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WHO CAN UNITE THE NATION ? Terrorist attacks in our bazaars, the violence against Biharis in Mumbai, the Naxalite uprisings, religious strife in Orissa, the list goes on: India is being torn apart . We need strong leadership to bring Indians together to protect our collective national interests. But our political system is dysfunctional and our most important institutions are failing . Our best hope is that a great political leader emerges to build trust across various interest groups and knits our country together. India is a deeply fractured country today . We are divided by state, religion, caste, community, language, forwards vs. backwards, left vs. right, secular vs. communal, promoters vs. workers, and on and on. Tossed about among all these divisive interest groups, the Indian state is floundering . Each interest group seeks to capture the state apparatus to serve its narrow demands ranging from getting hundreds of SEZs approved to reserving seats at higher educational instituti...

From : Letters to the Editor section, Published in The Dawn , Pakistan,6 Dec 08 READING Qamar Iqbal's letter, 'Mumbai: India blames Pakistan' , and the several reports titled , (i) ' India sending top official to US' , (ii) 'The misplaced hype about Faridko't , (iii) 'Gunmen spoke Hindi with strong Punjabi, north Indian accent' and (iv) 'Taj hotel was warned of attack' , (all in Dawn's Dec 1 issue), only strengthened my earlier conclusions. Going by some of the past actions of the Indians, I had already suspected that the attacks on Mumbai had been engineered by New Delhi in order to ward off the immense and increasing pressure it has been coming under on two accounts. First, the peaceful and massive uprising in Kashmir in recent months has caught the Indian establishment and even the independence-minded Kashmiri leaders by surprise. What is worse, some Indian intellectuals and rights activists, too, are now demanding of their leaders...