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The Nation and the Liberal Polemicist
The Mumbai attacks of 26th November 2008 were, in some ways, a new kind of experience for India. There have been terrorist acts before but these earlier acts were, to all appearances, perpetrated by disaffected Indian citizens. The Bombay blasts of 1993, for instance, were found to have been the handiwork of people from Mumbai who were personally affected by the Bombay riots of 1992-93. The various other acts of terror that have disrupted life in the cities and taken lives have been generally acknowledged as the doings of Indians, with or without foreign assistance, as have the Malegaon blasts. What makes the Mumbai attacks different is that they were perpetrated by foreign nationals. This means that the terrorist attacks in Mumbai on 26th November 2008 were an act of war, although it may not have been war waged on behalf of a sovereign state, viz. Pakistan.
This editorial is not so much about India and Pakistan as about Indian liberals and the responses coming from their ranks after 26th November. Two people who have often spoken out boldly on issues like Kashmir, the nuclear policy and the Narmada project have been the writer Arundhati Roy and the documentary filmmaker Anand Patwardhan. They have demonstrated that they are capable of taking up unpopular causes and their credentials as critics of the state cannot be doubted. It may therefore be useful to look at their responses to the Mumbai attacks rather than those with less credibility as liberal voices. Their positions on various issues are familiar but the question here is the validity of their stands on the Mumbai attacks.
Arundhati Roy, writing in Outlook December 08 has, generally, the following arguments to offer:
1. |
The TV coverage of The Taj was shameful because of the way the poor people dying in the railway station and the public hospital were ignored. Here is a segment from her piece: "We're told that 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. |
2. |
Terrorism has a context and we must be aware of this context. Roy shows that the sayings of Hafiz Saeed, the founder of the Laskar-e-Taiba are not very different from the pronouncements of Babu Bajrangi, a VHP activist from Ahmedabad - or the RSS. The implication is that the terror in Mumbai directed from outside the country must be seen in the context of Hindu-Muslim conflict within India. Incidentally, Roy translates 'Laskar-e-Taiba' as 'Army of the Pure' implying that the translated phase represents the organization in its essence. She does not translate 'Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh' as 'National Self-Help Group'. |
3. |
The accusation that the attacks were directed from Pakistan will not stick because: "The Lashkar has denied involvement, but remains the prime accused. According to the police and intelligence agencies, the Lashkar operates in India through an organization 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..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." |
4. |
Although there is a hasty correction later, there is a touch of satisfaction at the effectiveness of the attacks in the following passage, with Kashmir invoked almost immediately as justifying 'context': "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..(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.)" |
5. |
The attacks were carried out by people willing to die and the reasons were: "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." |
6. |
The demand for a special law to curb terrorism is tantamount to asking for a police state - when the police kill with impunity without ever being brought to justice and "the line between the underworld and the Encounter Specialists virtually does not exist." |
7. |
American has not won the war against terror and neither can India. "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." |
Although he appears to hold comparable views, the documentary filmmaker Anand Patwardhan is a less aggressive polemicist than Roy. The following is a summary of his observations/ views apparently made in a letter that Times of India apparently declined to publish:
1. |
The call for more stringent anti-terror laws is misplaced as is the call for retaliation or a reprisal. (These are) "Solutions that will lead us further into the abyss. For terror is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It thrives on reaction, polarization, militarization and the thirst for revenge." |
2. |
Those who talk of imitating America in its war on terror fail to take into account America's crucial role in creating terror groups because of its Afghanistan and Middle-East policies. "It recruited global support for Islamic militancy, which began to be seen as a just resistance against American mass murder. Which begs the question of who created Bin Laden in the first place, armed the madarsas of Pakistan and rejuvenated the concept of Islamic jehad? Israel played its own role in stoking the fires of jehad. The very creation of Israel in 1948 robbed Palestinians of their land, an act that Mahatma Gandhi to his credit deplored at the time as an unjust way to redress the wrongs done to Jews during the Holocaust." |
3. |
The terror within is more real than the terror from outside: "This internal divide is as potent a breeding ground for terror as jehadi camps abroad. Nor is jehad the copyright of one religion alone. It can be argued that international causes apart, India has jehadis that are fully home grown. Perhaps the earliest famous one was Nathuram Godse who acting at the behest of his mentor Vinayak Savarkar (still referred to as "Veer" or "brave" although he refused to own up to his role in the conspiracy), murdered Mahatma Gandhi for the crime of championing Muslims." |
4. |
Draconian anti-terror laws cannot succeed because the law has been partisan: "As for draconian anti-terror laws, they too only breed terror as for the most part they are implemented by a State machinery that has imbibed majoritarian values. So in Modi's Gujarat after the ethnic cleansing of Muslims in 2002, despite scores of confessions to rape and murder captured on hidden camera, virtually no Hindu extremists were punished while thousands of Muslims rotted in jail under draconian laws. The same happened in Bombay despite the Shiv Sena being found guilty by the Justice Shrikrishna Commission. Under pressure a few cases were finally brought to trial but all escaped with the lightest of knuckle raps. In stark contrast many Muslims accused in the 1993 bomb blasts were given death sentences." |
The more strident tone adopted by Roy may be because her platform is international. Her piece on 26/11 was, for instance, also published in The Guardian and a periodical named 'The Huffington Post'. Patwardhan, on the other hand needs to be more circumspect because he is addressing Indians: "I am not arguing that we do not need efficient security at public places and at vulnerable sites. But real security will only come when it is accompanied by real justice, when the principles of democracy are implemented in every part of the country, when the legitimate grievances of people are not crushed, when the arms race is replaced by a race for decency and humanity, when our children grow up in an atmosphere where religious faith is put to the test of reason. Until such time we will remain at the mercy of "patriots" and zealots." Invoking Mahatma Gandhi as Anand Patwardhan does (in 3 above) is perhaps a way of reducing the possibility of controversy within India, something that Roy does not care about. In any case both of them represent the liberal response to the events in Mumbai - only anxious that it should be 'contextualised'. Neither even wonders about immediate matters like the choice of targets this time; it is as if attacks and terrorist acts always owe to the same factors and the merit the same responses on every occasion. Both of them ask that the events be seen in the context of Hindu-Muslim strife in India, in the general context of social injustice in India, in the light of America's and Israel's misdoings. It is interesting to compare their responses with one from the Pakistani press itself, one more willing to address the immediate issue. Here are segments from a piece in the respected Karachi newspaper Dawn: (Irfan Hussain, December 3rd, 2008)
"Even in my remote bit of paradise, news of distant disasters filters through: above the steady sound of waves breaking on the sandy beach in Sri Lanka, I was informed by several news channels about the sickening attacks on Mumbai.
