Arundhati Roy

Original in Outlook India

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". And 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 means
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, Lalgarh in West Bengal; in Chhattisgarh,
Jharkhand, Orissa; 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-Toiba (Army of the Pure) in 1990 and who belongs to the
hardline Salafi tradition of Islam, certainly bolster the case of Side A. Hafiz
Saeed approves of suicide bombing, hates Jews, Shias and Democracy, and believes
that jehad should be waged until Islam, his Islam, rules the
world.


Among the things he has 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...we hacked, burned, set on fire...we
believe in setting them on fire because these bastards don't want to be
cremated, they're afraid of it.... I have just one last wish...let me be
sentenced to death.... 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 of these people stay.... I will finish them off...let a few more of them
die...at least twenty-five thousand to fifty thousand 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 M.S. Golwalkar 'Guruji', 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 whom 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-Dawa, which many believe is a front organisation for the
Lashkar-e-Toiba. He continued to recruit young boys for his own bigoted jehad
with his twisted, fiery sermons. On December 11, the UN imposed sanctions on the
Jamaat-ud-Dawa and the Pakistani government succumbed to international pressure,
putting Hafiz Saeed under house arrest. Babu Bajrangi, however, is out on bail
and continues to live 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, has 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
seven million volunteers preaching its doctrine of hate across India. They
include Narendra Modi, but also former prime minister A.B. Vajpayee, current
Leader of the Opposition L.K. Advani, and a host of other senior politicians,
bureaucrats and police and intelligence officers.And 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 L.K. 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-Toiba is from Shimla (India) and L.K.
Advani of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak 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 2006 bombing of the Samjhauta Express, the Government
of India announced that it has 'incontrovertible' evidence that the
Lashkar-e-Toiba 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 Calcutta 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 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 jehad against
the Soviet Union, it was the job of the Pakistan army and the ISI to nurture and
channel funds to Islamic fundamentalist organisations. Having wired up these
Frankenstein's monsters 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 re-made. 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 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—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 stand-off, 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 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-Toiba, 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 its 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 theatre, spectacle and symbolism, and today, the
stage on which it pirouettes and performs its acts of bestiality is Live
TV.

Even as the Mumbai terrorists were being condemned by TV
anchors, the effectiveness of their action was magnified a thousand-fold 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 minister V.P. 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 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 television flash cards 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 the business of terrorism is a hall of mirrors in which 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 S.A.R. Geelani, the man
whom the police claimed was the mastermind of the operation. A third, Shaukat
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 judgement, the court acknowledged that there was
no proof that Mohammad 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 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 L.K. 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 the 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 2 kg 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), which was investigating the September 2008 Malegaon blasts,
arrested a Hindu preacher, Sadhvi Pragya; a self-styled godman, Swami Dayanand
Pande; and Lt Col Prasad Purohit, a serving officer of the Indian army. All the
arrested belong to Hindu Nationalist organisations, 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". L.K. 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 November 25, newspapers
reported that the ATS was investigating the high-profile VHP chief Praveen
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 channel, 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 the 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
India's next prime minister, 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 colours, 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 unravelling 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 of people, including
thousands of American soldiers, have lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The frequency of terrorist strikes on US allies/agents (including India) and US
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 a hundred and fifty 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 10 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 two per cent. 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 naive 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.