Where you stand depends on where you sit. I am an NRI and I fail to be dazzled by US hegemony.

The NAM, the Non-Aligned Movement of newly free sovereign nation-states mainly in Africa and Asia soon found their hard won political liberation rapidly undercut by the geo-economic machinations of the World Bank and the IMF, both within the sphere of US control represented by the Federal Reserve. Nyerere’s Tanzania became a debtor despite his commitment to Ujamaa pan-African socialism. So did India despite Swadeshi and NAM.

The divide-and-rule strategy perfected by the colonial Brits was now given a virulently new lease of life by the neo-imperial US. across much of the Global South. The Mumbai terror attack must be framed within this larger world-system in which the US invented the Cold War, produced and still maintains the largest number of nuclear warheads, controlled the work of the UN Security Council, satellitized a pro-Zionist Israel in West Asia (the Middle East to some) and made the world safe for Coke.

Pakistan, rendered vulnerable at the Mountbatten-engineered Partition (with the assistance of collusional homegrown elites) particularly has felt the full impact of 60 years of US meddling. That divisive meddling dates back to the Dulles era of the State Department in the Eisenhower administration with SEATO and CENTO ( both of which Pakistan became a member as an ‘ally’ of the US).

The lonstanding, invasive U.S. engagement in Afghanistan (within which Pakistan became enmeshed during the Cold War) is too well known to require cataloging here. Mumbai no more and no less than Islamabad or Kabul or London or Madrid or New York are global or glocal megacitities which stand at the intersection of dominant, yes hegemonic unipolarity represented by US capital and military shock and awe. The rest of the world is awakening to multipolarity and the US is still unipolar. How 20th century!

My point is not at all to externalize the terror that took our breaths away that recent November day in Mumbai. In fact it is to affirm the need for crossborder people-to-people civil society exchanges that are made ever more difficult and divisive when Condi Rice and Mike Mullen pop in and out to “mediate.” in South Asia, to own “the road map” in Palestine.

So long as India, Pakistan and Afghanistan exhibit a colonized, dependent mindset; allow the US to triangulate their historic and contemporary relationship; fail to look within ourselves to braid the bonds that bind us as blood-sharing kin; do not ensure that the arc of justice bends proudly and surely towards all our peoples, we may find ourselves continue to be restive as we cross the street in Mumbai.

Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com

There is only one thing which is rather confusing in Professor Appadurai’s analysis. Why would the Riksha drivers and the steet vendors in North Mumbai want the South Mumbai to be destroyed? Perhaps I missed someting.

Thank you for educating and enlightening!