Is so-called saffron, or rightwing Hindu, terror an answer to so-called green, or radical Islamist, terror? No, it isn't. Terror - by whatever name it calls itself, or that others call it - is never an answer to anything: it is an affirmation. It is an affirmation of the only demonic gods that terror, of any stripe, worships: hate and fear.
This cannot be emphasised enough at a time when investigations into several bomb blasts in the country, including the explosion on the Samjhauta Express, have evoked the spectre of a retaliatory 'bomb-for-bomb' 'saffron' terror to counter 'Islamist' terror. The confession made to the authorities by the self-styled 'Swami' Aseemanand about the involvement of terrorist conspirators with RSS links has sparked a war of words between the Sangh Parivar and what calls itself the secular camp, led by the Congress. While the secularists have once again raised a demand for banning the RSS, the organisation's chief, Mohan Bhagwat, has said that those suspected of the bombs were no longer part of the parivar fold, having either left voluntarily or been externed. This in turn has provoked a Congress spokesperson to respond that it was a case not of "rats leaving the sinking ship, but of the ship leaving the rats".
This politicisation of terror, of dividing an indivisible menace into two opposing camps, is exactly what terrorists of all hues want. It has been said before but it needs to be said again, and yet again: terror does not owe allegiance to any faith or religion except to its own perverted and obscene creed which thrives on the massacre of innocents.
The dynamics of terror are based on the twisted logic of obsession. Hatred and fear - the evil twins who always go hand in hand, each reinforcing the other - are both the propagators as well as the spawn of terror. How does the perpetrator of terror ensure its own escalation? By destroying the feared and hated Other, the Enemy? No, because the Other, the Enemy, is necessary for the terrorist himself to exist; without the hated Other, the terrorist has no reason for existence. The survival of the terrorist and his unholy credo dictates a strategy very different from the destruction of the Other. The terrorist doesn't want to destroy the Other, for that would mean self-destructing himself; he wants to turn the Other into a mirror likeness of himself, each locked to the other in an antagonistic embrace of mutual fear and hatred. 'Hindu' terror and 'Islamist' terror aren't mortal enemies; they are incestuous siblings, each feeding of the other's insatiable lust.
The real Enemy, the true Other, of the terrorist is not another terrorist - the two are in fact allies - but the common humanity, the shared cycle of birth and death and the rites of passage in between, that binds us together, regardless of our differences of belief, or caste, or race, or colour. It is this common humanness - humaneness, if you prefer - which is the real target of the terrorist, of whatever kind. For the terrorist, whatever prefixes or suffixes he attaches to himself, the real Other, the Enemy is humanity, the civil society of ordinary people accommodating each other's differences and occasional disputes as they go about the everyday business of living.
The everyday business of the terrorist - saffron or green, or pink, or polka-dotted - is not living but dying, causing the deaths of others and often of himself as well in suicide missions. What happens when a country's way of life becomes a way of death? Today Pakistan - arguably the biggest exporter of terrorism in the world - has shown with tragic inevitability what happens when, left unchecked, terror consumes itself.
Let's not colour-code terror, by saffron or any other shade. Terror is not just colour-blind; its eye-for-an-eye spiral of vengeance makes for a world of sightless darkness.
