The recent siege of Mumbai for nearly three days by a small band of well trained terrorists has almost universally come to be described as India ’s 9/11. In terms of sheer audacity of planning and execution, the places targeted and the scale and range of people killed and injured, the Mumbai terror siege can surely be bracketed with the original 9/11, and in terms of the duration of the skirmish it can also claim to have left the original way behind.
The analogy between New York 9/11 and Mumbai 26/11 must not however be confined to these operational details, what is most important is to recognise the Mumbai attack as an extension of the same terror trajectory that struck New York seven years ago. What should we learn from this?
The terror that visited the US in September 2001 was not just executed in the US but it was also born and brought up in Washington ’s foreign policy laboratory. The history of development of the Taliban and Mujahideen variety of terror – the precursor of Al-Qaeda – under the aegis of Washington is too well known to merit repetition. But instead of effecting a policy change to terminate the trajectory of this terror, the Bush Administration could only think of attacking Afghanistan in the name of avenging 9/11. And soon enough it moved on to its next project – invasion, occupation and plunder of Iraq . The US has not been able to bring Laden to justice; all it could do was to capture and kill Saddam and create a huge vacuum that is now filled up by more terror and anarchy.
Some ‘terror experts’ in India claim that this ‘firm’ and ‘no-nonsense’ response has made the post 9/11 US a safer place. The American people evidently do not believe this story and hence we saw them deliver an emphatic mandate against the entire Bush strategy in the recent Presidential election. The US may well have escaped a repeat of 9/11 within its own territory, but at a price that has made Americans the world over more insecure and vulnerable to terror threats as once again confirmed by the Mumbai siege. And when more and more parts of the world reel under terror, the US can hardly expect to remain indefinitely insulated from its vicelike grip.
The US strategy to counter terror is therefore nothing but a strategy of proliferation of terror, and India can never afford to adopt such a strategy. While the US can in the short run hope to transfer its burden of terror on to other parts of the world till the accounts are settled and all the transferred terror begins paying a return visit to the US , India just does not have that kind of an option. India can only invite more terror with such a strategy.
Instead of realising that to fight terror India must first of all delink her foreign policy from the American strategic stranglehold, our US-crazy terror experts and policy analysts have begun prescribing that if the US had followed up 9/11 with Afghanistan and Iraq, India should follow up 26/11 with at least Pakistan and Bangladesh.
Nothing could be a surer recipe for disaster. Pakistan today is more susceptible to terror than India . The Lal Masjid siege, the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the attack on Marriott Hotel in Islamabad and the blasts that are rocking and bleeding Pakistan at regular intervals, all confirm this undeniable reality. India must therefore seek Pakistan ’s cooperation in a shared battle against terrorism and not try and bully or corner Pakistan , let alone ask for a US-led invasion or occupation of Pakistan on the lines of Afghanistan or Iraq .
Any attempt to destabilise Pakistan could only lead to an unprecedented escalation and proliferation of terror in South Asia . The US , which is desperately looking for an exit route from Iraq while intensifying its presence and intervention in South Asia , may find an Indo-Pak war, or at any rate a permanent state of heightened Indo-Pak tension, an attractive proposition for fishing in troubled waters. But India and Pakistan must by all means avoid such a scenario. Instead of inviting the US to act against Pakistan , India must keep the US out and directly engage Pakistan in a shared bilateral fight against the common problem of terrorism.
Dipankar Bhattacharya, Liberation, January, 2009
Corporate Governance and Nuclear End Games Cannot Make Us Secure
In the aftermath of Mumbai, sections of the media have made much of ‘people’s anger against politicians and the system.’ What do we make of this claim? Sure, people are angry. Anger with those who rule us and with the system is surely a healthy emotion. Anger at those who are putting us in a position where we never know when our loved ones could be subjected to sudden and violent death; anger at those who circled around the Mumbai tragedy for votes, with the eagerness of vultures spotting a meal; anger at the shamelessness of those who vilified Hemant Karkare for his courage (in investigating Sanghi terrorists) in life, and tried to appropriate him in death; anger at Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi of the BJP who dismissed the people’s anger in loaded gendered language; anger at the Kerala Chief Minister who could not gracefully accept the feelings of a bereaved parent who wasn’t interested in meeting him, and instead indulged in unwarranted and contemptuous abuse.
Armed marauders indulging in random shooting at public places and killing nearly 200 people is surely just cause for rage. Some sections of the media are telling us that the target of our anger must be Pakistan . Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) Chief Sudarshan has said in an interview that if it comes to a nuclear war to defeat the ‘demons’, so be it – a better world will emerge from it? Does he know what a nuclear war means – or does he imagine it like a scene from the TV Mahabharata? That may be a Bollywood scenario – go across the ‘Border,’ with the US backing us, and get the bad guys. Unfortunately in real life, the bad guys are not that easy to recognise. Take the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI): that familiar bugbear for Indian rulers for decades. The ISI is known to have had inextricably close links with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) – in fact, many in Pakistan’s beleaguered democratic movement were sure that the ISI listened more to US diktats than to those of the Pakistani government. Ditto, often, for the Pakistani Army. So what are we saying if we demand an attack Pakistan with the US on our side? That we don’t really care about the morals of our allies; or for the true identity of our enemies; we just want a quick, easy, feel-good target to attack?
