Vice President Mohammed Hamid Ansari on Wednesday underscored the need to combat terrorism both socially and politically besides meeting the challenge as one involving security.
Delivering the Field Marshal K.M. Cariappa memorial lecture here on ‘Insecurity and the State: Emerging Challenges’, he said the approach, mechanism and commitments developed through various Security Council resolutions as also the innumerable bilateral and regional arrangements were unevenly implemented and do not deal with mental orientation that leads to terrorists acts.
The approach to tackle it, he said, are “essentially focussed on preventive or punitive steps, on the dismantling of the infrastructure of terrorism, and do not deal sufficiently with the mental orientation that leads to terrorist acts. The latter emanate from a radicalisation of the mind induced by an ideological or faith-based impulse and propelled by a perceived grievance. Combatting terrorism thus becomes a sociological and political effort as much as a security one”.
Besides terrorism, he said another trans-national threat exists in the form of pandemics. He said besides the impact on societies that is devastating, pandemics also create havoc in the form of loss of human lives.
Highlighting the under-preparedness of the country in dealing with such pandemics, the Vice President cited the Indian experience of dealing with the H1N1 (Swine Flu) as instructive.
Mr. Ansari said considering the global health trends, India should create one primary and one backup facility, either nationally or multi-laterally, for the production of vaccines and therapeutics expressly for emerging and re-emerging infections.
Similar arguments, he said, hold for environment and climate change and both were not co-terminus with political units. Despite the good work done by a number of dedicated environmentalists, at the national level public awareness was still in its infancy.
He said solutions to these dimensions of insecurity that transcend national frontiers were beyond the traditional security paradigm, “They suggest that solutions have to be sought in a multilateral framework of equals; they also have to be equitable.”
