NEW DELHI - As the death toll continues to
mount in Mumbai's ghastly serial bomb attacks of
Tuesday, it is becoming clear that India is
witnessing a human tragedy of the same dimensions
as the Madrid train bombings of March 2004, in
which 192 people lost their lives. The bombings
were Europe's worst-ever case of sub-state
terrorism.
Spain responded to that
humanitarian disaster by replacing conservative
prime minister Jose Maria Aznar with Social
Democrat Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero and
withdrawing Spanish troops from Iraq, sent as part
of the United States-led war coalition.
India does not seem about to execute such
a big political change, but the Mumbai bombings,
that targeted commuters returning
home
and which have claimed about 200 lives, have
raised a number of questions in the minds of
observers and analysts of the country's society
and politics.
Some of these are: do such
professionally coordinated, well-articulated
bombings really pose a serious, systemic threat to
the fabric of India's society and its democracy?
Who carried these out and from what motivation?
How should India respond to such violence without
losing its democratic and constitutional
obligation to defend human rights while bringing
the culprits to book?
And not least, what
will be the likely impact of the attacks on the
India-Pakistan dialogue process? In the past,
Indian leaders typically blamed Pakistani secret
agencies or Islamabad-supported militants for
terrorist attacks against Indian civilians.
The last question may be easier to answer
than the first three. A senior Pakistan high
commission official in New Delhi told Inter Press
Service, "We do not see any hitch in the coming
round of bilateral talks. Pakistan was among the
first countries to condemn the Mumbai bomb
attacks. No fingers have been pointed at us by
Indian officials. And we believe that both states
are serious about their two-year-old understanding
that no incident of violence would be allowed to
wreck the all-important dialogue process."
The process was not interrupted by recent
terrorist violence, including in the disputed
Kashmir Valley last week. Pakistani officials
expect their foreign secretary's visit to India,
likely next week, to be "a smooth affair" with
positive engagement between the two sides.
Although Indian intelligence agencies do
not rule out the involvement of "rogue" elements
within Pakistani secret services in anti-India
terrorism, they note that President General Pervez
Musharraf has pitted himself against Islamist
extremists in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
As
the Indian public experiences the full impact of
the blasts, with their sickening violence against
ordinary civilians, it is increasingly apparent
that it cannot duck these questions. Yet, there
are no consensual answers to some of them. But,
despite a lot of confusion over the past couple of
days, the Indian public refuses to be shaken off
its feet by the blasts' trauma and to lose its
robust democratic bearings.
In sheer
numbers, the serial bombings of Mumbai represent
one of worst episodes of terrorism in India, only
slightly smaller in scale than Mumbai's March 12,
1993 bombings, which claimed 257 lives.
The 1993 blasts were widely seen as
"retribution" for the demolition of a 16th century
mosque and systematic demonization of Muslims. The
present blasts are random: you are targeted not
because you belong to a particular category, but
because you happen to be one of the 4 million-plus
commuters who use the city's suburban rail system.
"This randomness makes the violence
especially frightening," says Achin Vanaik, a
political scientist with Delhi University. "It is
meant to intimidate you and make you feel
extremely vulnerable. But beyond that, it poses no
real challenge to the political system or to
Indian democracy," Vanaik adds.
In the
past, terrorism has typically failed to create a
sense of grave systemic crisis or near-collapse of
governance in India; to encourage social schisms
and alienation; or to lead to Hindu-Muslim
violence. The Indian public simply refused to be
provoked.
This is a tribute to the
ordinary citizen's maturity and affirmation of
social assimilation and pluralism in India, rather
than the state's handling of terrorist violence.
"This handling is marked by lack of intelligence,
sloppy investigation and collation of evidence,
absence of thorough interrogation of witnesses,
loose framing of charges, and poor conduct of
prosecution," says Nitya Ramakrishnan, a civil
liberties lawyer based in Delhi.
Adds
Ramakrishnan, "The state fails to gather the
information necessary for successful prosecution
of culprits in case after case, or to create a
data-base on different groups and their links.
There are hardly any cases where an alleged
terrorist is prosecuted on adequate evidence."
The police often stage fake "encounters"
and claim that the terrorists opened fire on them
when surrounded; they killed in "self-defense".
India's criminal justice system, creaking
under antiquated procedures and delays, rarely
succeeds in bringing criminals to book. Most of
India's major cases of hate-crime, religious
violence or state repression go unpunished. Some
80,000 people have perished in state killings and
sub-state violence in Kashmir and the northeast.
But only a minuscule number of officials have been
punished.
This has created a culture of
impunity, a phenomenon observed after the butchery
of 2,000-plus Muslims in western Gujarat state in
2002.
Lack of hard evidence of the
involvement of specific groups in violent
incidents means that everyone engages in
speculation. In the present case, officials and
the media have hinted at the involvement of
Islamist-extremist groups like Lashkar-e-Toiba
based in Pakistan, and the Students Islamic
Movement of India. But no hard evidence has
emerged.
The political left and the right
in India have reacted differently to the blasts.
The left, which supports the government from the
outside on an agenda of maintaining the country's
secular character, has counseled restraint and
appealed to citizens not to overreact.
The
right, especially the Hindu-chauvinist Bharatiya
Janata Party that leads the national opposition,
has accused the government of "ignoring" national
security. It demands the return of draconian
anti-terrorism laws, in particular, the notorious
Prevention of Terrorism Act, which was repealed
after numerous instances of its abuse came to
light.
"Draconian laws can only abridge
the citizen's fundamental rights and devalue
democracy," says Vanaik. "That would be tragic,
not least because stiff restrictions on basic
freedoms will only brutalize ordinary people and
encourage official irresponsibility, dereliction
of duty and abuse of power. Such measures divert
attention from the far graver damage that state
excesses, including war and terrorism, can inflict
upon the public."
More answers are
expected to emerge as India comes to terms with
the grave tragedy still unfolding in Mumbai.
