We've
forfeited the rights to our own tragedies. As the carnage in Mumbai
raged on, day after horrible day, our 24-hour news channels informed us
that we were watching "India's 9/11". And like actors in a Bollywood
rip-off of an old Hollywood film, we're expected to play our parts and
say our lines, even though we know it's all been said and done before.
As
tension in the region builds, US Senator John McCain has warned
Pakistan that if it didn't act fast to arrest the 'Bad Guys' he had
personal information that India would launch air strikes on 'terrorist
camps' in Pakistan and that Washington could do nothing because Mumbai
was India's 9/11.
But November isn't September, 2008 isn't 2001, Pakistan isn't Afghanistan and India isn't America.
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It's odd how in the last week of November thousands of people in Kashmir supervised by thousands of Indian troops lined up to cast their vote, while the richest quarters of India's richest city ended up looking like war-torn Kupwara—one of Kashmir's most ravaged districts.
The Mumbai attacks are only the most recent of a spate of terrorist attacks on Indian towns and cities this year. Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Delhi, Guwahati, Jaipur and Malegaon have all seen serial bomb blasts in which hundreds of ordinary people have been killed and wounded. If the police are right about the people they have arrested as suspects, both Hindu and Muslim, all Indian nationals, it obviously means something's going very badly wrong in this country.
If you were watching television you may not have heard that ordinary people too died in Mumbai. They were mowed down in a busy railway station and a public hospital. The terrorists did not distinguish between poor and rich.
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There is a fierce, unforgiving fault line that runs through the contemporary discourse on terrorism.
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The sayings of Hafiz Saeed, who founded the Lashkar-e-Toiba (Army of the Pure) in 1990 and who belongs to the hardline Salafi tradition of Islam, certainly bolster the case of Side A. Hafiz Saeed approves of suicide bombing, hates Jews, Shias and Democracy, and believes that jehad should be waged until Islam, his Islam, rules the world. Among the things he has said are:
"There cannot be any peace while India remains intact. Cut them, cut them so much that they kneel before you and ask for mercy."
And, "India has shown us this path. We would like to give India a tit-for-tat response and reciprocate in the same way by killing the Hindus, just like it is killing the Muslims in Kashmir."
But where would Side A accommodate the sayings of Babu Bajrangi of Ahmedabad, India, who sees himself as a democrat, not a terrorist? He was one of the major lynchpins of the 2002 Gujarat genocide and has said (on camera):
"We didn't spare a single Muslim shop, we set everything on fire...we hacked, burned, set on fire...we believe in setting them on fire because these bastards don't want to be cremated, they're afraid of it.... I have just one last wish...let me be sentenced to death.... I don't care if I'm hanged...just give me two days before my hanging and I will go and have a field day in Juhapura where seven or eight lakhs of these people stay.... I will finish them off...let a few more of them die...at least twenty-five thousand to fifty thousand should die."
And where, in Side A's scheme of things, would we place the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh bible, We, or Our Nationhood Defined by M.S. Golwalkar 'Guruji', who became head of the RSS in 1944. It says:
"Ever since that evil day, when Moslems first landed in Hindustan, right up to the present moment, the Hindu Nation has been gallantly fighting on to take on these despoilers. The Race Spirit has been awakening."
Or:
"To keep up the purity of its race and culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic races—the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here...a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by."
Of course, Muslims are not the only people in the gun sights of the Hindu Right. Dalits have been consistently targeted. Recently in Kandhamal in Orissa, Christians were the target of two-and-a-half months of violence which left more than 40 dead. Forty thousand people have been driven from their homes, half of whom now live in refugee camps.
