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Monday, Jul 6, 2009
Amid calls for a fierce crackdown on "potential terrorists," Indians strive to define the Mumbai attackers as "the other."
By Sandip Roy
Read more: Opinion
Reuters/Ho New
A suspected gunman walks in the premises of the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus or Victoria Terminus railway station in Mumbai November 26, 2008.
Nov. 29, 2008 | In India "the other" is already being identified, out of the rubble of luxury hotels and shattered glass. The Mumbai attackers were young men "based outside the country," Prime Minister Manmohan Singh says. They came, we are told, by sea. Like pirates. Some may have been British citizens. When one of the hostage takers contacted an Indian news station, the journalist kept asking him "Where are you from?"
In short, are you Indian? Or are you "the other"?
Three days after the start of this awful siege, which has killed more than 150 and injured more than 300 people, I remember one of the first faces to emerge out of the horrifying scenes of burning hotels, sprawled bodies and uniformed police in Mumbai. "Is he one of the victims?" asked my roommate as we looked at the fuzzy image of a young man in a dark t-shirt, the word VERSACE written across it in white. My roommate obviously hadn't noticed the assault rifle he was holding.
That man whose image was beamed across the world could have been one of the victims. "They were very young, like boys really, wearing jeans and T-shirts," a British tourist told The Times.
In short they were wearing the uniform of a young India. A uniform that allowed them access into the sanctum santorum of Indian high society, which they then proceeded to blow up.
The face of that gun-toting faux-VERSACE t-shirt-wearing assailant was haunting in its ordinariness. And its familiarity.
He could be Pakistani.
He could be Indian.
He is almost certainly Muslim.
With newspaper editorials calling for the head of the Indian Home Minister over this colossal failure of intelligence, and demanding a new, zero-tolerance war on terror that many fear could result in more hardship for Muslim Indians, I am curious about the young assailant I saw on television.
Who was he before he became whatever he is? Three days after the attacks began, we still don't know what he is. An unknown group called Deccan Mujaheddin took credit, but the New York Times reports that American intelligence officials are beginning to suspect Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba. Others say they're from Indian Mujaheddin.
We don't know whether it was ideology or the promise of cash that sent young men like him into the attackers' disparate targets: Mumbai's historic CST train station; the Taj hotel, where Bombay's elite gather for cocktails and coffee; the trendy Leopold café, where tourists and Bollywood stars relax; the five-star Oberoi, where diamond merchants make deals and starlets wait to be spotted by gossip columnists; a local Chabad House, where an American rabbi and his wife and several others were killed on Friday.
"These men are not poor and illiterate," Suba Chandra, deputy director at the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies in New Delhi, told Bloomberg News. "They are highly motivated youngsters with grievances, real and imagined. There may be more such attacks until we address their grievances and improve intelligence gathering."
A recent study found that Muslims in India, despite having been President and Bollywood stars, tend to make less money and be less educated. But right now, with the smell of carnage still in the air, with smoke billowing out of beloved landmarks, there is little appetite for understanding grievances.
India's English-language media wants heads to roll. It's time for zero tolerance.
"It's War" headlined the Times of India. "India is Under Attack" said The Hindustan Times. And most ominously, The Telegraph wants no more "crazy initiatives aimed at winning over potential terrorists with love, affirmative action and moral equivalence."
Who is a "potential" terrorist? What is his profile? The unspoken subtext: Which Muslims in India should we treat with fairness, and which should we write off as "potential terrorists?"
Mira Kamdar, author of Planet India, told a webcast organized by the South Asian Journalists Association, that she worries that the "blunt instrument" way the Indian police round up young Muslim men will leave them even more alienated. Right now, with some top police officers killed in the line of duty, this is not what India wants to hear, especially from Indians living halfway across the world.
Instead, every newspaper is clamoring for centralized intelligence coordination. The scale and efficiency of the Mumbai attacks made it India's 9/11. In response, they say, India needs what America got after 9/11: a PATRIOT Act and a Department of Homeland Security. Almost every newspaper has made much of the way Democrats and Republicans "came together" to pass the PATRIOT act with bipartisan support. Look, say the editorial writers, a Department of Homeland Security works. The U.S. has had no attacks since 9/11, they note.
Next page: Bombing the elites' islands of security
