A place where bombs routinely rip apart people, tear them asunder from limb to limb in the most horrifying ways. A place where the victims of the bombs are always innocent people, citizens who go about the daily business of living and earning a livelihood. A place where an entire generation has grown up in the shadow of violence. A place where the cycle of terror is unending. A place where any faint ray of light at the end of the tunnel is extinguished as soon as it appears.

Yes, that’s where we live. That’s what Assam has become today.

What is it about our city, our State, that has made it a place of such endemic violence? Certainly, the people of these valleys are not, have never been, of a violent nature. These valleys were once populated by a gentle, laughing, dancing people, who lived with golden harvests and a blue river. And yet, the violence has grown from within us, from within the communities themselves. What does it show, what does it mean?

For those of us who are not in the security forces, there is no point trying to figure out which insurgent group, which terror outfit was behind the latest horror. Any group, any person who could perpetrate these heinous bomb blasts has lost his or her moral compass. Totally. Let’s get that clear, once and for all. No cause, whether social, economic, political or religious, is large enough to take even a single civilian life. And when the body count runs into the scores, and that of mangled, mutilated, badly injured people into the hundreds, then one can only conclude that the perpetrators are monsters, barbarians who do not deserve to be called human beings at all.

One wonders what they think when they see the results of their handiwork, playing out in endless loops on TV screens on all channels. A sense of satisfaction for a “job well done”? What do they feel, these bomb-planters, when they see the little girl running around looking for her parent who has been killed in the blast? Do they feel a sense of professional pride when they watch images of an aged father searching for his son’s body in the pile of corpses charred beyond all recognition? When they see the maimed and the wounded, the blinded and the badly burned, what do they feel, these perpetrators? Are they rewarded by their bosses for “a job well done?” Do they get incentives in the form of holidays abroad, and perhaps a crash course in a terror school somewhere outside the country, so that they can come back and carry on their work with even greater vigour than before?

And by the way, what about the police? The law enforcers, as they are called? Ah yes, the law enforcers. We do tend to forget, don’t we, that the khaki-uniformed person is there for a purpose? After so many decades of seeing the security men used only for protecting the bigwigs, we have forgotten that the policeman is actually there to protect us, have we not? Yes, protect us, you and me, the man on the street, the woman in the marketplace, the child in the playground. We come to accept as “normal” the fact that policemen only protect the lives and properties of politicians and bureaucrats. Yes, even retired bureaucrats. Wow. That’s something, isn’t it? Protection from the big bad world outside their palace gates till their teeth fall out and their eyes grow rheumy. Protection till their dying breath, in fact. We have come to accept the siren-shrieking presence of our securitymen on our streets as just a nuisance, an impediment to city life. That’s about it. So much so, indeed, that we tend to forget that we pay our taxes so that we can maintain them for the purpose of protecting us.

What were they doing, those police bigwigs in their fancy offices and rambling colonial homes, all this time? What were they doing, with their retinue of staff, designed to keep them in the style of our erstwhile colonial masters? Little potentates, all of them are, with their sleek bellies and air of vast wealth. Terror has been stalking the land, walking up and down the country for months now. Guwahati has always been one of the most vulnerable places in the country for terror strikes. What were they doing then, those men in their khaki uniforms, when even the most naïve citizen was aware that the probability of Assam being next on the terrorists’ list was extremely high? The lower ranks were of course busy protecting their bosses. But what about the bosses themselves?

Actually, All Things Considered, why do we need a full fledged police department at all? In other places, the police essentially manage to nab the culprit. Some of the time, or even most of the time. This is unheard of in our land. It would be cheaper for the common man, for the taxpayer, if the whole thing were to be dismantled, and the men in uniform put out to grass. Ah, but then…who would provide security to the bigwigs?

And yes, let’s not forget the politicians. Those whom we have elected, and those who wait in the wings. Those who hold the reins of power today have shown their total ineptitude as far as maintaining law and order is concerned. But those who wait in the wings are equally culpable. They look for incidents like these to swoop down like vultures, to fish in troubled waters, and make political capital out of a human tragedy. They are all tarred by the same brush of opportunism. They come, shedding crocodile tears, but with an eye out for the main chance.

And what about the bandhs? Why is it necessary to go into bandh-mode in a knee jerk reaction every time we have a human tragedy? We all know it is useless, less than useless, to have a bandh. Why don’t those organisations that call a bandh at every opportunity, organise a blood-donation camp instead? Or something more long-term, like rendering support to the survivors of the blasts, and helping them cope with their trauma, emotionally, financially and in all other ways required?

No wonder the people are angry. But what will our anger do? We seem powerless to change the course of events, to prevent incidents like these from occurring in future. Anybody with a gun, or a bomb, can just walk into any place in our State, and wreak mayhem on an unimaginable scale. There seems to be nothing we can do to stop these men (and perhaps women) bent on destruction.

And that, truly, is the scary thing.

MITRA PHUKAN