All these years, Hafiz Saeed has lived the life of a respectable man in Lahore as the head of the Jamaat-ud-Dawa, which many believe is a front organisation for the Lashkar-e-Toiba. He continued to recruit young boys for his own bigoted jehad with his twisted, fiery sermons. On December 11, the UN imposed sanctions on the Jamaat-ud-Dawa and the Pakistani government succumbed to international pressure, putting Hafiz Saeed under house arrest. Babu Bajrangi, however, is out on bail and continues to live the life of a respectable man in Gujarat. A couple of years after the genocide, he left the VHP to join the Shiv Sena. Narendra Modi, Bajrangi's former mentor, is still the chief minister of Gujarat. So the man who presided over the Gujarat genocide was re-elected twice, and is deeply respected by India's biggest corporate houses, Reliance and Tata. Suhel Seth, a TV impresario and corporate spokesperson, has recently said, "Modi is God." The policemen who supervised and sometimes even assisted the rampaging Hindu mobs in Gujarat have been rewarded and promoted. The RSS has 45,000 branches, its own range of charities and seven million volunteers preaching its doctrine of hate across India. They include Narendra Modi, but also former prime minister A.B. Vajpayee, current Leader of the Opposition L.K. Advani, and a host of other senior politicians, bureaucrats and police and intelligence officers.
And if that's not enough to complicate our picture of secular democracy, we should place on record that there are plenty of Muslim organisations within India preaching their own narrow bigotry.
So, on balance, if I had to choose between Side A and Side B, I'd pick Side B. We need context. Always.
In this nuclear subcontinent, that context is Partition. The Radcliffe Line which separated India and Pakistan and tore through states, districts, villages, fields, communities, water systems, homes and families, was drawn virtually overnight. It was Britain's final, parting kick to us. Partition triggered the massacre of more than a million people and the largest migration of a human population in contemporary history. Eight million people—Hindus fleeing the new Pakistan, Muslims fleeing the new kind of India—left their homes with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Each of those people carries and passes down a story of unimaginable pain, hate, horror, but yearning too. That wound, those torn but still unsevered muscles, that blood and those splintered bones still lock us together in a close embrace of hatred, terrifying familiarity but also love. It has left Kashmir trapped in a nightmare from which it can't seem to emerge, a nightmare that has claimed more than 60,000 lives. Pakistan, the Land of the Pure, became an Islamic republic, and then, very quickly a corrupt, violent military state, openly intolerant of other faiths. India on the other hand declared herself an inclusive, secular democracy. It was a magnificent undertaking, but Babu Bajrangi's predecessors had been hard at work since the 1920s, dripping poison into India's bloodstream, undermining that idea of India even before it was born. By 1990, they were ready to make a bid for power. In 1992, Hindu mobs exhorted by L.K. Advani stormed the Babri Masjid and demolished it. By 1998, the BJP was in power at the Centre. The US War on Terror put the wind in their sails. It allowed them to do exactly as they pleased, even to commit genocide and then present their fascism as a legitimate form of chaotic democracy. This happened at a time when India had opened its huge market to international finance, and it was in the interests of international corporations and the media houses they owned to project it as a country that could do no wrong. That gave Hindu Nationalists all the impetus and the impunity they needed. This, then, is the larger historical context of terrorism in the subcontinent, and of the Mumbai attacks.
It shouldn't surprise us that Hafiz Saeed of the Lashkar-e-Toiba is from Shimla (India) and L.K. Advani of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh is from Sindh (Pakistan).
In much the same way as it did after the 2001 Parliament attack, the 2002 burning of the Sabarmati Express and the 2006 bombing of the Samjhauta Express, the Government of India announced that it has 'incontrovertible' evidence that the Lashkar-e-Toiba backed by Pakistan's ISI was behind the Mumbai strikes. The Lashkar has denied involvement, but remains the prime accused. According to the police and intelligence agencies, the Lashkar operates in India through an organisation called the 'Indian Mujahideen'. Two Indian nationals—Sheikh Mukhtar Ahmed, a Special Police Officer working for the Jammu and Kashmir Police, and Tausif Rehman, a resident of Calcutta in West Bengal—have been arrested in connection with the Mumbai attacks. So already the neat accusation against Pakistan is getting a little messy. Almost always, when these stories unspool, they reveal a complicated global network of foot-soldiers, trainers, recruiters, middlemen and undercover intelligence and counter-intelligence operatives, working not just on both sides of the India-Pakistan border, but in several countries simultaneously. In today's world, trying to pin down the provenance of a terrorist strike and isolate it within the borders of a single nation-state is very much like trying to pin down the provenance of corporate money. It's almost impossible.