Over the last few years, I have traveled to several countries across four continents. Everywhere I go, I am asked why Pakistan is now the focal point of Islamic extremism and terrorism, and why successive governments have allowed this cancer to fester and grow. As a Pakistani, it is obviously embarrassing to be put on the spot, but I can see why people everywhere are concerned.
In virtually every Islamic terrorist plot, whether it is successful or not, there is a Pakistani angle. Often, foreign terrorists have trained at camps in the tribal areas; others have been brainwashed in madressahs; and many more have been radicalised by the poisonous teachings of so-called religious leaders.. Most Pakistanis, when presented with the fact that our country is now the breeding ground for the most violent ideologies, and the most vicious gangs of thugs who kill in the name of religion, go back in history to explain and justify their presence in our country.
They refer to the Afghan war, and the creation of an army of holy warriors to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. Then they go on to complain that the Americans quit the region soon after the Soviets did, leaving us saddled with jihadi fighters from all over the Muslim world camped on our soil.
What we conveniently forget is that for most of the last two decades, the army and the ISI used these very jihadis to further their agenda in Kashmir and Afghanistan. This long official link has given various terror groups legitimacy and a domestic base that has now come to haunt us.Each time an atrocity like Mumbai occurs, and Pakistan is accused of being involved, the defensive mantra chanted by the chorus of official spokesmen is: "Show us the proof." The reality is that in terrorist operations planned in secret, there is not much of a paper trail left behind. Nine times out of ten, the perpetrators do not survive to give evidence before a court. But in this case, one terrorist did survive, and Ajmal Amir Kamal's story points to Lashkar-e-Tayyaba. The sophistication of the attack is testimony to careful planning and rigorous training.
This was no hit-and-run operation, but was intended to cause the maximum loss of life."
The first question to be asked now is why India's liberal need to invoke and lose themselves in so many issues that are not pertinent when discussing the Mumbai attacks. If these other issues are pertinent it is only in the way that all things political are interconnected. But when immediate action is needed, the State can hardly begin by examining with the tenuous links between various political issues. When Roy invokes the Dalits (which she does) in the course of her rhetoric does she mean, for instance, that if India must protect itself against a foreign agency or retaliate against an attack from abroad, it must first correct its attitude towards its own Dalits? In the present instance the State may need to demonstrate its determination to the Indian citizen without having to trace its actions to a contextual 'first cause'. It is not the purpose of this editorial to suggest a remedy to the state but ethical issues cannot preclude the need for strategy - and the state can hardly avoid thinking and acting strategically.
The strange fact is also that both Roy and Patwardhan's responses can be published without changes after the next terrorist attack because their arguments are almost timeless in their lack of specificity. Liberal polemicists may contend that the Indian state is discredited but they have nonetheless drawn individual benefits from it. This being the case, should they also not think in terms of solutions not impossible to implement within an acceptable time frame? Neither of them, for instance, suggests that stringent anti-terror laws might be reasonable if there are also similar laws against inciting communal violence.
One can only speculate on why Arundhati Roy has rarely any constructive suggestion to offer and this is that her constituency is not Indian. Liberals of a certain kind are perhaps simply engaged in positioning themselves within the spectrum of political/ ideological positions, internationally. The sentiments that crop up again and again in their rhetoric may be signals or signs sent out for other members of an international society to recognize - in perhaps the way that a freemason might signal something to another.
To conclude, India is under grave threat from conservative forces but while the conservative right-wing is trying to persuade the electorate that it is the major stakeholder in the Indian nation, many liberal polemicists write again and again as people who have disinvested in it, thereby substantiating the claims of the right wing. Hitler, it has been said, was put into power by the doings of the German left but this is a 'context' that India's liberal polemicists appear to be oblivious of - or entirely indifferent to.
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