The nine serial blasts on Sunday in the Buddhist temple complex in Bodh Gaya, which is world Buddhism’s key pilgrim centre as it is deemed to be the place where Prince Gautam received enlightenment and became the Buddha, should never have occurred if India’s security template was half as good as it pretends to be.
Terrorist incidents are not prevented in spite of fairly specific intelligence being available in advance at times, as appears to be the case with the blasts in the Buddhist holy city. News reports suggest that on July 2, security-related inadequacies were discussed at a review meeting between the police and the Mahabodhi complex authorities. Evidently, this didn’t help much.
Indeed, we are plain lucky that the Buddha’s statue has not been damaged and the basic temple complex not disfigured. For this we have the ineffectiveness of the low-intensity bombs to thank. If the famous statue had been damaged, the furore across the world might be similar to what we saw when the Taliban blasted the famous Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan.
Bodh Gaya is a place of high religious importance, like Amritsar, Jerusalem, or Mecca. To it are drawn pilgrims from around the world, in particular the countries of the Far East, China and Sri Lanka, which make handsome grants to the Buddhist temple. As such, the international relations value of Bodh Gaya has to be factored in when its security superstructure is designed. The Indian government as well as the Bihar government bear a special responsibility for its safety, and the safety of the pilgrims and monks. The state of Bihar will especially do well to recall that its very name derives from the Buddhist “vihara”, or shrine-cum-study complex.
The attitude of the authorities in predominantly Buddhist Burma towards the Rohingya Muslims is said to have turned the attention of Islamist outfits like Al Qaeda and Indian Mujahideen — the front for Pakistan-based anti-India terror outfits — to Buddhist institutions in India. But it isn’t just Buddhism they target. Islamist groups had attacked and triggered a social media scare and exodus of people from India’s Northeast in places like Mumbai and Karnataka only a few months back because the people in India’s Northeast often have mongoloid features like the Burmese.
These narrow-minded extremist organisations play exclusively on identity faultlines and use violence to make their point and advance their aims. Security agencies must be in fighting trim to tackle them. But so must India’s politicians. The statements from the BJP, Lalu Yadav’s RJD and Ramvilas Paswan’s LJP — attacking the state government and the Centre — fail to understand this and are content to play narrow blamegame politics with elections in view. That is hardly desirable.