[Reader-list] Fwd: Bombs and bullets cannot destroy India

[inder salim]

Bombs and bullets cannot destroy India - as long as its gates remain open
This atrocity was not homegrown. But if it leads to demonisation of
the nation's Muslims, the terrorists will have won

    * Shashi Tharoor
    * guardian.co.uk, Friday November 28 2008 00.01 GMT

There is a savage irony to the fact that the unfolding horror in
Mumbai began with terrorists docking near the Gateway of India. The
magnificent arch, built in 1911 to welcome the King-Emperor, has ever
since stood as a symbol of the openness of the city. Crowds flock
around it, made up of foreign tourists and local yokels; touts hawk
their wares; boats bob in the waters, offering cruises out to the open
sea. The teeming throngs around it daily reflect India's diversity,
with Parsi gentlemen out for their evening constitutionals, Muslim
women in burkas taking the sea air, Goan Catholic waiters enjoying a
break from their duties at the stately Taj Mahal hotel, Hindus from
every corner of the country chatting in a multitude of tongues. Today,
ringed by police barricades, the Gateway of India - and gateway to
India's soul - is barred, mute testimony to the latest assault on the
country's pluralist democracy.

The terrorists knew exactly what they were doing. Theirs was an attack
on India's financial nerve-centre and commercial capital, a city
emblematic of the country's energetic thrust into the 21st century.
They struck at symbols of the prosperity that was making the Indian
model so attractive to the globalising world - luxury hotels, a swish
cafe, an apartment house favoured by foreigners. The terrorists also
sought to polarise Indian society by claiming to be acting to redress
the grievances of India's Muslims. And by singling out Britons,
Americans and Israelis, they demonstrated that their brand of Islamist
fanaticism is anchored less in the absolutism of pure faith than in
the geopolitics of hate.

Today, the platitudes flow like blood. Terrorism is unacceptable; the
terrorists are cowards; the world stands united in unreserved
condemnation of this latest atrocity. Commentators in America trip
over themselves to pronounce this night and day of carnage India's
9/11. But India has endured many attempted 9/11s, notably a ferocious
assault on its national parliament in December 2001 that nearly led to
all-out war against the assailants' presumed sponsors, Pakistan. This
year alone, terrorist bombs have taken lives in Jaipur, in Ahmedabad,
in Delhi, and several different places on one searing day in Assam.
Jaipur is the lodestar of Indian tourism to Rajasthan; Ahmedabad is
the primary city of Gujarat, the state that is a poster child for
India's development; Delhi is the political capital and window to the
world; Assam was logistically convenient for terrorists from across a
porous border. Mumbai combined all the four elements of its
precursors: a grand slam.

Indians have learned to endure the unspeakable horrors of terrorist
violence ever since malign men in Pakistan concluded it was cheaper
and more effective to bleed India to death than to attempt to defeat
it in conventional war. Attack after attack has been proven to have
been financed, equipped and guided from across the border, the most
recent being the suicide-bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul, an
action publicly traced by American intelligence to Islamabad's dreaded
military special-ops agency, the ISI.

The risible attempt to claim the Mumbai killings in the name of the
"Deccan Mujahideen" merely confirms that wherever the killers are
from, it is not the Deccan. The Deccan lies inland from Mumbai; one
does not need to sail the waters of the Arabian Sea to get to the city
from there. In its meticulous planning and military precision, the
assault on Mumbai bore no trace of what its promoters tried to suggest
it was - a spontaneous eruption by angry young Indian Muslims. This
horror was not homegrown.

The Islamist extremism nurtured by a succession of military rulers of
Pakistan has now come to haunt its well-intentioned but lamentably
weak civilian government. The militancy once sponsored by its
predecessors now threatens to abort Pakistan's sputtering democracy
and seeks to engulf India in its flames. There has never been a
stronger case for firm and united action by the governments of both
India and Pakistan to cauterise the cancer in their midst.

India is a land of great resilience that has learned, over arduous
millenniums, to cope with tragedy. Bombs and bullets alone cannot
destroy it, because Indians will pick their way through the rubble and
carry on as they have done throughout history. But what can destroy
India is a change in the spirit of its people, away from the pluralism
and coexistence that has been our greatest strength. The prime
minister's call for calm and restraint in the face of murderous
rampage is vital. If these tragic events lead to the demonisation of
the Muslims of India, the terrorists will have won. For India to be
India, its gateway - to the multiple Indias within, and the heaving
seas without - must always remain open.

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