feeds from sacw.net
print versionThe Guardian, November 28 2008
No war on terror for south Asia
To call the Mumbai attacks ’India’s 9/11’ creates a convenient myth that masks the real history of communal conflict
A growing narrative within India and outside emotively describes the recent terror strike in Mumbai as "India’s 9/11". On Thursday, the scion of Nehru-Gandhi dynasty called the Mumbai attacks assaults on the nation’s sovereignty, while the editorials in two of India’s largest newspapers, the Times of India and the Hindustan Times carried the 9/11 comparisons forward by describing it as an act of war.
A clear subtext of these comparisons is to respond to the attacks in the same way as the Americans responded by waging a "war on terror". Pakistan’s involvement is being cited again in popular media and the political establishment. Clearly, the ongoing peace process between India and Pakistan is at risk, given the increasingly hawkish tone set by the Hindu nationalist groups. For these reasons, the 9/11 narrative needs to be challenged now.
The analogy is not only contestable in terms of scale, size and nature; it also mistakenly locates terror in India on a much broader canvas of the global war on terror. As a consequence, complex conflicts within India are linked to a simplified narrative of Islamist violence, thereby removing "India" itself from the realm of analysis. This version of history needs to be cross-examined to highlight the way a politics of terror has shaped India in the past decades.
To begin with, violence is deeply rooted within the history of modern India, beginning with partition in 1947. The ensuing six decades have been marked by frequent events of anti-Muslim violence – often termed "communal violence" – most notably in 1992, after the demolition of historic Babri mosque in Ayodhya, and then, in 2002, in Guajarat as retribution for the killings of 56 Hindu pilgrims returning from Ayodhya. In both events, thousands were massacred while state agencies were at best ineffective, at worst collusive, in the violence. In this context, the 1993 Mumbai bombings were seen as "Muslim" response to the political marginalisation of Muslims by the increasingly aggressive stance of Hindu nationalist groups. According to extreme Hindu nationalist ideology, Muslims are inherently violent and disloyal to the nation – a view all too easily "affirmed" by current reference to the war on terror.
So, 9/11 becomes a common point of convergence between India and the west, which not only purport to share secular democratic values, but also hold in common the threat of al-Qaida-inspired violence. The post-9/11 terror strikes in India – for example, the 2008 serial bombings in Ahmadabad, Jaipur, Bangalore, Delhi and now Mumbai – are routinely spoken of in global terms, even though little evidence of such linkages has surfaced. The spectre of a global terror threat in India has become a handy trope to consolidate political consensus around issues of security, patriotism and morality – to the exclusion of Muslim "Others".
This trope is also a convenient ruse for the Indian state, first, in minimising its responsibility in its failure to detect and defuse specific threats, and second, in diverting attention from its longstanding regional conflict over Kashmir with Pakistan. Although it is too early to identify with any confidence the agents behind the Mumbai terror strikes, there is at least circumstantial evidence pointing not towards global outfits like al-Qaida, but to local south-Asian actors inimical to the peace process.
9/11 comparisons do little to enhance our understanding of this tragic violence. Instead, they emotively feed the politics of revenge, which we have already witnessed in Afghanistan and Iraq – themselves precisely the theatre of the war on terror. What we definitely do not require is a south-Asian version of Bush’s disastrous war, which has brought only misery to these countries.
