London attacked

London attacked

There is now a globalised template of terror, India too should draw some lessons.
The attack that unfolded on Westminster Bridge at an iconic London tourist site, which killed at least four, injured 40 and locked down UK's parliament, is a terror outrage. Unfortunately, this is not the first time such a vehicle attack has occurred. Trucks were used to devastating effect against crowds last year, in Berlin and Nice. With Islamic State (IS) crumbling in Iraq and Syria, such distributed terror attacks can be staged anywhere in the world once the template exists in an era of globalisation.
If the London attack is not so remote, what are the lessons India should draw from it? It goes without saying that it needs to strengthen its defences against terror by beefing up security and intelligence. However, what's noteworthy is that the London attack did not require the acquisition of weapons and explo sives or perhaps even the cultivation of teams of militants, which indicate future attacks security agencies can then interdict. As French lawmaker and terrorism expert Sebastien Pietrasanta observed “it is often a case of individual action, they can be quite spontaneous” . To minimise such attacks, it is also important to guard against social alienation and the ghettoisation of groups.
As of today, groups like IS hold hardly any attraction for Indian Muslims. However, recent BJP poll wins have ignited in some minds visions of going ahead with the Hindutva project, or the creation of a kind of Hindu Pakistan where minorities would be relegated to second class status. There is already a disturbing similarity between Pakistan's blasphemy laws and persecution of people on grounds of meat consumption in India: in both cases mobs can gather and level flimsy accusations at people, usually belonging to minorities, with the assurance that authorities will side with them which becomes a spark for violence. Luckily, India is still some distance away from being Pakistan. However, progress along this path will also come freighted with the kind of outcomes that we see in Pakistan.