[Assam] From the Guardian UK, Arundhati Roy

[Chan Mahanta]

The only voice I have heard coming out of India, 
or for that anywhere else in the world thus far, 
that says it like it should be, should have been.

cm



<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/dec/12/mumbai-arundhati-roy>http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/dec/12/mumbai-arundhati-roy

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 Š we hacked, burned, set on fire Š we 
believe in setting them on fire because these 
bastards don't want to be cremated, they're 
afraid of it Š I have just one last wish Š let me 
be sentenced to death Š 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 Š 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 naïve 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.