IBNLive Chat: 'It's time India took on terror by the horn'

Do the frequency of bomb blasts at public places and terror attacks suggest that India has become a soft target for terror? How deep-rooted is the terror network in the country?

Are our intelligence agencies failing to get the better of these subversive elements? VK Shashikumar, Editor of Special Investigations, CNN-IBN, addressed these issues in a live chat on IBNLive.com on October 15.

Here we reproduce the full text of the chat:-

Varun Bharat: How can a normal individual contribute to stopping terror?

V K Shashikumar: By being vigilant and reporting suspicious activity to local police authorities. In the Ajmer blast, a blue bag containing explosives was found. The terrorists could not set that off, otherwise the casualties might have been higher. This bag was left behind by someone. So if citizens are vigilant, somebody would have spotted the terrorist leaving the bag behind. We have to be alert citizens and help law enforcement authorities by coming forward and reporting suspicious activity.

B Jayahander Rao: Dear V K Shashikumar, The terrorist attacks are becoming routine now-a-days. The governament and the investigating agencies are not doing much to prevent these acts of terror. If these acts increase in number and spread across India, how do you think this will impact the Indian economy and especially the stock market?

V K Shashikumar: Terror attacks are, indeed, becoming routine. This is because unlike the earlier phase of stand alone terrorist attacks, terrorist groups, militant organisations, insurgent groups, sub-national overground movements and terror financiers, including big criminal underworld groups, have all fused in network-centric operations.

So, if earlier the LeT or JeM carried out stand alone attacks using their own capabilities, now they depend on each other, optimise the use of their resources, "outsource" terror functions to other groups and carry out terror strikes with a high degree of coordination.

So, on the ground this means that the recce of a terror operation location is carried out by someone, the financing of that operation comes from somewhere else, the plan is formulated in some other place, it is communicated to someone else and finally executed by another group. In most cases it is carried out with the help of some local elements. Local elements also provide shelter and, therefore, anonymity.

Terror groups across Pakistan, India and Bangladesh have networked. They in turn have networked with subversive and anti-national groups located in India, who believe in the path of violence.

So, Maoists are reportedly joining hands with fundamentalist groups, the insurgent groups in the north-east are linking up with terror groups because by networking every member of the networked group gets greater outreach and by extension greater power.

Kasturi Ray: Each time we hear of terrorism, it's an intelligence failure. In reality, how does protect such a widespead and diverse country? Don't you think we need to have a special corp in the police whose only responsibility would be to provide additional support to the team on the ground, in areas that are susceptible?

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V K Shashikumar: Intelligence sources tell us that in the last six months around 11 terror strikes were foiled. This means many innocent lives were saved. Within the limited resources available to our intelligence agencies, it would be reasonably fair to say that some good work is being carried out in counter terror operations.

However, your point is valid. In a large, diverse country like ours, bedevilled with complex problems, a lot more has to be done to strengthen counter-terror methods.

For instance, the intelligence bureau has around 20,000 staff strength. Internal security and active counter terror operations form a big part of IB's mandate. But it needs better trained personnel to put in place in active counter terror operations, which includes giving them a 21st century technical platform for effective intelligence gathering, so that more and more sleeper terror modules are busted.

In fact, our forces develop the ability to squash a terror module the moment it is set up that would bring us up to the level of other countries fighting terrorism.

Yes, a federal agency dealing with terror related operations which has the ability to react quickly and effectively is very much required to enhance India's counter terror operations. There has to be a unified response to the terror threats and it cannot be left to the police forces of the states to fight out this menace. The police forces will also have to retrain, re-equip and re-orient themselves to becoming crime and terror fighting forces instead of merely being a law and order force. But we have a long long way to go in achieving all these objectives

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Manoj K: Do we require better intelligence coordination today than in the past?

V K Shashikumar: Yes, better intelligence coordination is a necessary condition to fight terrorism. There has been some effort to set up an intelligence coordination mechanism with the nerve centre located with the Intelligence Bureau HQ in Delhi. And it appears that this mechanism is already delivering success. However, this is just the first step. Fusing external and internal intelligence and building coherent and comprehensive scenarios and actionable intelligence is a very complex affair.

Nandini: Why was POTA dropped by the UPA?

V K Shashikumar: Laws legislated to fight terrorism have often been used "politically" and have hardly been used by law enforcement authorities to fight terrorism. Instead, POTA, for instance, was used to detained hundreds of people on fairly ordinary charges and in many cases without a shred of evidence against them. There are already laws in place for combating terrorism and a new law will hardly solve the problem.

According to me, the Central Government must enunciate and put in place a national policy on terrorism, a policy that will not only enable our security forces to fight terrorism on the ground, but also enable retraining and reorienting our police forces to fight terrorism, enable a 21st century technical platform to gather intelligence, enable an effective intelligence coordination mechanism between states and centre, set up a federal agency to fight internal security threats and put heavy emphasis on education and on programmes that wean the youth away from fundamentalist ideologies.

This would necessarily mean creating an expanding job and entrepreneurship opportunities market. A mix of strategic, economic, educational policies are required to enable the government to challenge and defeat network centric terrorism.

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In short, just as terrorists are fusing their capabilities for greater reach and impact, so must the government respond by networking its response strategies.

Dilbert: What exactly do you constitute as terror? The final act of violence is just a culmination of the whole process by which people feel isolated, get recruited and participate in the actual event. Where do you think societies would come in? Is there a fool proof way by which the sense of alienation could be removed?

V K Shashikumar: There can certainly be a fool proof method in ensuring that the youth is not pushed into the cesspool of violence, where every act of violence is seen as a legitimate instrument to overturn a perceived or imagined or real wrong.

If the government were to put in place effective education cover for all and in turn ensure that the education so received would find professional expression in the marketplace it would build a seamless continuum that would suck up youth in India's growing economy, instead of throwing them into the society as rejects and, thereby, making fundamentalists ideologies and violence more meaningful for them.

What is pushing young people to support extremist ideologies? This is a question that has to be addressed more meaningfully and thought more purposefully.