In circumstances like these, air strikes to 'take out' terrorist camps may take out the camps, but certainly will not 'take out' the terrorists. And neither will war. (Also, in our bid for the moral high ground, let's try not to forget that the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the LTTE of neighbouring Sri Lanka, one of the world's most deadly terrorist groups, were trained by the Indian army.)
Afghan revenge: America’s debris, our headache
Thanks largely to the part it was forced to play as America's ally, first in its war in support of the Afghan Islamists and then in its war against
them, Pakistan, whose territory is reeling under these contradictions,
is careening towards civil war. As recruiting agents for America's
jehad against the Soviet Union, it was the job of the Pakistan army and
the ISI to nurture and channel funds to Islamic fundamentalist
organisations. Having wired up these Frankenstein's monsters and
released them into the world, the US expected it could rein them in
like pet mastiffs whenever it wanted to. Certainly it did not expect
them to come calling in the heart of the Homeland on September 11. So
once again, Afghanistan had to be violently re-made. Now the debris of
a re-ravaged Afghanistan has washed up on Pakistan's borders. Nobody,
least of all the Pakistan government, denies that it is presiding over
a country that is threatening to implode. The terrorist training camps,
the fire-breathing mullahs and the maniacs who believe that Islam will,
or should, rule the world is mostly the detritus of two Afghan wars.
Their ire rains down on the Pakistan government and Pakistani civilians
as much, if not more, than it does on India. If at this point India
decides to go to war, perhaps the descent of the whole region into
chaos will be complete. The debris of a bankrupt, destroyed Pakistan
will wash up on India's shores, endangering us as never before. If
Pakistan collapses, we can look forward to having millions of
'non-state actors' with an arsenal of nuclear weapons at their disposal
as neighbours. It's hard to understand why those who steer India's ship
are so keen to replicate Pakistan's mistakes and call damnation upon
this country by inviting the United States to further meddle
clumsily and dangerously in our extremely complicated affairs. A
superpower never has allies. It only has agents.
On the plus
side, the advantage of going to war is that it's the best way for India
to avoid facing up to the serious trouble building on our home front.
The
Mumbai attacks were broadcast live (and exclusive!) on all or most of
our 67 24-hour news channels and god knows how many international ones.
TV anchors in their studios and journalists at 'ground zero' kept up an
endless stream of excited commentary. Over three days and three nights,
we watched in disbelief as a small group of very young men armed with
guns and gadgets exposed the powerlessness of the police, the elite
National Security Guard and the marine commandos of this supposedly
mighty, nuclear-powered nation. While they did this, they
indiscriminately massacred unarmed people, in railway stations,
hospitals and luxury hotels, unmindful of their class, caste, religion
or nationality. Part of the helplessness of the security forces had to
do with having to worry about hostages. In other situations, in Kashmir
for example, their tactics are not so sensitive. Whole buildings are
blown up. Human shields are used. (The US and Israeli armies don't
hesitate to send cruise missiles into buildings and drop daisy cutters
on wedding parties in Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan.) But this was
different. And it was on TV.
The boy-terrorists' nonchalant
willingness to kill—and be killed—mesmerised their international
audience. They delivered something different from the usual diet of
suicide bombings and missile attacks that people have grown inured to
on the news. Here was something new. Die Hard 25. The gruesome
performance went on and on. TV ratings soared. Ask any television
magnate or corporate advertiser who measures broadcast time in seconds,
not minutes, what that's worth.
Eventually the killers died and
died hard, all but one. (Perhaps, in the chaos, some escaped. We may
never know.) Throughout the stand-off, the terrorists made no demands
and expressed no desire to negotiate. Their purpose was to kill people
and inflict as much damage as they could before they were killed
themselves. They left us completely bewildered. When we say 'Nothing
can justify terrorism', what most of us mean is that nothing can
justify the taking of human life. We say this because we respect life,
because we think it's precious. So what are we to make of those who
care nothing for life, not even their own? The truth is that we have no
idea what to make of them, because we can sense that even before
they've died, they've journeyed to another world where we cannot reach
them.
