For all the attention paid to the government’s recalibration of the Indo-Pak peace talks and all the high quality semantics the foreign policy establishment is using to get the message across—the foreign secretary level talks are indefinitely postponed, not cancelled—the real job is at home. This is one thing the UPA mustn’t forget, as the Indian delegation collects sincere expressions of solidarity at the G-8 meeting. The prime minister and the foreign secretary have both emphasised the global dimensions of terror and asked for coordinated international efforts. As valid as these arguments are, they don’t address the fact that the war against terror can’t be fought similarly by all targeted countries. Terrorism has specific local dimensions, defined both by local politics and society. India unfortunately has probably the most complex set of local factors to deal with—and foreign cooperation, or even peace talks with Pakistan, are not particularly helpful in that regard.

Mumbai has made it impossible for all but the most irresponsible politicians to ignore that India is a recruiting ground for terrorism. This calls for two kinds of responses. First, Intelligence agencies must not feel constrained in their efforts to infiltrate and monitor local groups. Much of Intelligence work, contrary to the impression given by even the “experts”, is a long, slow grind. Monitoring, surveillance and agent placement are time and resource consuming processes with very uncertain rewards. Security officials can’t mount such operations and keep them going if approval of their work varies with the politics of the day. In fact, Intelligence agencies need a major boost from the government—a thumping acknowledgment of their importance.

Equally important, but even more difficult, is the second response: change the incentive calculus of the young people mostly men who form the recruitment pool for terror’s headhunters. Young men with jobs in humdrum bourgeois settings don’t usually chuck it all for a career that promises murder as the highest achievement. There’s no doubt that the huge expansion in economic opportunities that high growth has engendered hasn’t seen full participation of India’s Muslim community. There’s little doubt also that many of the community’s political feted leaders do not communicate the strong popular desire for education and jobs. Politicians need to start ignoring some of these so-called leaders, who are always claiming that the Muslim problem is special. That false distinction is the starting point for India’s biggest political and social challenge.