the US, enough of hollow rhetoric, enough of petty politicking. We need to and we must now launch condign and conclusive action against the terrorists and their camps, and punish their masters and mentors. Never mind the so-called world opinion, never mind who says what. We have done what was right by us in the past--in Hyderabad, in Goa, in Pokharan, in East Engal. Some powers fretted and fumed on each occasion but sooner than later accepted it all. We gave them no alternative. This is what sovereignty is all about.

A country unable to defend itself is fated to lose, but a country unwilling to defend itself deserves to suffer. Action against the terrorists and Pakistan will not be easy or without costs, but hasn’t our “restraint” already cost us a great deal?r