[Reader-list] Arundhati Roy: Mumbai was not our 9/11

[Rohan DSouza]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/dec/12/mumbai-arundhati-roy
 Arundhati Roy: Mumbai was not our 9/11 The author on the Mumbai terror
attacks and India's response

   - Arundhati Roy
   - guardian.co.uk <http://www.guardian.co.uk/>, Friday 12 December 2008
   20.21 GMT
   - Article history<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/dec/12/mumbai-arundhati-roy#history-byline>

 [image: Azam Amir Kasab filmed on CCTV inside the Chhatrapati Shivaji train
station in Mumbai]

Azam Amir Kasab, the face of the Mumbai attacks. Photograph: Reuters

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". 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. So perhaps we should reclaim our tragedy and pick
through the debris with our own brains and our own broken hearts so that we
can arrive at our own conclusions.

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 indicates that 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.
They killed both with equal cold-bloodedness. The Indian media, however, was
transfixed by the rising tide of horror that breached the glittering
barricades of India Shining and spread its stench in the marbled lobbies and
crystal ballrooms of two incredibly luxurious hotels and a small Jewish
centre.

We're told one of these hotels is an icon of the city of Mumbai. That's
absolutely true. It's an icon of the easy, obscene injustice that ordinary
Indians endure every day. On a day when the newspapers were full of moving
obituaries by beautiful people about the hotel rooms they had stayed in, the
gourmet restaurants they loved (ironically one was called Kandahar), and the
staff who served them, a small box on the top left-hand corner in the inner
pages of a national newspaper (sponsored by a pizza company I think) said
"Hungry, *kya*?" (Hungry eh?). It then, with the best of intentions I'm
sure, informed its readers that on the international hunger index, India
ranked below Sudan and Somalia. But of course this isn't *that* war. That
one's still being fought in the Dalit bastis of our villages, on the banks
of the Narmada and the Koel Karo rivers; in the rubber estate in Chengara;
in the villages of Nandigram, Singur, Chattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa,
Lalgarh in West Bengal and the slums and shantytowns of our gigantic cities.

That war isn't on TV. Yet. So maybe, like everyone else, we should deal with
the one that is.

There is a fierce, unforgiving fault-line that runs through the contemporary
discourse on terrorism. On one side (let's call it Side A) are those who see
terrorism, especially "Islamist" terrorism, as a hateful, insane scourge
that spins on its own axis, in its own orbit and has nothing to do with the
world around it, nothing to do with history, geography or economics.
Therefore, Side A says, to try and place it in a political context, or even
try to understand it, amounts to justifying it and is a crime in itself.

Side B believes that though nothing can ever excuse or justify terrorism, it
exists in a particular time, place and political context, and to refuse to
see that will only aggravate the problem and put more and more people in
harm's way. Which is a crime in itself.

The sayings of Hafiz Saeed, who founded the Lashkar-e-Taiba (Army of the
Pure) in 1990 and who belongs to the hardline Salafi tradition of Islam,
certainly bolsters the case of Side A. Hafiz Saeed approves of suicide
bombing, hates Jews, Shias and Democracy and believes that jihad should be
waged until Islam, *his* Islam, rules the world. Among the things he 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 [seven or eight hundred thousand]
of these people stay ... I will finish them off … let a few more of them die
... at least 25,000 to 50,000 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 MS Golwalkar, 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 who 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 Daawa, which many believe is a front
organization for the Lashkar-e-Taiba. He continues to recruit young boys for
his own bigoted jehad with his twisted, fiery sermons. On December 11 the UN
imposed sanctions on the Jammat-ud-Daawa. The Pakistani government succumbed
to international pressure and put Hafiz Saeed under house arrest. Babu
Bajrangi, however, is out on bail and lives 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, 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 7 million volunteers
preaching its doctrine of hate across India. They include Narendra Modi, but
also former prime minister AB Vajpayee, current leader of the opposition LK
Advani, and a host of other senior politicians, bureaucrats and police and
intelligence officers.

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 LK 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-Taiba is from Shimla (India) and LK Advani of the
Rashtriya Swayam Sevak 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 2007 bombing of the Samjhauta
Express, the government of India announced that it has "incontrovertible"
evidence that the Lashkar-e-Taiba 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 Kolkata 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.
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.)

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 jihad
against the Soviet Union, it was the job of the Pakistan army and the ISI to
nurture and channel funds to Islamic fundamentalist organizations. Having
wired up these Frankensteins 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 heart of the Homeland on
September 11. So once again, Afghanistan had to be violently remade. 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 U.S 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 standoff 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.

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 emails" 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-Taiba, 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 their 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
faultlines. 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 attack was being condemned by TV
anchors, the effectiveness of the terror strikes were being magnified a
thousandfold by TV broadcasts.

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 minster VP 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
leftwing, 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 flashcards 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 in the business of terrorism,
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 SAR Geelani, the man
whom the police claimed was the mastermind of the operation. A third,
Showkat 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
judgment the court acknowledged there was no proof that Mohammed 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 the 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 LK 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 a sessions 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 2kg 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) that was investigating the September 2008 Malegaon blasts arrested a
Hindu preacher Sadhvi Pragya, a self-styled God man Swami Dayanand Pande and
Lt Col Purohit, a serving officer of the Indian Army. All the arrested
belong to Hindu Nationalist organizations 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". LK 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 the November 25 newspapers reported that the ATS was investigating the
high profile VHP Chief Pravin 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, 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 camera: "Arundhati
Roy<http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/arundhatiroy>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 the next prime minister of India, 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 colors, 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 unraveling 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 people including thousands of American
soldiers have lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan. The frequency of
terrorist strikes on U.S allies/agents (including India) and U.S 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 150 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 ten 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 2%. 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 naïve 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.