[Assam] Mumbai Attacks Politicize Long-Isolated Elite - NYT

[cmahanta at charter.net]

Hi Ram:

I saw the article this morning.

What left you speechless :-)?  Disbelief? Doubt? The improbability of it all? 

BTW, I saw the movie Slumdog Millionaire today, at San Francisco. I thought it was an extremely timely movie for anyone interested in India in general and Mumbai in particular to watch. It is a must see movie.It will immediately remind you of Snehalaya. If you were left speechless with the NYT article, I am not sure what Slumdog Millionaire would do however. Maybe you should not risk watching it :-). Incidentally, I have seen even worse--at Ahmedabad.

Finally I was struck by the decay of  the Victoria Terminus --C Shivaji Stn. (?). Last time I saw the place was in 1964. 44 years later I cannot believe how decrepit the place looks. And it is one of Mumbai's most important public facilities-- for the ordinary millions that is.

c-da

---- Ram Sarangapani <assamrs at gmail.com> wrote: 
> I am not sure what to say - 'Mera Bharat Mahan'?
> 
> 
> ------------------------------
> 
> This from the IE http://www.indianexpress.com/news/to-south-mumbai/394275/
> 
> and this from the NYT
> 
> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/07/world/asia/07india.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print
> 
>  December 7, 2008
>  Mumbai Attacks Politicize Long-Isolated Elite By SOMINI
> SENGUPTA<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/somini_sengupta/index.html?inline=nyt-per>
> 
> MUMBAI, India<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/india/index.html?inline=nyt-geo>—
> Last Wednesday, an extraordinary public interest lawsuit was filed in
> this
> city's highest court. It charged that the government had lagged in its
> constitutional duty to protect its citizens' right to life, and it pressed
> the state to modernize and upgrade its security forces.
> 
> The lawsuit was striking mainly for the people behind it: investment
> bankers, corporate lawyers and representatives of some of India's largest
> companies, which have their headquarters here in the country's financial
> capital, also known as Bombay. The Bombay Chamber of Commerce and Industry,
> the city's largest business association, joined as a petitioner. It was the
> first time it had lent its name to litigation in the public interest.
> 
> The three-day siege of Mumbai, which ended a week ago, was a watershed for
> India's prosperous classes. It prompted many of those who live in their own
> private Indias, largely insulated from the country's dysfunction, to demand
> a vital public service: safety.
> 
> Since the attacks, which killed 163 people, plus nine gunmen, there has been
> an outpouring of anger from unlikely quarters. On Wednesday, tens of
> thousands of urban, English-speaking, tank-top-wearing citizens stormed the
> Gateway of India<http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=97766004>,
> a famed waterfront monument, venting anger at their elected
> leaders<http://www.time.com/time/video/?bcpid=1485842900&bctid=3712277001>.
> There were similar protests in the capital, New Delhi, and the southern
> technology hubs, Bangalore and Hyderabad. All were organized spontaneously,
> with word spread through text messages and Facebook
> pages<http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=52727051223&ref=mf>
> .
> 
> On Saturday, young people affiliated with a new political party, called
> Loksatta <http://www.loksatta.org/index.php>, or people's power, gathered at
> the Gateway, calling for a variety of reforms, including banning criminals
> from running for political office. (Virtually every political party has
> convicts and suspects among its elected officials.)
> 
> Social networking sites were ablaze with memorials and citizens' action
> groups, including one that advocated refraining from voting altogether as an
> act of civil disobedience. Never mind that in India, voter turnout among the
> rich is far lower than among the poor.
> 
> Another group advocated not paying taxes, as though that would improve the
> quality of public services. An e-mail campaign began Saturday called "I Am
> Clean," urging citizens not to bribe police officers or drive through red
> lights.
> 
> And there were countless condemnations of how democracy had failed in this,
> the world's largest democracy. Those condemnations led Vir Sanghvi, a
> columnist writing in the financial newspaper Mint, to remind his readers of
> 1975<http://www.livemint.com/2008/12/04231559/Let8217s-recall-the-lessons.html?d=1>,
> when Prime Minister Indira
> Gandhi<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/indira_gandhi/index.html?inline=nyt-per>imposed
> emergency rule. Mr. Sanghvi wrote, "I am beginning to hear the same
> kind of middle-class murmurs and whines about the ineffectual nature of
> democracy and the need for authoritarian government."
> 
> Perhaps the most striking development was the lawsuit because it represented
> a rare example of corporate India's confronting the government outright
> rather than making back-room deals.
> 
> "It says in a nutshell, 'Enough is enough,' " said Cyrus Guzder, who owns a
> logistics company. "More precisely, it tells us that citizens of all levels
> in the country believe their government has let them down and believe that
> it now needs to be held accountable."
> 
> In India's city of gold, the distinction between public and private can be
> bewildering. For members of the working class, who often cannot afford
> housing, public sidewalks become living rooms. In the morning, commuters
> from gated communities in the suburbs pass children brushing their teeth at
> the edge of the street. Women are forced to relieve themselves on the
> railway tracks, usually in the dark, for the sake of modesty. The poor
> sometimes sleep on highway medians, and it is not unheard of for drunken
> drivers to mow them down.
> 
> Mumbai has been roiled by government neglect for years. Its commuter trains
> are so overcrowded that 4,000 riders die every year on average, some pushed
> from trains in the fierce competition to get on and off. Monsoons in
> 2005 killed
> more than 400 people in
