How to make sense of Sri Lanka attacks? Experts from India, Russia discuss

Sri Lanka, the pearl drop island which has been at peace for the last decade, was an unexpected target for a global terror attack. Or was it? A panel of experts from Russia and India had an interesting discussion over video conference on Monday, debating on the hows and whys of the Lankan bombings.

The speakers brought a lot of issues into the discussion, even though there were divergent views as well. The experts agreed there was culpable failure on the part of the Sri Lankan authorities to act on very precise intelligence inputs. As the panelists noted, it is not often that one gets warnings as specific as the places that are the likely targets, as well as the day on which the attack would happen. Director of India Foundation Major General Dhruv C. Katoch said the authorities remained complacent because, after ten years of peace, they had not expected anything to go awry. The Russians, however, were more critical. Alexei Kupriyanov, researcher of international political problems at the Russian Academy of Sciences, blamed the failure to act on the internal conflicts between the president and prime minister's offices. Since most top appointees were political ones, he said, there was poor coordination between them. 

The Russians rued the fact that because of their poor relations with the West, they were usually not privy to such intelligence inputs. But, whenever such warnings were given, they were quick to defuse the problem. There was also much discussion on why the local Muslims of Sri Lanka, a small community of prosperous traders, got involved in such attacks.

Yuri Nagernyak, director general of Moscow's International Foundation for the Promotion of the Development of Culture, noted that the Muslims there were not as repressed as elsewhere, and the attack just helped alienate the community. However, Ambassador K.P. Fabian recalled the attacks of 2014, when four Muslims were killed and almost 8,000 displaced. Ajai Sahni, executive director at Institute for Conflict Management, said that if alienation was the cause, the targets should have been Buddhist temples, and not places where Westerners would flock to, namely plush hotels and the church on Easter Sunday. 

Sahni added that Sri Lanka had not done enough to woo the Tamils and other minorities to collect intelligence from them. The Indians gave the example of their country's efforts in dealing with IS. The authorities were constantly in touch with commmunity leaders, because of which they were able to learn of the youth joining the organisation, sometimes from the parents themselves who sought help. In India, they said, several youngsters had been brought back, some rehabilitated into mainstream and others tried for their crimes.

However, they agreed that intelligence gathering was a constant and ongoing effort, and that no part of the world was safe from attacks any more. The men also agreed that while terror groups are being stamped out through military might, there was a need to address alienation from mainstream and points of radicalisation.