AA Edit | Educated Terrorists Add Chilling Element to 10/11

It is to the credit of India’s security agencies that they may have neutralised hundreds of terror plots before their culmination in the last couple of decades. In fact, available evidence suggests that the Delhi car blast was hastened because a very large conspiracy was undone and one of the participants in this ghoulish venture was thought to be fleeing once he became aware of his colleagues having been corralled.

Even so, a single catastrophic event that took place with one conspirator escaping the dragnet was sufficient for it to be pinned as an intelligence failure on the part of the security agencies. And it is the failure to stop a terror event outside Jammu & Kashmir, the regular theatre of operations of terrorists of both the imported and homegrown varieties, which will be the albatross the agencies will carry countrywide as they plough on with their task of trying to keep the nation safe.

Inference points to the Faridabad network having links with events in the Valley, their consequences in terms of Operation Sindoor that struck at the heart of sponsored terror in PoK and in other areas of Pakistan and a planned reprisal by terrorist cells that could have taken on gigantic proportions if three tones of deadly explosives had not been seized from them.

However successful the Faridabad operation arising from investigation of threatening posters that began in the Kashmir Valley may have been, it only illustrates the fact that the vigil must be constant. What lends a chilling dimension to the unravelling of the big conspiracy is that members of the medical profession who would have taken the Hippocratic oath on graduating as doctors have been involved in plotting terror and spreading its tentacles in radicalising others.

The involvement of at least five doctors, four of them born in Kashmir, is symptomatic of the huge problem that the security agencies would be facing if educated people, with access to gadgets and methods of secret communications, knowledge from material online about explosives and various types of bombs and the mechanics of blowing them remotely, are to join a crazed movement that swears by terror in which innocents are far more likely to be hit.

The rise of white-collar terror is going to be the bugbear of security agencies if it is to be assumed the educated will be smarter than the lumpen elements who are readymade fodder for zealotry. And given the recent geopolitical shifts post-Operation Sindoor with Pakistan also cozying up to Bangladesh, the threat of terror will not diminish and may rear its head beyond the Kashmir Valley.

Far from blaming them for not spotting the terrorist who got away, the security agencies should be further fortified with men, machines and resources to coordinate a national effort at gathering intelligence and smashing terror plots that could be taking place anywhere in the country. The timing may not appear propitious but, on the political front, it might make sense to give back statehood to Jammu & Kashmir while retaining total control in security matters.