[Reader-list] From Delhi after Bombings

[Shuddhabrata Sengupta]

Driving through the city of New Delhi after midnight, in the early  
hours of the 13th of September, one could mistake the eerie calm in  
the broad avenues that skirt the hollow centre of Lutyens Delhi as  
the lull of a city tranquil and asleep to itself and the world.

Normally, when I drive late, I am stopped at least twice, by  
gentlemen of the Delhi police, ('With us, for us, always') with  
torches, who peer into my face, and sometimes ask to see some ID.  
Tonight, a few hours after 5 bombs ripped through New Delhi's crowded  
markets and public spaces, claiming (at the last count) 30 lives,  
while the city, and indeed the country, was placed on 'Red Alert',  
the police barricades did not obstruct my night journey. A few police  
cars crawled a few curbs, cruising, idling. There was nothing more  
eerie than this strange lull after the storm.

Perhaps they were at the city's borders. Perhaps they were at  
hospitals and bomb sites, perhaps they were kicking down a few doors,  
finding a few men to exhibit for the morning edition of the  
newspapers. Perhaps they were doing nothing. I was left alone to find  
may way home, through a strangely silent city, and that solitude and  
silence produced a random strand of thoughts that I would like to  
share with you all today.

Terror has a strange banality. It strikes at its victims without  
discrimination. It snuffs out lives, dismembers limbs, breaks bones  
and punch through the face of everyday without thought or care.  
Terror does not care whether you are a patriot or a renegade, a  
traitor or a loyalist, a bomb has no way of knowing which way your  
heart inclines in the matter of fealty to the state. It simply kills,  
without favour, without prejudice, without qualms.

Remote terror has a greater, even more chilling banality. And the  
remotest terror of all is the kind that gets exercised by mandarins  
who dictate the agendas that footsoldiers execute, often without a  
clear sense of who it is that directs the hand that primes the timer  
that sets off the bomb.  Sometimes, in this shadow play, the state  
and the 'would be state' meld into a strange non-entity, a non-person  
who disappears into shadows, only to find a biography or a  
precociously premature obituary in the column inches of a journalist  
who also doubles up as a counter insurgent.

(I think that the apparently 'oracular' piece written by Praveen  
Swami this morning in the Hindu that was forwarded to this list by   
is a very interesting instance of the above)

What makes terrorism, which is only a sub-branch of modern warfare  
particularly lethal is the distance between the bomber and his or her  
victims (including the paradoxical distance and intimacy of the  
suicide bomber, who embraces as well as obliterates his or her victim)

This distance creates an ethical parallax error - a blurring of the  
kind of distinction that makes us value the the particularity of each  
life - such that lives cease to matter and all that begins to matter  
is a kind of pornography of the quantity of casualties, with twenty  
dead producing the paradox of a more acute numbness and arousal than  
sixteen would. This is what makes a great deal of news television the  
kind of pornography that I actually find degrading. Far more  
degrading than the honest and often wholesome tittilation offered by  
the erotic acrobats of porn.

We will see a lot of news-porn in the days to come. Arousals will be  
offered on the cheap by patriotic politicians ranting against terror.  
Narendra Modi's skin will glow with the shine that only an 'I told  
you so' can bring on.

Bal Gangadhar Tilak, (after whom avenues and bridges are named in our  
beloved Capital city) patriot, steadfast Indian nationalist, and  
erudite aficionado of the bomb, loved the Bhagavad Gita, and  
particularly its exhortation to give effect to a 'dispassionate  
violence', one that unites the slayer and the slain in a single  
stroke of moral equivalence for a higher purpose  - na hanyate,  
hanyamane sharire (there is no slayer, there is no slain) - because  
for him, it  brought about a fine tuned karmic resolution of the  
messy details of whether or not life was lost for the sake of a  
cause. To him, like to many nationalists, the cult of the bomb, was  
not simply a means to an end, it was the end because it produced the  
circumstances for a blooding, a sacrifice, in a manner conducive to  
the purposes of the nation, or the nation-in-waiting. Blood irrigated  
the nation. It continues to do so. It is easy for those who today  
rail against terrorism to forget that some of their heroes in fact  
championed terrorism. There is something inevitable about the fact  
that yesterday's 'terrorist' always ends up as tomorrow's 'freedom  
fighter'.

Tilak writes, - (I am grateful to a citation of this remarkable  
passage from his works in a recent lecture delivered by Christopher  
Pinney on the iconography of Indian Nationalism at the School of Arts  
and Aesthetics at JNU)

"The Bomb is not a thing like Muskets or Guns, it is a simple sport  
of science. Muskets or guns may be taken away from the subjects by  
the means of the 'Arms Act', and the manufacture, too of guns and  
muskets without the permission of the government may be stopped, but  
is it possible to stop or do away with the bomb by means of laws or  
the supervision of officials or the busy swarming of the detective  
police? The bomb has more the form of a knowledge, it is a (kind of)  
witchcraft, it is a charm, an amulet. It has not much the features of  
a visible object manufactured in a big factory. Big factories are  
necessary for the bombs required by the military forces of  
Government. But not much in the way of materials is necessary to  
prepare for five or ten bombs required by violent turn-headed  
persons. Virendra's big factory of bombs (was stored) in one or two  
jars and five or ten bottles."

[ From - 'These Remedies are Not Lasting' by Bal Gangadhar Tilak,  
published in The Kesari, Poona, 9th June 1908, cited in "Full and  
Authentic Report of the Tilak Trial (1908) being the only Authorized  
Verbatim Account of the Whole Proceedings with Introduction and  
Character Sketh of Bal Gangadhar Tilak together with Press Opinion"  
by N.C. Kelkar,  (Poona, 1908) ]

The bomb is a peculiar form of arcane urban knowledge. it is made by  
those who know how. It is placed by people who have secret agendas,  
lead illegible lives, and often operate within the zones of ambiguity  
where there are neither friend nor enemies, only assets and liabilities.

This simple sport of science, which can be played with a few jars of  
the right chemicals, has only one goal. Whosoever plays, there is  
only one winner, and that is the state. Every time a bomb goes off,  
the repressive apparatus of the state gets another big rush of  
adrenalin. Terror and State Terror need and feed each other.  
Sometimes, they are each other.

As this city that I live in and love and hate crosses the turbulence  
of a night still acrid with the smell of ammonium nitrate and  
cordite, I can only hope that the days to come will offer us a few  
rationed portions of respite. Each time an anonymous purveyor of  
terror closes a deal, he (and its mainly he isn't it) spreads out a  
doormat welcoming state-terror to come and claim its victory.  
Whosoever plants bombs in dustbins, in busy market places, whatsoever  
be their motive, their cause, their sick and hollow dream of heaven,  
all that they do is to make the state stronger, more repulsive, more  
bloated. The terrorist is the best footsoldier that the state can  
ever have. And the most terrible thing is, not every footsoldier is a  
mercenary. Sometimes, knowingly or unknowingly, a 'freedom fighter'  
is the best asset that his antagonist can ever hope to possess.

And that is why terror, in whatever form, for whatever reason, is  
pathetic, sad, and really ugly. it leaves us restless at night and  
listless by day. It excites our fear and enervates our hope. It  
leaves us empty, hollow and full of dread. It eats into and corrupts  
the simplest of conversations about freedom, leaving ugly scars of  
suspicion. Terror requires only one response - total rejection,  
especially from those interested in fighting the daily depredations  
of the state.