Integrity Score 240
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A Strategy to Deter Terrorism continues....
This was the suggestion I had publicly made then but the government seemed to have lost its nerve by then, by its apparent lack of support from civil society (was it an excuse) and ready to capitulate. At the very least, we should have demanded the custody of the killer of Rupa Katyal’s husband. Who was a passenger on honeymoon with his newly wed wife, Rupa. His throat was slit by one of the hijackers in front of his newly wed wife. The Katyals were returning by the ill-fated flight after their honeymoon in Nepal. Even if all the 259 passengers had to be put at risk, we should have at least demanded that this callous butcher of Katyal be handed over as part of the deal. For freeing Azhar, the Taliban would have sacrificed him. But at the end of it all, Bharat Mata is still bleeding unavenged because Azhar and the two other terrorists went to Pakistan after the unholy swap, and founded terrorist organizations that have, since the year 2000, killed 3,000 innocent citizens. The killing continues even today, with no obvious end in sight. This whole Kandhahar episode proves that we should never negotiate with terrorists and never yield. If you do, then sooner or later you will end up losing more lives than you will ever save by a deal with terrorists. Civil society can only be as tough as its politicians, a dictum brought clearly during World War II between the approaches of Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill.
The third lesson to be learnt is that whatever and however small the terrorist incident, the nation must retaliate—nor by measured and “sober” responses, but by massive retaliation. For example, when Ayodhya Temple was sought to be attacked, or the Institute of Science in Bangalore was targeted, these were not big terrorist incidents but we should have massively retaliated. Our intelligence agencies also keep telling me in private that we have clinching proof of terrorist training camps in PoK and Bangladesh, and if that is so, we should bomb them by despatching our Air Force.
To be continued...