Gripped with an outraged sense of hurt, I donated blood at the Ram Manohar Lohia hospital yesterday. It's nothing when you compare it to the macabre spectre of terrorism that we have all become inured to.
Which is why I wonder how P Chidambaram and Rahul Gandhi can sleep at night. Perhaps they are veterans at visiting victims.
I wasn't and it was unbearable. A young girl with half her face a void, yet the perky scrunchy pink - I focused hard on it- intact. An old man carrying multitude of grief in his eyes, yet queuing up quietly to pick up his dead. A young man wailing loudly, the sounds jarring and penetrating your ears till you wished he would stop.
Collective grief is a sharp wake up call. You can taste the despair, the feeling that nothing would ever be the same again.
It is obscene that politicians make hospitals where terror victims go a pilgrimage spot. If they can't keep us safe, do they have the right to use us fo
r photo-opportunities?
And, as the statistics numb you: Delhi in May; Mumbai in July; Delhi in September. Speculations about Wednesday becoming terror du jour, it's time to say enough already.
I want a simple answer. Why has a man who has been convicted by the Supreme Court of India after due process and whose mercy petition has been turned down by the President of India, after an inordinate delay, still alive?
Especially, when a terror group has an avowed intention of targeting courts till this terrorist Afzal Guru is released. Why is the government turning ordinary human beings into sitting ducks? Targets for terrorists at will?
How long will this obscene politics carry on where state assemblies and politicians play around with terror for vote banks!
It’s simple, either abolish the death penalty or quit playing with it for imaginary vote-banks.
Be it the killers of Rajiv Gandhi, Afzal Guru or Bhattal, can politicians quit playing dirty games over national interest. Surely terror cannot become a bargaining chip.
P Chidambaram once told me I have a terrible job. I agree Home Minister, but could you do it a little better. Lives are at stake. And, I for one have no compassion for terror.
(The views expressed by the author are personal)