Gujarat ’02: The elephant in the room
One TV channel (India TV) broadcast a phone conversation with
one of the attackers, who called himself 'Imran Babar'. I cannot vouch
for the veracity of the conversation, but the things he talked about
were the things contained in the 'terror e-mails' that were sent out
before several other bomb attacks in India. Things we don't want to
talk about any more: the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, the
genocidal slaughter of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, the brutal
repression in Kashmir. "You're surrounded," the anchor told him. "You
are definitely going to die. Why don't you surrender?" "We die every
day," he replied in a strange, mechanical way. "It's better to live one
day as a lion and then die this way." He didn't seem to want to change
the world. He just seemed to want to take it down with him.
If
the men were indeed members of the Lashkar-e-Toiba, why didn't it
matter to them that a large number of their victims were Muslim, or
that their action was likely to result in a severe backlash against the
Muslim community in India whose rights they claim to be fighting for?
Terrorism is a heartless ideology, and like most ideologies that have
their eye on the Big Picture, individuals don't figure in its
calculations except as collateral damage. It has always been a part
of—and often even the aim of—terrorist strategy to exacerbate a
bad situation in order to expose hidden fault lines. The blood of
'martyrs' irrigates terrorism. Hindu terrorists need dead Hindus,
Communist terrorists need dead proletarians, Islamist terrorists need
dead Muslims. The dead become the demonstration, the proof of
victimhood, which is central to the project. A single act of terrorism
is not in itself meant to achieve military victory; at best it is meant
to be a catalyst that triggers something else, something much
larger than itself, a tectonic shift, a realignment. The act itself is
theatre, spectacle and symbolism, and today, the stage on which it
pirouettes and performs its acts of bestiality is Live TV.Even as the
Mumbai terrorists were being condemned by TV anchors, the effectiveness
of their action was magnified a thousand-fold by TV broadcasts.
Forgotten man: Former PM V.P. Singh’s death passed without a mention
Through the endless hours of analysis and the endless op-ed essays, in
India at least there has been very little mention of the elephants in
the room: Kashmir, Gujarat and the demolition of the Babri Masjid.
Instead, we had retired diplomats and strategic experts debate the pros
and cons of a war against Pakistan. We had the rich threatening not to
pay their taxes unless their security was guaranteed (is it alright for
the poor to remain unprotected?). We had people suggest that the
government step down and each state in India be handed over to a
separate corporation. We had the death of former prime minister V.P.
Singh, the hero of Dalits and lower castes and villain of upper-caste
Hindus, pass without a mention. We had Suketu Mehta, author of Maximum City and co-writer of the Bollywood film Mission Kashmir,
give us his version of George Bush's famous 'Why They Hate Us' speech.
His analysis of why "religious bigots, both Hindu and Muslim", hate
Mumbai: "Perhaps because Mumbai stands for lucre, profane dreams and an
indiscriminate openness." His prescription: "The best answer to the
terrorists is to dream bigger, make even more money, and visit Mumbai
more than ever." Didn't George Bush ask Americans to go out and shop
after 9/11? Ah yes. 9/11, the day we can't seem to get away from.
Though
one chapter of horror in Mumbai has ended, another might have just
begun. Day after day, a powerful, vociferous section of the Indian
elite, goaded by marauding TV anchors who make Fox News look almost
radical and left-wing, have taken to mindlessly attacking politicians, all
politicians, glorifying the police and the army, and virtually asking
for a police state. It isn't surprising that those who have grown plump
on the pickings of democracy (such as it is) should now be calling for
a police state. The era of 'pickings' is long gone. We're now in the
era of Grabbing by Force, and democracy has a terrible habit of getting
in the way.
Dangerous, stupid television flash cards like the
Police are Good, Politicians are Bad/ Chief Executives are Good, Chief
Ministers are Bad/ Army is Good, Government is Bad/ India is Good,
Pakistan is Bad are being bandied about by TV channels that have
already whipped their viewers into a state of almost uncontrollable
hysteria.