> Mumbai<http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/30/international/asia/30monsoon.html>in
> one day alone; so clogged were the city's ancient drains, so crowded
> its
> river plains with unauthorized construction that water had nowhere to go.
> 
> Rahul Bose, an actor, suggested setting aside such problems for the moment.
> In a plea published last week in The Hindustan
> Times<http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/StoryPage.aspx?id=bde19709-fc96-4811-a8e8-37f3efb33367>,
> he laid out the desperation of this glistening, corroding place. "We
> overlook for now your neglect of the city," he wrote. "Its floods, its
> traffic, its filth, its pollution. Just deliver to us a world-standard
> antiterrorism plan."
> 
> None of the previous terrorist attacks, even in Mumbai, had so struck the
> cream of Bombay society. Bombs have been planted on commuter trains in the
> past <http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/13/world/asia/13india.html>, but few
> people who regularly dine at the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower hotel, one of the
> worst-hit sites, travel by train. "It has touched a raw nerve," said Amit
> Chandra, who runs a prominent investment firm. "People have lost friends.
> Everyone would visit these places." In any event, public anger could not
> have come at a worse time for incumbent politicians, who were at their most
> contrite last week. National elections are due next spring, and security is
> likely to be one of the top issues in the vote, particularly among the urban
> middle class. It remains to be seen whether outrage will prompt them to turn
> out to vote in higher numbers or whether politicians will be compelled to
> pay greater attention to them than in the past.
> 
> "There's a revulsion against the political class I have never seen before,"
> said Gerson D'Cunha, a former advertising executive whose civic group,
> A.G.N.I. <http://www.agnimumbai.org/about.asp>, presses for better
> governing. "The middle class that is laid back, lethargic, indolent, they've
> been galvanized."
> 
> For how long? That is a question on everyone's lips. At a memorial service
> on Thursday evening for a slain alumnus of the elite St. Xavier's
> College<http://xaviers.edu/frame14.htm>here, a placard asked: "One
> month from now, will you care?"
> 
> "It's helplessness, what do we do?" said Probir Roy, the owner of a
> technology company and an alumnus of St. Xavier's. "All the various
> stakeholders — the police, politicians — you can't count on them anyway. Now
> what do you do?"
> 
> Tops, a private security agency, has plenty to do. It is consulting schools,
> malls and "high net individuals" on how to protect themselves better.
> Security was a growth industry in India even before the latest attacks.
> Tops's global chairman, Rahul Nanda, said the company employed 73,000
> security guards today, compared with about 15,000 three years ago.
> 
> Mumbai is not the only place suffering from official neglect. Public
> services have deteriorated across India, all the more so in the countryside.
> Government schools are notoriously mismanaged. Doctors do not show up to
> work on public health projects. Corruption is endemic. In some of India's
> booming cities, private developers drill for their own water and generate
> electricity for their own buildings.
> 
> Political interference often gets in the way of the woefully understaffed
> and poorly paid police force. Courts and commissions have called for law
> enforcement to be liberated from political control. Politicians have balked.
> 
> The three-day standoff with terrorists was neither the deadliest that India
> has seen, nor the most protracted; there have been other extended
> convulsions of violence, including mass killings of Sikhs in Delhi in
> 1984<http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950DE5DF1F3DF934A3575AC0A96F948260&scp=4&sq=sikhs
> 1984&st=cse> and of Muslims in Gujarat in
> 2002<http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9903E2DF163BF934A15754C0A9649C8B63&scp=51&sq=Gujarat&st=nyt>
> .
> 
> Yet, the recent attacks, which Indian police say were the work of a
> Pakistan-based terrorist group called
> Lashkar-e-Taiba<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/l/lashkaretaiba/index.html?inline=nyt-org>,
> were profoundly different. Two of the four main targets were luxury hotels
> frequented by the city's wealthy elite: the Taj, facing the Gateway of
> India, and the twin Oberoi and Trident hotels, a few miles west on Nariman
> Point. They were the elite's watering holes and business dinner
> destinations. And to lose them, said Alex Kuruvilla, who runs the Condé Nast
> publications in India, is like losing a limb.
> 
> "It's like what I imagine an amputee would feel," he said. "It's so much
> part of our lives."
> 
> Last Wednesday, on the night of the candlelight vigil, Mr. Kuruvilla's
> driver made a wrong turn. A traffic policeman virtually pounced on the
> driver and then let him go with a bribe of 20 rupees, less than 50 cents.
> Mr. Kuruvilla is not optimistic about swift change. "Our cynicism is
> justified," he said.
> 
> Ashok Pawar, a police constable from the police station nearest the Taj,
> entered the hotel the night the siege began. It was full of gunfire and
> smoke. He could not breathe, and he did not know his way around. "It was my
> first time inside the Taj," he said. "How can a poor man go there?"
> 
> In The Indian Express newspaper on Friday, a columnist named Vinay Sitapati
> wrote a pointed open
> letter<http://www.indianexpress.com/news/to-south-mumbai/394275/>to
> "South Bombay," shorthand for the city's most wealthy enclave. The
> column
> first berated the rich for lecturing at Davos and failing in Hindi exams.
> "You refer to your part of the city simply as 'town,' " he wrote, and then
> he begged: "Vote in person. But vote in spirit, too: use your clout to
> demand better politicians, not pliant ones."
> 
> "In your hour of need today," he added, "it is India that needs your help."
> 
> <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/07/world/asia/07india.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print>
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