Terrorism may have root causes but can never have any justification. It is war taken to the door steps of innocent civilians because the non-state actors do not have the courage and the support of the people at large for their presumed noble cause for which they commit heinous and cowardly acts. These criminals regardless of their religious, ethnic, or any other identity must be pursued relentlessly and given such punishment that hopefully would deter others from following this path.

Mumbai is not a solitary example of terror perpetrated in India. Recently grenades thrown at tourists in Kashmir have killed and injured a number of people with the result that many Indians who had earlier planned to go to Kashmir during upcoming holidays have now changed their mind and are going elsewhere. India has been the victim of cross-border terrorism for decades supported by external finance and manned by outsiders and their cohorts within the country with training and weapons having been supplied by external actors.

The Mumbai blasts are suspected to have been carried out by Laskar-e-Toiba and the banned Students Islamic Movement of India. Predictably the BJP leaders accused the UPA government of having been lax in meeting terrorist threats like the one that happened in Mumbai. Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh and Congress President Sonia Gandhi called for calm and expressed the government's resolve to "defeat the forces of terrorism."

The Oslo Conference of June 2003 that identified some of the pre-conditions setting the stage of terrorism certainly does not apply to India. The conference, inter alia, identified lack of democracy, liberty and rule of law; failed or weak states; historical antecedents of political violence, civil wars, revolution, dictatorship or occupation; hegemony and inequality of power; corrupt government upheld by powerful external actors; repression by foreign occupation by colonial powers; discrimination based on religious or ethnic origin; social injustice as catalytic agents for terrorism.

India with its age-old traditions resulting from diversity and uninterrupted practice of democracy can hardly be accused of harbouring the contagion of any of these malaises. But then again to claim that all is well in India would be a fallacious premise. The efforts to unite India on the basis of Hindutva or cultural nationalism have not been universally accepted. Indeed many Hindus particularly those belonging to the lower caste, not to speak of Muslims, are reluctant to accept this concept as an adequate replacement of Nehruvian secularism which, perhaps, was the first attempt in the Indian sub-continent to follow, for example, George Holyoke's or Charles Bradlaugh's concept of secularism as not being against religion.

Pandit Nehru's exasperation with "what is called religion or at any rate organized religion in India" expressed in his autobiography does not detract from the fact that religion plays a very important role in the daily life of the people of this sub-continent. But then, as Yale Professor Paul Bloom points out, the US, the richest and the undisputed leader of the post-cold war world, is a poster child of supernatural belief where about 96% believe in God in the Biblical sense, miracles, devils and angels. As opposed to the Christian conservatives who were believed to be "largely poor, uneducated and easy to command," 40% of the scientists believe in God regardless of Karl Marx's contention that mankind had adopted God as an opiate to soothe the pain of existence, or as claimed by some philosophers that man's devotion to a supernatural deity is because he "cannot deal with chaos" or Freudian interpretation about the necessity of religious belief to exorcise the terrors of nature, particularly the cruelty of fate, as shown in our inevitable end in death.

The problem of humanity is not so much with religion per se as it is with the dogmatic interpretation of faith, Osama bin Laden is perhaps the best living example of this aberration, where death and destruction is meted out with abandon in the name of faith based politics. Religious terrorists are more dangerous than politico-secular terrorists (not that there can be any apology for their acts which are no less directed at civilian men, women and children) because they believe that they are answerable only to their God, an expedient solace to be found in Danish philosopher Soren Kierkgaard's consideration of the dilemma of whether there can be a "teleological suspension of the ethical" -- a situation wherein normal moral considerations are justifiably overridden when appealing to a higher ideal comparable, albeit in a different context, to Professor Michael Byers argument of "exceptional illegality" to justify intervention "where a serious threat exists, no invitation can be obtained, and the council (UNSC) is not prepared to act" as distinct from humanitarian intervention advocated by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, or Princeton's Ann Marie Slaughter's Duty to Protect or those who advocate a more expansive interpretation of the UN Charter advocating intervention as a natural adaptation of the concept of "imminence" in today's world of WMD.

After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the international community resolved to hold the instigating, financing, and/or harbouring country as equally responsible as the terrorists and therefore liable to be punished. Given the brutality of the terrorism perpetrated at Mumbai, London, Madrid, New York, Washington, Nairobi and Dar-es-Salam, to name only a few, the international community should be unforgiving of the crimes committed, unrelenting in the pursuit of the terrorists, and resist any temptation to justify terrorism for scoring parochial advantage.

Saarc Regional Convention on Suppression of Terrorism that embraces Hague Convention of 1970, Montreal Convention of 1971, New York Convention of 1973 and UN Resolution 2625(XXV) among others, enjoins South Asian countries in particular along with the rest of the world to spare no efforts to bring the culprits of the Mumbai massacre to book. Civilization demands that man be accountable for their actions and if guns are used against unarmed people then bigger guns should be deployed to put them out of commission. In such cases it becomes indeed difficult to quarrel with Bush Doctrine of Pre-emption which Colin Powell had assured the international community was really directed at non-state actors and not at sovereign countries who panicked after the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, and remain to be convinced in view of continuing diplomatic offensive against Iran with an important part of Washington foreign and defense establishment being allegedly convinced of eventual military conflict with Iran, a belief further strengthened by the removal of Jack Straw from the post of Foreign Secretary because of his public opposition to any military adventure in Iran.

In the final analysis, the Mumbai bomb blasts reminds us of the JMB terrorist activities in Bangladesh which have been contained for the present but make us acutely aware of the vulnerability that we face in our daily life. Neither the pockets of poverty nor the islands of affluence are immune to the terrorist attacks. The world must unite to eliminate this curse from the earth forever if civilization is to reach Francis Fukuyama's final destination.

Kazi Anwarul Masud is a former Secretary and Ambassador.