As the years pass, more and more of us are learning to live with terror, the prospect of sudden intense pain, the smell of blood and dreadful injury, and even death for doing nothing more than walking along a road or going into a shop or office. More and more of us are coming to terms with the world we inhabit, where stepping out of our homes means a heightened tension which doesn?t go till one is back again.

How many ordinary folk in Srinagar and, indeed, elsewhere, have been engaged in their usual day?s work when their lives have been ended, or they have been terribly hurt? How many more are going to die or be maimed? No place, no city is immune. No one would be surprised if bombs were to explode or snipers open fire in Calcutta, Chennai, Mumbai, Hyderabad or Bangalore.

The irony is that we have always accepted terrorism as a part of the struggle for freedom from British rule. The activities of such groups as the Anushilan Samiti, that operated in several areas of Bengal, are part of the history of the freedom movement. Although it was in that province that terrorism was concentrated, there were incidents outside it ? examples being the Kakori conspiracy case, the Lahore conspiracy cases and so on. Except that there was one very major difference between those terrorists and the ones who are active today.

The terrorists fighting colonial rule were very clear who their targets were: British officers and their subordinates. They never ever killed innocent civilians, except one or two, mistakenly, and they openly admitted that they had made a mistake. They used violence as a means to further their ultimate objective, the freedom of the people of India. If they were called terrorists it was because they spread terror among the colonial rulers, not because they terrorized the people. This is not to say that the use of violence was therefore justified; one is merely stating facts, not making a moral judgment.

Those using terror today have a totally different objective. They seek to envelop people in a miasma of terror, so that, over time, they will not go about their daily work in anything like a regular manner, leading then to a disruption in day-to-day commerce, trade, business and other activities which go to make up a functioning society. Today the targets are not only people who are of consequence in the state?s power structure; the targets are ordinary people. Not accidentally, not as ?collateral damage? but as targets. They assume that such acts will create edginess and fear; people will be jumpy, nervous, frightened, abandoning their daily work at the first rumour of some terrorist act.

Predictably, such people have to work stealthily, in secret. They cannot, and do not seek the safe haven of supportive families who look on them as heroes. The only support they get is from their own secretive, vicious groups. They move furtively among people, blending in with the crowds.

There is one trait they share with the terrorists operating in colonial times ? the very low value they place on their own lives. The terrorists in the freedom struggle considered that their lives were forfeit when they went out to assassinate a British official or commit some other act of violence; today the terrorists are willing to kill themselves as a part of the act itself, become suicide bombers. The difference is one of degree, really. It reinforces a major factor in the terrorist?s mind-set: his complete devotion to the cause he has espoused.

In both cases, though, the suicide bombers or the terrorists on a mission aren?t really the planners, the strategists, the ones who are the masterminds. The masterminds never kill themselves; they arrange to have a set of fanatically dedicated men and women do it. The conditioning is a skill carefully devised to appeal to their most passionate religious emotions and feelings, but is only a part of the total plan. That plan is to make sure that the carnage planned actually happens. In conventional terrorist attacks, where bombs are used to kill as many people as possible, there is a possibility that detonators may not go off; when suicide bombers are used that possibility is eliminated.

So the difference between living in, say Calcutta in the Thirties and in any city today, is that in the first case ordinary folk did not fear death and injury; today they do. They also know that they have to live in cities inhabited by these killers, who move among them like cloaked predators. The man next to you on the street, or in the cinema hall, may well have determined that you will die with many others. This is the test that all of us have to face at some time or the other.

What happened in London, or in New York is truly horrifying; but it is what many have faced in India repeatedly. Think of the bombings in Mumbai; the continuous killings in Jammu and Kashmir; in the villages of Andhra Pradesh, and in the Northeast. It is no longer possible to live a life that is uncomplicated and contented. We will have to decide how to cope, and it will need some kind of positive, assertive action from all of us. At the very least, a determination that we will not let these killers succeed in their objective, even though a number of us die in the future, or are wounded. They have made some assumptions about what their killing of people will achieve; we need to show that those assumptions are radically wrong.

The state authorities have to reorganize and regroup, true; one hopes they will. But state action by itself is not enough. We need to ask ourselves, in Srinagar, Kohima and elsewhere, whether we as a people want to live in terror, or pay the price needed to expose the terrorists as the isolated, fanatical and mentally crippled people they are.