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November 27, 2008
India's Leaders Need to Look Closer to Home
The Assault on Mumbai
By TARIQ ALI
The terrorist assault on
Mumbai’s five-star hotels was well planned, but did not require a great
deal of logistic intelligence: all the targets were soft. The aim was to
create mayhem by shining the spotlight on India and its problems and in
that the terrorists were successful. The identity of the black-hooded group
remains a mystery.
The Deccan
Mujahedeen, which claimed the outrage in an e-mail press release, is
certainly a new name probably chosen for this single act. But speculation
is rife. A senior Indian naval officer has claimed that the attackers (who
arrived in a ship, the M V Alpha) were linked to Somali pirates, implying
that this was a revenge attack for the Indian Navy’s successful if bloody
action against pirates in the Arabian Gulf
that led to heavy casualties some weeks ago.
The Indian Prime
Minister, Manmohan Singh, has insisted that the
terrorists were based outside the country. The Indian media has echoed this
line of argument with Pakistan
(via the Lashkar-e-Taiba) and al-Qaeda listed as
the usual suspects.
But this is a
meditated edifice of official India’s political imagination.
Its function is to deny that the terrorists could be a homegrown variety, a
product of the radicalization of young Indian Muslims who have finally
given up on the indigenous political system. To accept this view would
imply that the country’s political physicians need to heal themselves.
Al Qaeda, as the CIA
recently made clear, is a group on the decline. It has never come close to
repeating anything vaguely resembling the hits of 9/11.
Its principal leader
Osama bin Laden may well be dead (he certainly did not make his trademark
video intervention in this year’s Presidential election in the United States)
and his deputy has fallen  back on threats and bravado.
What of Pakistan?
The country’s military is heavily involved in actions on its Northwest
frontier where the spillage from the Afghan war has destabilized the
region. The politicians currently in power are making repeated overtures to
India.
The Lashkar-e-Taiba, not usually shy of claiming
its hits, has strongly denied any involvement with the Mumbai attacks.
Why should it be such
a surprise if the perpetrators are themselves Indian Muslims? Its hardly a
secret that there has been much anger within the poorest sections of the
Muslim community against the systematic discrimination and acts of violence
carried out against them of which the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in shining
Gujarat was only the most blatant and the most investigated episode,
supported by the Chief Minister of the State and the local state
apparatuses.
Add to this the
continuing sore of Kashmir which has for
decades been treated as a colony by Indian troops with random arrests,
torture and rape of Kashmiris an everyday
occurrence. Conditions have been much worse than in Tibet, but
have aroused little sympathy in the West where the defense of human rights
is heavily instrumentalised.
Indian intelligence
outfits are well aware of all this and they should not encourage the
fantasies of their political leaders. Its best to
come out and accept that there are severe problems inside the country. A
billion Indians: 80 percent Hindus and 14 percent Muslims. A very large
minority that cannot be ethnically cleansed without provoking a wider
conflict.
None of this
justifies terrorism, but it should, at the very least, force India’s
rulers to direct their gaze on their own country and the conditions that
prevail. Economic disparities are profound. The absurd notion that the
trickle-down effects of global capitalism would solve most problems can now
be seen for what it always was: a fig leaf to conceal new modes of
exploitation.
Tariq Ali’s latest book, ‘The
Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power’ is published by
Scribner.
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