[Reader-list] 9 Is Not 11: (And November isn't September) by Arundhati Roy

[Rahul Asthana]

Given the difference in national narratives and the way justice is conceived and dispensed, within the geographic and logical boundary of a nation,it is ridiculous how someone can assume that  people across national boundaries can hold the same opinion\perception about the justness of a particular society,specially when those two nations are India and Pakistan.
In the context of prevention of terrorist attacks on India,her idea that India should look inwards is incredibly moronic.
Since she probably would  have difficulty in understanding anything else than Hindu fundamentalism,lets word her argument differently in a hypothetical situation.
Suppose there is sufficient evidence pointing to Bajrang Dal to plan and carry out an attack on Pakistan.A Pakistani version of Arundhati Roy says that Pakistanis have to treat their minorities fairly  and actually convince Babu Bajrangi of Bajrang Dal that they are doing so for the attacks to stop.The bottom line is it totally depends on Babu Bajrangi's mood and perception.Does this sound stupid enough?
So,in effect,by combining a just cause with a puerile conclusion,she ends up harming the cause she stands for.


--- On Tue, 12/16/08, Nishant <nicheant at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

> From: Nishant <nicheant at yahoo.co.uk>
> Subject: [Reader-list] 9 Is Not 11: (And November isn't September) by Arundhati Roy
> To: "Reader List" <reader-list at sarai.net>
> Date: Tuesday, December 16, 2008, 1:08 AM
> 9 Is Not 11 
> (And November isn't September) 
> ARUNDHATI ROY 
> 
> 
> 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.
> 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
> 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. 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, Lalgarh in West
> Bengal; in Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa; 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-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, hisIslam, 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.)
> 
> 
> 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.
> 
> 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.
> 
> 
> 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.
> 
> http://outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20081222&fname=ARoy+(F)&sid=1
> 
> 
> 
>       
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