The Problem Is Politics.(International Edition; POINT OF VIEW)

Byline: Shekhar Gupta; Gupta is editor in chief of the Indian Express.

How did a historically strong state come to look so weak? The answer is politics.

Given its hapless response to last week's deadly Mumbai attacks and other recent terror strikes, domestic critics these days tend to castigate India as a soft state that has neither the spine nor the skills to fight threats to its people--or to its very existence. In fact, until recently the opposite was true. India may have looked soft, but it had a titanium-hard, brutal core. For decades it used the strongest of methods to squash internal threats. It used air power against tribal insurgents in its northeast back in the sixties, and in 1984, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi used tanks and artillery to put down the Sikh rebellion in Amritsar.

Even in more recent times, terrorists were often met with great resolve, either killed or arrested before they had achieved their objectives. When armed members of Jaish-e-Mohammed attacked India's Parliament on December 13, 2001, they were shot down by the security guards before they made it to the building, and their accomplices were ultimately caught and tried under strict antiterrorism laws. To this day, India has a army that's tough, well trained, highly motivated--and above all, not afraid to take casualties.

Yet in the past two years, this same India has lost more lives to terrorism than any other country but Iraq. Its intelligence services have failed to sniff out and prevent major strikes. It has also failed to acknowledge the advent of homegrown terrorists, including Muslims seeking to avenge the bloody 2002 Gujarat riots, and now Hindus supposedly out to punish Muslims for past bombings. India's police and intelligence agencies have succeeded in nailing some of these groups, but almost always after the damage has been done.

How did a historically strong state come to look so weak? The answer lies in the distorted politics of the past decade. In 1998, a government led by the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power. For decades, India's sizable Muslim minority had voted for the Congress Party as the most acceptable secular alternative to the BJP. Suddenly the defeat of Congress heightened Muslim's insecurities, as did the racial profiling of Muslim populations that followed 9/11.

Initially India's Muslims stayed out of trouble. But the 2002 Gujarat riots, in which more than 1,000 people were killed, changed that. They left India's Muslims angry, fearful and frustrated and persuaded some, particularly the young, that their community needed revenge. That meant terrorism. This created something India had not seen before: genuinely homegrown terrorists. It also played straight into India's increasingly complicated electoral ...