Tragically, this regression into intellectual infancy
comes at a time when people in India were beginning to see that the
business of terrorism is a hall of mirrors in which victims and
perpetrators sometimes exchange roles. It's an understanding that the
people of Kashmir, given their dreadful experiences of the last 20
years, have honed to an exquisite art. On the mainland we're still
learning. (If Kashmir won't willingly integrate into India, it's
beginning to look as though India will integrate/disintegrate into
Kashmir.)
It was after the 2001 Parliament attack that the first
serious questions began to be raised. A campaign by a group of lawyers
and activists exposed how innocent people had been framed by the police
and the press, how evidence was fabricated, how witnesses lied, how due
process had been criminally violated at every stage of the
investigation. Eventually the courts acquitted two out of the four
accused, including S.A.R. Geelani, the man whom the police claimed was
the mastermind of the operation. A third, Shaukat Guru, was acquitted
of all the charges brought against him but was then convicted for a
fresh, comparatively minor offence. The Supreme Court upheld the death
sentence of another of the accused, Mohammad Afzal. In its judgement,
the court acknowledged that there was no proof that Mohammad Afzal
belonged to any terrorist group, but went on to say, quite shockingly,
"The collective conscience of the society will only be satisfied if
capital punishment is awarded to the offender. " Even today we don't
really know who the terrorists that attacked Indian Parliament were and
who they worked for.
More recently, on September 19 this year,
we had the controversial 'encounter' at Batla House in Jamia Nagar,
Delhi, where the Special Cell of the Delhi police gunned down two
Muslim students in their rented flat under seriously questionable
circumstances, claiming that they were responsible for serial bombings
in Delhi, Jaipur and Ahmedabad in 2008. An Assistant Commissioner of
Police, Mohan Chand Sharma, who played a key role in the Parliament
attack investigation, lost his life as well. He was one of India's many
'encounter specialists', known and rewarded for having summarily
executed several 'terrorists'. There was an outcry against the Special
Cell from a spectrum of people, ranging from eyewitnesses in the local
community to senior Congress Party leaders, students, journalists,
lawyers, academics and activists, all of whom demanded a judicial
inquiry into the incident. In response, the BJP and L.K. Advani lauded
Mohan Chand Sharma as a 'Braveheart' and launched a concerted campaign
in which they targeted those who had dared to question the integrity of
the police, saying it was 'suicidal' and calling them 'anti-national'.
Of course, there has been no inquiry.
Only days after the Batla
House event, another story about 'terrorists' surfaced in the news. In
a report submitted to the court, the CBI said that a team from Delhi's
Special Cell (the same team that led the Batla House encounter,
including Mohan Chand Sharma) had abducted two innocent men, Irshad Ali
and Moarif Qamar, in December 2005, planted 2 kg of RDX and two pistols
on them, and then arrested them as 'terrorists' who belonged to Al Badr
(which operates out of Kashmir). Ali and Qamar, who have spent years in
jail, are only two examples out of hundreds of Muslims who have been
similarly jailed, tortured and even killed on false charges.
This
pattern changed in October 2008 when Maharashtra's Anti-Terrorism Squad
(ATS), which was investigating the September 2008 Malegaon blasts,
arrested a Hindu preacher, Sadhvi Pragya; a self-styled godman, Swami
Dayanand Pande; and Lt Col Prasad Purohit, a serving officer of the
Indian army. All the arrested belong to Hindu Nationalist
organisations, including a Hindu supremacist group called Abhinav
Bharat. The Shiv Sena, the BJP and the RSS condemned the Maharashtra
ATS, and vilified its chief, Hemant Karkare, claiming he was part of a
political conspiracy and declaring that "Hindus could not be
terrorists". L.K. Advani changed his mind about his policy on the
police and made rabble-rousing speeches to huge gatherings, in which he
denounced the ATS for daring to cast aspersions on holy men and women.
On
November 25, newspapers reported that the ATS was investigating the
high-profile VHP chief Praveen Togadia's possible role in the Malegaon
blasts. The next day, in an extraordinary twist of fate, Hemant Karkare
was killed in the Mumbai attacks. The chances are that the new chief,
whoever he is, will find it hard to withstand the political pressure
that is bound to be brought on him over the Malegaon investigation.
