A Times of India article from 2007  asserts that outside Iraq India is the country with the most terrorism, losing as many as were lost in the 9-11 attack every three years or so. Now with the bombing of Pakistan, violence is bound to escalate, as disaffected Pakistanis take out their wrath at the US and Israel on the convenient and vulnerable target next door.

“In fact, India has since 2004 lost more lives to terrorist incidents than all of North America,
South America, Central America, Europe and Eurasia put together. All of these vast swathes of the globe lost a total of 3,280 lives in terrorist incidents between January 2004 and March this year. India alone lost 3,674 lives over the same period of three years and three months.

In yesterday’s edition of TOI, in our front page lead report on the Hyderabad blasts, we had said that terror groups have left India with perhaps the highest number of civilian victims of terror (apart from war-torn countries like Iraq).

Later, on Sunday, when we looked in detail at the worldwide numbers, we found India not only had the highest number of deaths after Iraq, but also the highest number of terror-related incidents and injured among all countries (again, barring Iraq) — more than all the war zones around the globe. India has been hit by terrorists at will and with chilling regularity — Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Malegaon, Varanasi, J&K — the list is endless.

It’s only on one count — hostages taken by terror groups — that India’s at No 3, to Iraq’s No 2. Guess which country was No 1? Nepal, that too by a huge margin, thanks to large-scale kidnappings by Maoists.

Indeed, if one had to pick a terrorist hotspot on the globe it would have to be South Asia. Outside of Iraq, 20,781 people were killed in terrorist violence between January 2004 and March 2007, according to data available from the Worldwide Incidents Tracking System (WITS) of the US National Counter-Terrorism Centre (NCTC). Almost half of them, 9,283 to be precise, were killed in South Asia.

Besides India, Afghanistan has seen 2,405 lives being lost while more than 1,000 each have been killed in Pakistan and Nepal. Sri Lanka has had 866 terrorism-related deaths and Bangladesh 158. Bhutan and the Maldives are the only South Asian nations not to have lost lives to terror in this period.”

The World Terrorist Risk Index compiled by the UK firm Maplecroft had India at number six in 2009,  after Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Lebanon, but, by the end of 2010 (November 2010), the country’s position had improved to 16.  At the top in 2010 were Somalia, Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan, a ranking unchanged from the previous years.

The Maplecroft index assesses 198 countries based on number, frequency, and intensity of attacks, as well as the likelihood that there will be mass casualties.  Of the 20 states they rate as high risk, India is at 18 and Israel is at 20, according to a Huffington Post article.

The HuffPo piece doesn’t square with the Times of India assessment I cited at the top, which rates terrorism in India much more severely. By contrast, the Maplecroft Index attributes over 75% of the 13,492 victims of global terrorism to its top four countries, a proportion strongly at variance with the T of I figures.

The explanation for this might lie in the fact that the index is “forward-looking”, even though it’s based on historical data. It’s possible that countries with a proactive stance on terrorism might be rated as less dangerous.  The other possibility –  cynical though it might be – is that the ranking follows Anglo-American military strategy, highlighting terrorism in “areas of interest”, and downplaying it when it occurs inside the territory of allies.