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The monster in the mirror
12 December 2008, Guardian
"...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.... The only way
to contain (it would be na�ve 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."
 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 na�ve 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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