Terror is the repudiation of justice and politics. It is the creation of excess violence which carries with it the imminence of more. It is presented as a means nit is often an end in itself. Torture might be personal, sometimes creating a strange intimacy between interrogator-perpetrator and victim but terror is anonymous and impersonal. The victim may have nothing to do with the original act that is projected as prime cause. Terror lacks the ethics of war. Why would anyone wish to bomb a civil hospital and its trauma ward except to create that excess as impact and identity?

Terror came in several incarnations in India, but frequently more in the hybrid form mixed with exploitation, rape, atrocity and riot. It has also developed endemically in Kashmir and the Northeast and around episodes like Naxalbari and Khalistan. But pure terror with its combination of the impersonal and intimate, the rational and the illogical is a product of information and terror needs information to thrive. In turn, it must deprive the victim of access to information and become more enzymatic and indefinable as rumor. Terror must strike with appalling efficacy but always carry the rumor of more like where next or who next is central to narrative to terror.

Information, the availability or lack of it, is central to terror. Terror thrives on rumor, grows with gossip. Yet terror needs precise information to operate. It has to strike to extract maximum surplus. The violence of terror is strategic because it has to maximize insecurity and instability. Everyone must feel target and everyone must be seen as targetable. Every city must see itself a serially vulnerable. Terror creates tough challenges for democracy. The conundrum lies in the fact that terror is a denial of democracy and through its idea of rights, due process and adherence to the rule of law creates a tactical flexibility for terror. Emergencies and crisis have been regular grounds for abbreviating democracy. Democracies in fighting terror might lose their sense of democracy. Terror demands infinite patience and inventiveness from a democracy, while it can be parasitic on it.

The National Technical Research Organization (NTRO) set up in 2004, an ambitious initiative to use technology to watch terror groups and preempt strikes, has turned into a pensioners club. Nearly a dozen retired officials hold key position in organization to monitor phone calls and emails, track the flow of funds on the Internet, and be the repository of the country's technical intelligence assets, including spy planes and satellites. The idea was it would keep an eye on terror groups and Left-wing extremists and prevent Kargil-like intrusions. The NTRO should have been able to monitor phone calls and trace emails. The organization was envisaged as an expert in cyber security and tracking global satellite mobile (GSM) system as also high-frequency (HF) communication. We have money, resources and technology but we don't have the vision and the will to create an effective intelligence sharing mechanism. In view of terrorists and left wing onslaught on the country it is highly desirable that intelligence gathering manual and methodology should be recast, and each agency should be accountable for lapses, as it is happening at present.