[Reader-list] fwd: Mumbai was not India's 9/11- by Arundhati Roy

[inder salim]

The Mumbai attacks have been dubbed 'India's 9/11', and there are
calls for a 9/11-style response, including an attack on Pakistan.
Instead, the country must fight terrorism with justice, or face civil
war
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/dec/12/mumbai-arundhati-roy

    * Arundhati Roy
    *
          o Arundhati Roy
          o guardian.co.uk, Saturday 13 December 2008 00.01 GMT
          o Article history



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 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.



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