Delhi blast: The pillars of the Indian state are crumbling

On the face of it, a court where ordinary people flock for redressal of mundane disputes may seem an unlikely target for terrorists. No cause is meaningfully advanced by blowing to bits people who are just going through the timeless grind of the legal system.

Yet, if there’s one overarching message from yesterday’s blast at the Delhi High Court, which killed 11 people, it is that it expands the range of the pillars of the Indian state that have now been targeted by terrorists.

Bomb blasts and terrorist strikes in Mumbai have typically targeted commercial interests – the stock exchange, the diamond bourse and the teeming markets, among others. That’s because Mumbai is in many ways the engine of India’s economy, and targeting the money trail gets the terrorists more bang for their vile efforts.

But since Delhi is all about temporal power, it is the pillars of the state that are being targeted. The strand that connects yesterday’s blast with the high-profile attack on the Red Fort in 2000 and the Parliament complex in 2001 is that all of them are powerful symbols of a democratic state.

With all its historical associations, the Red Fort represents the majesty of Indian executive authority. And Parliament is (despite the ongoing debate over whether its members are worthy of the privilege they are accorded) today the potent symbol of a working Indian democracy. If the targets in the past were the executive and the legislature, yesterday’s attack was aimed at the judiciary, the third pillar of the Indian state.

Tragically, however, the blood price in every case is paid by ordinary folks who are unrepresentative of the might of the state, and in fact are themselves victims in their own way.

The connection with the 2001 attack on Parliament is doubly reinforced by the purported reason for yesterday’s attack. The terror group that has reportedly claimed responsibility for yesterday’s blast, the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HuJI), is believed to have demanded the withdrawal of the death sentence on Afzal Guru, who has been convicted for the attack on Parliament.

Faced with such an open and overwhelming challenge to its authority, the response of the Indian state – and, in fact, all the elements that go to make up the edifice of our parliamentary democracy - has been monumentally inept.

For although the death sentence was handed down after due – and laborious – process of law, it has now become the subject of political back-and-forth. An effort is now on in the Jammu & Kashmir Assembly to pass a resolution to demand that the death sentence on Afzal Guru be commuted.

First, Parliament, one of the most powerful symbols of the Indian democracy, is targeted by vile terrorists; then the executive authority of the day is unable or unwilling to implement the verdict in the case handed down by the judiciary; to compound that, the entire political establishment plays political football with the judicial verdict. …

It’s easy to see why terrorists have been emboldened into repeated attacks on the might of the Indian state: they know they can get away with it, given the ineffectual response of the executive and the natural inclinations of the political establishment across the spectrum to play one-upmanship games with the issue of terrorism.