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By Ravi Kuchimanchi
Perhaps even more than its American counterpart, the Indian media is poring over Osama bin Laden since the Navy SEALs completed their job May 2. Drooling at what appear to be U.S. stealth helicopters, our media asks if we have the technology and the capability to carry out such an operation against those that terrorize India?
India loses millions of lives every year to threats that we have the technology to fight covertly and overtly. No doubt we have the technology to eradicate malnutrition, tuberculosis and malaria. Yet they have been hiding in plain sight for decades.  Isn’t our government either complicit or incompetent? Do we need the CIA chief’s intelligence to tell us this?
Somehow our radars seem to be jammed and they are not picking up the real threats. Imitating the FBI, our government asks about India’s 50 most wanted. Can “two square meals a day” and a functioning primary health clinic make it ahead of Dawood Ibrahim? That’s what most Indians really want to know. Have we thought of going for our most wanted at home? Or, like the U.S., do we want to nail them in Abbottabad, Pakistan?
This is not to say that the war against terror for India is easy or that it won’t involve painstaking work. America spent trillions of dollars over 10 years fighting wars across the world to go after the terrorists who took nearly 3,000 “American lives” when they bombed the World Trade Center on 9/11. Over 6,000 U.S. soldiers have died.
There have been an untold number of civilian deaths, possibly in the hundreds of thousands.  In the U.S., those don’t get as much attention as U.S. military lives lost. An Indian or a Pakistani or an Iraqi death does not merit the same attention. But why are we waiting for the U.S. to value an Indian life? What value do we ourselves put on it?
When mosquitoes dwelling in open drains that have been poorly constructed and ill-maintained take thousands of lives in cities and villages in India, what value do we put on these lives that were lost?
Last year, 138,000 people were attacked by malaria in Maharashtra with nearly 200 deaths. Some 80% of these were in India’s malaria capital, Mumbai, better known as the financial capital and site of the 26/11 attacks. It could have been worse. Our terrorist mosquitoes are mainly equipped with the conventional Plasmodium Vivax malarial strain. But any day they may more widely spread the Falciparum strain and develop drug resistance, the malarial equivalent of a nuclear weapon: It would be significantly more lethal.
We are not talking about a little malaria in some remote villages in tribal areas of India’s border regions — it’s in a big city like Mumbai right in the midst of our super-specialty hospitals. Mumbai is our Abbottabad: the threat is hiding in plain sight. It cannot do so without the support of our government. Are we going to strike at its support system by spending public funds towards public good? Will we equip our citizens through effective sanitation, drainage and adequate nutrition so they can defend themselves?
Over a million children under 5 years of age die every year due to malnutrition in India and over 350,000 people die annually from tuberculosis. Like the causalities of the war in Iraq, they seem to go unnoticed. What sacrifices are we prepared to make to fight the menace that is taking all these Indian lives?
This is not to say that we should look the other way on cross-border terrorism. Our neighbors face some of the same terror threats that challenge us. If we value the lives of the under-privileged Indian, just as we would value our own life, and strive to eliminate most of the threats to “Indian lives,” we would surely find most of the terror is within our country and likewise so would the Pakistanis.
Such a war would unite us rather than divide us. Surely it would elevate our sense and sensibility to respect human rights so that we find a way of peacefully co-existing and resolving issues that affect our lives.

Ravi Kuchimanchi is the founder of Association for India’s Development (AID), a volunteer movement promoting sustainable, equitable and just development. AID works along with other grassroots organizations in the inter-connected fields of agriculture, energy,  education, health, livelihoods, natural resources including land and water, women’s empowerment and social justice.  He can be reached at ravi@aidindia.org

Fuente: India Real Time