I am not sure whether this is because of the subliminal mass indoctrination done by certain sections of the political class of this country, but I seriously disagree with the notion that Mumbai happened because India is “soft on terror”. If being “hard on terror” is like behaving like Israel or USA, then I am sorry, but we have the wrong role models.
Wouldn’t it be more correct to call India incompetent in handling terror? It might sound similar but there is a big difference in our approach to the problem if we look at it differently. After all most citizens are convinced that our political leadership is incompetent, the bureaucracy is incompetent, the police and intelligence is incompetent. Wouldn’t a mass incompetency of our entire political-police setup of the country have the same result when faced with such acts of terrorism?
Why turn incidents like the Mumbai attacks a juvenile question of virility? That doesn’t sound like a mature country!
Why not grow up and just demand better and principled administrators of this country from now on?
Question yourself. Why do we have only three pathetic major political parties in India? One, the Congress, which has no idea what it stands for and just prefers to “go with the flow”. Two, the BJP who would rather make the entire country go in flames to achieve their 80 year old thinly disguised agenda of turning India into a Hindu equivalent of Pakistan. And three, the BSP who shamelessly exploits the image of a great man(Ambedkar) and has a leader who acts like a medieval queen.
Have you ever thought why we haven’t had a single political leader since Nehru (that also in his early days), who we have unquestionably admired and respected?
Anger is justifiably the first response to what happened in Mumbai. But decisions taken in anger has rarely ever provided the best response.
Why am I not seeing a single discussion, whether in the media or in the web, where people have sat down calmly and thought “why did these terrorists do this? What was their agenda?” After all these terrorists are not murderous psychopaths who kill because they like to kill. These are highly ideologically motivated people, and their leadership always have an agenda for every act that they do. They practice a form of politics in which the instruments are not speeches, lies and horse-trading like our politicians. Rather their instruments are acts of terror. But their aims are similar to politicians – to achieve a political goal.
Political and security idiots from around the country are dismissing the whole act as merely “an act of destabilizing the country”. While that might be true, it seems to me a dangerous over-simplification. Dangerous, because it is making the rest of India to stop thinking. They think they have got their answer to “why” and then keep raising the familiar ruckus of blaming the political class.
Over the next few days, we would probably see the real reason of this attack come out in the open. Some say that it is already coming out in the open. As reports emerge of Pakistan considering moving a large part of its troops from the Afghan border to the Indian border in anticipation of a belligerent Indian response like after our parliament attack, the consequent results should be clear. The LeT and other terrorist leadership which organized the Mumbai attack were getting a lot of heat from the combined US-Pakistani operations in Afghanistan border recently. The Indo-Pak escalations will take this heat off and help them consolidate their grip in that region.
This theory might be proven wrong with information that we get in the coming days and months, but if this is the real agenda, then by irrational response to the Mumbai attack, we would only prove ourselves to be mere puppets in the hand of terrorists.
For those eager to put labels on our country, being such a puppet would be a much better reason to call ourselves a soft state. I still prefer the term incompetent state though, even though idiot might be a better choice if it had not been so inflammatory. 
So the call I would like to make out to my country men, is to first defeat the terrorist’s agenda (the real one, not the one which the political idiots have been mouthing), and then go ahead to discuss how to fix the country so as to prevent it from being so vulnerable and so easily manipulated.
