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The merchants of darkness have stuck yet again. They have targeted the city of Hyderabad again within three months of the blasts at Makkah Masjid.
At least 34 people have been killed in two blasts, minutes apart, in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, officials say.
One explosion rocked an amusement park, killing at least nine people, while another blast hit a popular eating place miles away.
Some 50 people were injured in the incidents, in Andhra Pradesh state. [BBC News]
Meanwhile, the Congress government led by Y S Rajasekhara Reddy, apparently caught unaware, was left mouthing platitudes.
Chief Minister YSR Reddy after visiting Lumbini Park said the blasts were an act of terror. “I request everyone to maintain calm. This is definitely an act of terror,” he said.
The blasts “appear to be the handy work of anti-national elements. Our police is fully alert and the culprits shall be brought to book at the earliest,” he said. [IBN Live]
Indians would like to know who are these anti-national elements? Did the government knew about them? Does the government knows about them now? Was anything done to prevent this attack? Is the lack of progress in persecuting the culprits of previous blasts a reason why the terrorists have stuck again? Indians deserve to know answers to these questions.
During these 21 months we have been writing at this blog, major blasts have occurred at Mumbai, Samjhauta Express, Malegaon, Hyderabad and Varanasi. Not even one of them have been solved conclusively. Mirza Faisal writing at this blog sometime ago bemoans:
The government needs to answer that why till date there has been no solution to the various terrorist attacks. Why is it that while there have been one attack after the other throughout the country there has been no conclusion to any of these terror acts? While at the social level India has responded in an excellent way without a single act of violence as a response to these terrorists’ acts the government has somehow failed. [Indian Muslims]
The extreme ineptitude of the government in solving these cases gives ammunition to some that somehow the members of Indian Muslim community are complicit in these acts and the government is deliberately going slow on the investigations. Shekhar Gupta, a well-respected columnist and editor of Indian Express, wrote some months back:
While profiling of any community is bad, it should equally be imprudent to profile one for being a permanent victim. In the business of democratic, secular, one-law-for-all system of governance, all citizens and communities must be equal and innocent unless proven otherwise. Or let me put it even more simply: just because you cannot simply presume a person to be a terrorist because he belongs to a particular community, you cannot presume a suspect to be innocent just because he happens to come from ‘a’ particular community. [Indian Express]
The fact that there were equally gruesome acts of terror during the previous NDA government and the fact that none of them have been solved either is lost on the critics. Why wouldn’t the NDA government pursue the cases aggesively and punish the guilty? Already the BJP is calling these blasts a failure of UPA. Their own record in tackling terror is there for everyone to see. This is not the time to play politics. Indians need honest answers and they need them now.
We can’t afford to live in the shadow of fear.
