M A I L B A G

Terrorism, the most serious challenge

On July 7, the City of London faced perhaps the most serious challenge to its safety since World War II. The Metropolitan Police and New Scotland Yard were caught unawares. They were sanguine in their misplaced belief that non-white citizens and illegal aliens were under their close watch and would not dare to jump the harsh legal fences.

The Londoners too chose to overlook the crop of hate and animus that flourished in their backyards for the last 30 years, when Brigadier Enoch Powell and his National Front party sowed its seeds. The British Immigration Department, packed with NF sympathisers carried out an inquisition on every incoming “Paki”, a derogatory term for all South Asians, at Heathrow Airport. Gangs of skinheads went on hate crime rampages in the neighbourhood inhabited by non-whites in East London, throwing burning rags into their homes, and severely damaging their business premises.

Obviously, Mr Tony Blair and his colleagues in the Labour Party have no respect for the lessons of history. They do not recognise the fact that on 7/7, they brought home the harvest of Powell “poison” it has taken three decades to bear fruit. They ought to look inwards before raising an accusing finger at “the children of lesser gods”.

GURDEV S. GREWAL, IAS (retd), Shimla

II

Recent terrorism is the worst version of Nihilism, in whose vice the world is writhing. Terrorists are Frankenstein monsters who without compunction would any time readily devour their creators.

The US, shell-shocked, when the USSR forces entered Afghanistan, hastily contrived with the Saudis and Pakistan to percolate die-hard Islamic guerillas, to bleed the Soviets. To them, the indoctrinated spillage from the madarsas came in handy. Without a second thought about the psyche of this evil stuff, the US, like Dr Faustus selling his soul to Satan, started cultivating them. Pakistan having hate-love relationship with India sent waves of them to Jammu and Kashmir to destabilise her.

The aftermath, following the Soviet retreat, was that the terrorists trained and laced with the latest weapons turned their tide towards the Christian world and India. The nursery of the terrorists rests in the madarsas, run by the fundamentalist Mullahs and Maulvis. The brain-washed Jehadis churned out from the madarsas, hallucinated with the blind belief that the death was martyrdom, an open sesame, the heavenly gifts, propels them.

To stall terrorism, the flow of Saudi money should be scotched, the madarsas dismantled and uprooted from the Pakistan and Indian soils, forthwith.

V.I.K. SHARMA, Jalandhar City

III

Clearly, 9/11 and 7/7 are the result of the increasing hatred against the US and the UK. The definition of terrorism for the two governments underwent a complete change after these incidents. Condemning such incidents, rational minds all over the world will stand by the ordinary masses of the UK and the US but a measure of sentiments and feelings of an ordinary man reveals that these countries have themselves invited terrorism.

Adopting double standards on international terrorism, self-centred and ad hoc international policies and defying public opinion have been the hallmarks of governance of these powers. They had reduced the UN to a mere watchdog when they attacked Iraq. No proof of the reason of invading a nation on the pretext of possession of WMDs by it has been given till date.

SAURABH GUPTA, Chandigarh

Apostles of democracy All the Sikh Gurus were the apostles of democracy. They took care to impress upon their disciples that among them claims to superiority were to rest on merit. The Sikh Gurus were of the view that he who took the greatest pain to do the loveliest service to the people, along with a devout and regular in his prayers, was to be worthy of the highest honour. CHAMAN SINGH, Bhucho (Bathinda)