India|: Mr. Rajeev Chandrasekhar,FICCI President, said that it is extremely important for businessmen, investors and others not to lose faith in the Indian economy as it would strengthen the hands of terrorists who wanted to do just this and had struck Mumbai, the financial capital of India. The strength of the Indian economy will help the west recover and this was something the terrorists did not want. But India had a resilient economy and India must respond calling for reinforced global efforts to fight terror, he said.

Mr. Chandrasekhar pointed out that: “Indian business and its various stakeholders had so far been mute and very detached to this debate on terrorism and tougher approach to terrorism and terrorists including anti terror laws. Last nights attack was a clear and unambiguous attack on the Indian economy and all its participants. It is time we all join this debate on terrorism and demand stronger and firmer leadership and approach the threat of terrorism with better laws.”

Stronger laws, he said, need to be examined on merit and and simply saying no to it because a political party is insisting on it, is doing disservice to the nation. Anti terror laws need to be framed to give the policing establishment additional powers. To deny using stronger laws just because of the fear of abuse will be fighting terrorism ill-equipped, he said.

He said that there is going to be an upsurge of terrorism because of many weaknesses like the politicization of our police and intelligence establishments and then the repeated assaults on them by the intellectual left and the human rights organizations that have corroded their capability and removed initiative at an individual level.

“Our criminal justice system and the criminal penal code are ill-equipped to deal with the emerging threat of terrorism. So, we must create a fast track process outside the criminal justice system with specially trained judges directly under the Supreme Court and also have a review commission of capable people to audit abuse and misuse of the law. We are a liberal pluralistic society and there is no reason for any of that to change in our war against terrorism. We can have our democracy and also win over terrorism. They are not mutually exclusive as some intellectuals make it out to be,” he said.

“It worries me that India has made so little or no progress on any investigation in any of the terror cases including the attack on the Indian Institute of Science. It is even more disturbing that we as a civil society are not asking tough questions of our government,” he said.