I am totally against Draconian Laws in an immature democracy like ours. Anyway, there is no accountability of police and authorities; to give them more power in teh form of sweeping laws will be disastrous for civil society. They will put you in jail for 6 months by making up a wierd story (eg, Arushi case) and ruin your entire life -- you can do a fat lot about it. So laws have to give everyone a fair chance to trial.
Secondly, my position above should not be confused with fast-tracking justice. That is essential, and can be done through special courts with time-bound mandate. Its the lack of this which makes a situation like Maqsood azhar -- after his arrest, his associates can plan and execute a plane hijack with time to spare! The entire 1st round of Nuremberg Trials for WWII war criminals took just 11 months!
And finally, key to "preventing" terrorism is not strengthening laws, its in strengthening the intelligence setup. Laws are aftermaths of an act of terrorism, and frankly, strong laws and punishment are never deterrents for terrorists like its for civil society -- by definition, these are demented people. The only way to prevent terrorism is to strike at its root through intelligence. All these body searches and metal detectors (the last mile of defence) are also deterrents (for eg, most bombs in the past few years have been planted in open markets and not in shopping malls) but cant root out terrorism.
So lets all hope that our intelligence gathering, distribution, analysis and response improves. Otherwise we are all toast. As they say, security has to succeed everytime, terrorist only need to be successful once to create havoc.
PS: India is the only democracy I know of where winning an election is termed as coming to "power". Everywhere else, they assume "office".
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