Shame on ..... who?

I read this news report that the Intelligence agencies had definitive reports a few months ago that there would be an attack on Jaipur and Hardwar. In fact Jaipur was identified as a "prime target".

On the basis of Jalaluddin's confessions, India's Intelligence Bureau did issue advice last year, listing a number of cities like Jaipur that it said were on the "hit list" of the jihadis.

Then for a few months nothing happened and the intelligence advisory was forgotten.

"That is how intelligence works in India. A general advisory on the basis of some confession or an agent report is usually forgotten when nothing happens for a while," says Bibhuti Bhusan Nandy, a former deputy chief of India's Research and Analysis Wing (Raw), that is responsible for external intelligence.

"The intelligence agencies rarely chase up leads to get more specific intelligence and when something like Jaipur happens, they refer to their old report to save their jobs."

I don't want to blame the government, the police, the intelligence agencies. These people have already gotten their share of the blame. They are doing either a lackadaisical job or no job at all. The reason they get away with this is because their supposed bosses, the people of India have come to accept this as a way of life. Rather than make an effort to try to take the government to task, all we do is say a few obligatory sentences like no one is doing their job and that the terrorists want to incite a religious riot or stupid stuff like that. Yes, the government is not doing it's job. It has not been doing so for the past 60 years. However, we have gotten so used to the government not doing their job that we have made our peace with it. We have forgotten our job which is to take the government to task.

Our job as Indian citizens is to ask the government what steps it is taking to prevent such incidents from happening in the future? We need our government to explain why there is a need to call a security expert from South Africa to protect the IPL teams in Jaipur? In a country of more than a billion people, it is shameful that we need nationals from other countries to protect our own people.

It is shameful that we won't even stop once to think that those innocent lives could have been saved. We won't stop to think that so many more innocent lives are going to be sacrificed again because people we vote for (or don't vote for), people whose salaries comes from the taxes we pay, are not doing anything about it.

It shames me that I was only able to know this fact because of Google and the BBC. It shames me that news media in my country is busy covering what Aamir Khan writes on his blog rather than bring such essential facts to the forefront. It shames me that most people in this country would never get to know a lot of things not because they are not interested but because they do not have access to education, electricity and the internet. Because someone has not been doing their job.

We can sit back and let the government keep blaming the proverbial foreign hand. Yes, gathering and disseminating intelligence is not our job. Yes, acting on that intelligence is not our job. However, making sure that people who are not doing their job are out of it is our job.

Yes, the system is hard to fight against. Yes, you can't take on city hall. Yes, everything is screwed up. However, people have just given up. Most people have been bought up to be slaves of the system. Children have to bribe their way to get a "quality" education (whose quality is always in doubt). Old, retired people have to pay hash money to get access to their own retirement fund. The tax payes who pay the actual tax are the ones who suffer the most.

But all we do is make some movies about it, take up one issue and then forget about everything and go back to our old ways.

Our politicians have brainwashed people in our country to concentrate on frivolous issues like caste, caste and people are ready to kill because of some stupid erotic paintings.

There is a reason that politicians don't pander to the so called urban citizens. Merely because the educated, informed masses do not go and vote. To say that there is no candidate is an easy way out. How many of us, including me actually have a voters id card? I for one, have never voted. So I share the blame too.

We need to make the government, the bureaucrats and the media to do their job. How? By simply doing ours.

That's all.