What does Pakistan stand accused of? Of allowing its soil to be used by terrorists to launch attacks on other countries. Of allowing banned terrorist organisations to rename themselves and get a new lease of life? It is a cautionary reminder that the very country being touted as our greatest ally and powerful friend in the war on terror – the US – is guilty of an even worse crime. The US Army ran the ‘School of the Americas’ (SOA) at Fort Benning on US soil, for decades – training Latin American troops to put down popular democratic movements, prop up dictatorships and defend US corporations in Latin American countries. The SOA, dubbed by a President of Panama as the “biggest base for destabilization in Latin America ,” was not a ‘non-state actor’ – it was run by the US Army. Though public notoriety that dubbed it the ‘ School of Assassins ,’ it has recreated itself under a new name: the ‘Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.’ And that’s just the story in Latin America; there’s a similarly sordid story of US intervention to destabilise democracies in West Asia . So, are we willing to range ourselves against such ‘bad guys’? Or will we allow the bad guys to decide which of their disposable minions we are allowed to target?
Let’s also take time to broaden our perspective somewhat. Yes, Mumbai has taught many of us that the sight of innocent people and loved ones being killed in cold blood can enrage us. Let’s just remind ourselves that many thousands of Indians already live with this rage simmering within them. It insulted many that the media did not deem the deaths at Chakraparti Sivaji Terminal station (CST) as worthy of TV coverage as those at the Taj hotel. Let’s not similarly insult the loss and pain of others whom TV has not brought to our sight. The National Crime Records Bureau has come up with its grim count of annual suicides. India , we’re told, saw 16,632 farmer suicides in 2007; and in 2006, the number was marginally higher. What do we tell the families of those 17,000 people whom despair (caused by Governments that would rather bail out stinking rich corporates rather than suicidal farmers) destroys every year? That just because there’s no AK-47-wielding foreign ‘aatankvaadi’ [terrorist] (dead or alive) to hate and kill, their rage is any less justified?
What about the thousands of Muslim kids in Gujarat 2002 who saw their mothers raped, wombs ripped out, families burnt alive, quite openly, by gleeful brigades armed with a carefully prepared arsenal of gas cylinders and sharp weapons? No commandos rushed to save them and put down the killers. The killers gloated about their deeds on hidden camera – and are yet to be punished; their patron is a Chief Minister is the darling of corporate houses. Don’t those kids have a right to feel that ‘Enough is Enough’? If we expect sanity from the Vidarbha farmers and the Gujarat genocide victims, if we expect them to understand the ‘big picture’ and overcome blind rage to uphold democracy and secularism, surely we can expect a modicum of restraint and depth of analysis to guide our response to Mumbai?
The crude attempts by the media to whip up a mindless frenzy in the wake of Mumbai have been marked by breathtaking insults to our intelligence and independence. In one show, yesteryear film star Simi Garewal called for ‘carpet bombing’ of Pakistan and declared, “When you look down from the Four Seasons onto the slums, you see, not Congress or BJP flags but Pakistani flags.” She later apologised, explaining that she had mistaken Muslim flags for Pakistani ones; and that she thought ‘carpet bombing’ meant a covert military operation. Unfortunately there’s no ban on this Simi – she’s allowed to inflict her prejudices and idiocies on us all.
A media channel flashed a placard again and again, “CEO, Not CM;’ an article in the American Forbes magazine advised that Ratan Tata be made India ’s PM. The article said that “Indians and Pakistanis alike criticized President Bush’s” response to 9/11; and claimed that after Mumbai an Indian friend said that “only now does he understand Bush’s cowboy reaction.” Others have advocated ‘army rule’ as an option.
One need not look far to see that corporate governance and army rule have never guaranteed security. Pakistan has had army rule (and US as an ally) for years and decades, yet today Pakistan is as insecure and unsafe as India . Ask the adivasis of Kalinganagar or the peasants of Singur, or for that matter, the Muslims of Gujarat if they trust Tata, who christened Modi the “good M,” to keep them safe.
The only option to a rotting system is to struggle for a system on radically new democratic foundations. Corporate and authoritarian forces are at the heart of the rot: we can’t peddle them as the solution to it. Anger and outrage at Mumbai must join the anger and outrage at all the victims of every kind of terrorism and mass murder in this country.
Kavita Krishnan, Liberation, January, 2009