[Assam] Well said

[baruah at bard.edu]

I thought another good piece was the one by Amitav Ghosh in the New  
York Times. Sorry, if someone had circulated it already.

SB

The New York Times
December 3, 2008
India’s 9/11? Not Exactly
By AMITAV GHOSH

SINCE the terrorist assaults began in Mumbai last week, the metaphor  
of the World Trade Center attacks has been repeatedly invoked. From  
New Delhi to New York, pundits and TV commentators have insisted that  
“this is India’s 9/11” and should be treated as such. Nearly every  
newspaper in India has put “9/11” into its post-massacre headlines.  
The secretary general of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the leading Hindu  
nationalist political faction, has not only likened the Mumbai attack  
to those on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, but has insisted  
that “our response must be close to what the American response was.”

There can be no doubt that there are certain clear analogies between  
the two attacks: in both cases the terrorists were clearly at great  
pains to single out urban landmarks, especially those that serve as  
symbolic points of reference in this increasingly interconnected  
world. There are similarities, too, in the unexpectedness of the  
attacks, the meticulousness of their planning, their shock value and  
the utter unpreparedness of the security services. But this is where  
the similarities end. Not only were the casualties far greater on  
Sept. 11, 2001, but the shock of the attack was also greatly magnified  
by having no real precedent in America’s history.

India’s experience of terrorist attacks, on the other hand, far  
predates 2001. Although this year has been one of the worst in recent  
history, 1984 was arguably worse still. That year an insurgency in the  
Punjab culminated in the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi  
by her Sikh bodyguards. This in turn led to riots that took the lives  
of some 2,000 Sikhs.

I was living in Delhi then and I recall vividly the sense of besetting  
crisis, of extreme fragility, of being pushed to the edge of an abyss:  
it was the only time I can recall when the very project of the Indian  
republic seemed to be seriously endangered. Yet for all its horror,  
the portents of 1984 were by no means fulfilled: in the following  
years, there was a slow turnaround; the Punjab insurgency gradually  
quieted down; and although the victims of the massacres may never  
receive justice in full measure, there has been some judicial  
retribution.

This has been another terrible year: even before the invasion of  
Mumbai, several hundred people had been killed and injured in  
terrorist assaults. Yet the attacks on Jaipur, Ahmedabad, New Delhi,  
Guwahati and elsewhere did not set off chains of retaliatory violence  
of the sort that would almost certainly have resulted 10 or 15 years  
ago. Nor did the violence create a sense of existential crisis for the  
nation, as in 1984. Thus, despite all loss of life, this year could  
well be counted as a victory not for terrorism but for India’s  
citizenry.

The question now is this: Will the November invasion of Mumbai change  
this? Although there is no way of knowing the answer, it is certain  
that if the precedent of 9/11 is taken seriously the outcome will be  
profoundly counterproductive. As a metaphor “9/11” is invested not  
just with the memory of what happened in Manhattan and at the Pentagon  
in 2001, but also with the penumbra of emotions that surround the  
events: the feeling that “the world will never be the same,” the  
notion that this was “the day the world woke up” and so on. In this  
sense 9/11 refers not just to the attacks but also to its aftermath,  
in particular to an utterly misconceived military and judicial  
response, one that has had disastrous consequences around the world.

When commentators repeat the metaphor of 9/11 they are in effect  
pushing the Indian government to mount a comparable response. If India  
takes a hard line modeled on the actions of the Bush administration,  
the consequences are sure to be equally disastrous. The very power of  
the 9/11 metaphor blinds us to the possibility that there might be  
other, more productive analogies for the invasion of Mumbai: one is  
the Madrid train bombings of March 11, 2004, which led to a comparable  
number of casualties and created a similar sense of shock and grief.

If 9/11 is a metaphor for one kind of reaction to terrorism, then 11-M  
(as it is known in Spanish) should serve as shorthand for a different  
kind of response: one that emphasizes vigilance, patience and careful  
police work in coordination with neighboring countries. This is  
exactly the kind of response India needs now, and fortunately this  
seems to be the course that the government, led by the Congress Party,  
has decided to follow. Government spokesmen have been at some pains to  
specify that India does not intend to respond with a troop buildup  
along the border with Pakistan, as the Bharatiya Janata-led government  
did after the attack by Muslim extremists on India’s Parliament in 2001.

A buildup would indeed serve no point at all, since this is not the  
kind of war that can be fought along a border, by conventional armies.  
The Indian government would do better to focus on an international  
effort to eliminate the terrorists’ hide-outs and safe houses, some of  
them deep inside Pakistan. India will also need to cooperate with  
those in the Pakistani government who have come around to a belated  
recognition of the dangers of terrorism.

The choice of targets in Mumbai clearly owes something to the  
September bombing of the Islamabad Marriott, another high-profile site  
sure to include foreign casualties. Here already there is common  
ground between the two countries — for if this has been a bad year for  
India in regard to terrorism, then for Pakistan it has been still worse.

It is clear now that Pakistan’s establishment is so deeply divided  
that it no longer makes sense to treat it as a single entity.  
Sometimes a crisis is also an opportunity: this is a moment when India  
can forge strategic alliances with those sections of the Pakistani  
government, military and society who understand that they, too, are  
under fire.

Much will depend, in the coming days, on Mumbai’s reaction to the  
invasion. That the city was not stricken by turmoil in the immediate  
aftermath of the attack is undoubtedly a positive sign. That the  
terrorists concentrated their assault on the most upscale parts of the  
city had the odd consequence of limiting the disruption in the  
everyday lives of most Mumbai residents. Chhatrapati Shivaji station,  
for instance, was open just a few hours after the terrorists there  
were cleared out. In the northern suburbs, the home of Bollywood’s  
studios, actors were summoned to rehearsal even while the battles were  
being fought.

But with each succeeding day, tensions are rising and the natural  
anxieties of the inhabitants are being played upon. Still, this is not  
a moment for precipitate action: if India can react with dispassionate  
but determined resolve, then 2008 may yet be remembered as a moment  
when the tide turned in a long, long battle. For if there is any one  
lesson to be learned from the wave of terrorist attacks that has  
convulsed the globe over the last decade it is this: Defeat or victory  
is not determined by the success of the strike itself; it is  
determined by the response.

Amitav Ghosh is the author, most recently, of the novel “Sea of Poppies.”



Quoting "Pragyan,Tinsukia College" <pragyan_tsc50 at yahoo.co.in>:

> I've read the best ever piece of article by girish karnawat on   
> Mumbai Blast. Thanks to Baruahda. I'm going to translate it .
> MC has said well on Ram Dhar's comment. The problem is not that   
> that only rest of India love to forget or ignore  Assam. None of us   
> ever wants to know 'others' of India.We always love to construct a   
> negative pictures about others.
> We have learnt in school that Muslims rulers In India had destructed  
>  Temples and converted Hindus. I always tell my students that It the  
>  Muslims rulers that made it possible for us to develop Modern  
> Indian  Languages. It was under their rule that Bhakti Movements  
> flourished  in the whole of India!! but no text book will teach us  
> these truth  ever.Things in India goes such  a way! Ramda, imazine  
> what would  have happen if Narendra Modi would have been a Muslim  
> and have  been destructed hundreds of temples.He did so !! you know  
> !!  Probebly you will now talk about Development!! Yes, naratives  
> always  change according to needs of powercentres! 
> Sushanta
>
>
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>  A Quarterly Journal of Academic, Intellectual and Career Pursuit   
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