Both policing and politics needed to fight is

Both policing and politics needed to fight is

A man has been shot dead in a Lucknow suburban home, accused of being a self-radicalised Islamic State (IS) terrorist. Law enforcement agencies reached him, following a crude bomb blast in a passenger train in Madhya Pradesh and the arrest of some people in connection with it. There have been raids in different parts of the country to arrest IS adherents and one recruit from Kerala is reported to have been killed in Afghanistan.
Clearly, the IS has some traction in India, even as it is fast losing its status as the only jihadi terror outfit to hold territory and, thus, claim to be a Caliphate. To tackle this, the government needs both better policing and better politics.
Monitoring of social media and gathering intelligence are primary tasks and the government is on the job. We hope the police have got better at it than in the past when, time and again, they have arrested young Muslim men on flimsy suspicion, charged them with terror strikes and kept them in jail for long periods, only for the courts to acquit them, in some cases finding the evidence to have been fabricated. Policemen under immense public and media pressure to arrest the guilty after a terror strike often find it expedient to arrest some people and charge them with terror, regardless of their guilt. This causes immense damage. Loss of trust in the police and the justice system is exactly the kind of fodder IS propaganda needs.
The politics of polarisation also plays into IS hands. When leaders of political parties and even elected representatives characterise an entire community as anti-national, and do so without so much as a reprimand, not to speak of lynch-mob justice over beef, the result is to create the kind of desperate anger that terror recruits exploit. It is vital to get both policing and the politics right, to insulate India from the IS bug.