Page 2 of 3 The monster in India's mirror
By Arundhati Roy
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 had "incontrovertible"
evidence that the Lashkar-e-Taiba, backed by Pakistan's Inter-Services
Intelligence (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
organization 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. 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 neighboring Sri Lanka, one of the
world's most deadly terrorist groups, were trained by the Indian army.
Releasing Frankensteins
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
toward civil war.
As recruiting agents for America's jihad against the Soviet Union, it was the
job of the Pakistani 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 the
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 Pakistani 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 are mostly the detritus of two Afghan wars. Their ire rains down
on the Pakistani 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 neighbors.
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 - mesmerized
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.
Collateral damage 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-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 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
theater, spectacle and symbolism, and today the stage on which it pirouettes
and performs its acts of bestiality is Live TV. Even as the Mumbai attacks were
being condemned by TV anchors, the effectiveness of the terror strikes was
being magnified a thousand-fold by the 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 the 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 W 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 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.
Shadowy history of suspicious terror attacks
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 oversimplifications 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 past 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.)
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