While
the Sangh parivar does not seem to have come to a final decision over
whether or not it is anti-national and suicidal to question the police,
Arnab Goswami, anchorperson of Times Now television channel, has
stepped up to the plate. He has taken to naming, demonising and openly
heckling people who have dared to question the integrity of the police
and armed forces. My name and the name of the well-known lawyer
Prashant Bhushan have come up several times. At one point, while
interviewing a former police officer, Arnab Goswami turned to the
camera; "Arundhati Roy and Prashant Bhushan," he said, "I hope you are
watching this. We think you are disgusting." For a TV anchor to do this
in an atmosphere as charged and as frenzied as the one that prevails
today amounts to incitement as well as threat, and would probably in
different circumstances have cost a journalist his or her job.
So
according to a man aspiring to be India's next prime minister, and
another who is the public face of a mainstream TV channel, citizens
have no right to raise questions about the police. This in a country
with a shadowy history of suspicious terror attacks, murky
investigations, and fake 'encounters'. This in a country that boasts of
the highest number of custodial deaths in the world and yet refuses to
ratify the International Covenant on Torture. A country where the ones
who make it to torture chambers are the lucky ones because at least
they've escaped being 'encountered' by our encounter specialists. A
country where the line between the Underworld and the Encounter
Specialists virtually does not exist.
How should those of us
whose hearts have been sickened by the knowledge of all of this view
the Mumbai attacks, and what are we to do about them? There are those
who point out that US strategy has been successful inasmuch as the
United States has not suffered a major attack on its home ground since
9/11. However, some would say that what America is suffering now is far
worse. If the idea behind the 9/11 terror attacks was to goad America
into showing its true colours, what greater success could the
terrorists have asked for? The US army is bogged down in two unwinnable
wars, which have made the United States the most hated country in the
world. Those wars have contributed greatly to the unravelling of the
American economy and, who knows, perhaps eventually the American
empire. (Could it be that battered, bombed Afghanistan, the graveyard
of the Soviet Union, will be the undoing of this one too?) Hundreds of
thousands of people, including thousands of American soldiers, have
lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan. The frequency of terrorist
strikes on US allies/agents (including India) and US interests in the
rest of the world has increased dramatically since 9/11. George Bush,
the man who led the US response to 9/11, is a despised figure not just
internationally but also by his own people. Who can possibly claim that
the United States is winning the war on terror?
Homeland
security has cost the US government billions of dollars. Few countries,
certainly not India, can afford that sort of price tag. But even if we
could, the fact is that this vast homeland of ours cannot be
secured or policed in the way the United States has been. It's not that
kind of homeland. We have a hostile nuclear weapons state that is
slowly spinning out of control as a neighbour, we have a military
occupation in Kashmir, and a shamefully persecuted, impoverished
minority of more than a hundred and fifty million Muslims who are being
targeted as a community and pushed to the wall, whose young see no
justice on the horizon, and who, were they to totally lose hope and
radicalise, end up as a threat not just to India, but to the whole
world. If 10 men can hold off the NSG commandos and the police for
three days, and if it takes half-a-million soldiers to hold down the
Kashmir Valley, do the math. What kind of Homeland Security can secure
India?
Nor for that matter will any other quick fix.
Anti-terrorism laws are not meant for terrorists; they're for people
that governments don't like. That's why they have a conviction rate of
less than two per cent. They're just a means of putting inconvenient
people away without bail for a long time and eventually letting them
go. Terrorists like those who attacked Mumbai are hardly likely to be
deterred by the prospect of being refused bail or being sentenced to
death. It's what they want.
What we're experiencing now
is blowback, the cumulative result of decades of quick fixes and dirty
deeds. The carpet's squelching under our feet.
The only way to contain
(it would be naive to say end) terrorism is to look at the monster in
the mirror. We're standing at a fork in the road. One sign says
'Justice', the other 'Civil War'. There's no third sign and there's no
going back. Choose.
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