Today we are once more at a time when lawless violence proliferates and territorial boundaries are infringed upon, when state leaders invoke “non-state actors” and argue for the need to respond in kind. Are new political formations taking shape in our midst, even as we defend the old order?

On November 26, 2008, terrorists arrived by sea and entered near the Gateway, making an entrance not unlike the pirates of yesteryear. The event is described as India’s 9/11, with enemy intruders committing murder and mayhem. “9/11″ has become a nationalizing mantra across the globe, an invocation to remember violence in order to garner consent for violent retaliation. In an earlier age non-state actors, such as pirates, merged with the state. Today the state mimics the behavior of private parties, justifying violence as revenge and practicing torture as the just desserts of terrorists. War has become the preferred means of practicing politics under the guise of opposing terrorism, and it is endorsed as a sacred duty.

In the rush to affiliate the Mumbai attacks with the global war on terror, some point to Pakistan as the root cause. Calling these attacks “India’s 9/11″ bolsters the demand that the country strike hard and fast, although the global nature of terrorism may involve an outsourcing of retribution. This speaks to both the long-standing failures of the Indian state and to the increasing discrimination in civil society and the media against Muslims.

Many have said that the attacks are part of a pattern of revenge for repeated anti-Muslim violence in different parts of the country that were led by Hindu nationalists, most prominently in 1992 and in 2002. None of the guilty Hindu parties in either of these situations were brought to book. The violent response to the Hindu nationalists’ carnage in 1992, which left more than one thousand dead, was conceived and financed by people in Karachi and Dubai. Mumbai, at the time, was the third corner of the economic and cultural zone formed by these cities, and thus was a logical choice of target. When the attack was initiated by Muslims the perpetrators were pursued with abundant vigor, and numerous innocents were punished along with some guilty men.

The recent events are only the latest of numerous attacks in cities across India. In Mumbai alone 209 people were killed in bombed suburban trains in 2006, and blasts in 1993 killed more than 250. As the Indian state continually fails to provide justice, private parties have chosen to settle accounts through public violence. The message this violence has conveyed is that if the Indian state will not protect Muslim citizens, their allies close by will try and do so. The culmination of this violent exchange has been further mimetic violence, this time by the state. In 2002, state authorities in Gujarat aided in the massacre of more than two thousand Muslims, in retaliation for sixty Hindus killed. Census rolls and municipal records were used to strike at Muslim homes and businesses, the sacrificial victims in the Gujarat state’s successful electoral campaigns. In turn, other cities have been targeted for further retaliatory terror attacks.

As national boundaries become more fluid and politics render nation-states less capable of representing their citizens, cities turn into battle zones and urban spaces are weaponized. Cities suffer from severe economic and social segregation, and the slums of the poor are demolished in the name of urban beautification, moved to the city outskirts, squeezed by high-rises, and bypassed by flyovers that render ghettos invisible to the privileged. Muslim residents in India are overwhelmingly concentrated in such areas, and, in episodes of Hindu nationalist violence, have been the principal victims of assaults.

In Ahmedabad, in many ways a sister city to Mumbai’s Gujarati financial elite and professional classes, the anti-Muslim violence in 2002 was almost entirely contained in the older, eastern half of the city, leaving the more affluent western part of the city largely unscathed. Muslims in India have, for some time, been treated as internal enemies, through a combination of covert and overt socio-economic boycotts, state discrimination, episodes of intense political violence, and anti-terror legislation granting judicial powers to police. Those who participated in the November attacks in Mumbai were reportedly shown films of the Gujarat killings, as well as others, such as the demolition of Babri Masjid in 1992, as part of their indoctrination during training.

A Muslim school teacher in Naroda Patia, one of the worst-affected areas during the Gujarat violence, spoke to me indignantly about experiencing one such boycott combined with rampant discrimination: “The people who treat us like this—I will not say that they are alive. If they simply believe what they are told, and treat human beings as if they did not exist, where is the spirit of life in them? I will say they are dead people.”

Violence is not limited to the physical act of killing. It can be carried out through forms of interaction and through the refusal to acknowledge the humanity of others. The restoration of order may not bring peace so much as serve to store and delay the release of violent energies, in a circuit that brings politics and everyday life into intimate contact. Muslims in many parts of the country have experienced ostracism amounting to social death, and are pushed to the very margins of the economy. In 2006 The Justice Sachar Committee reported that the condition of Muslims had deteriorated to such a point that they were worse off than the untouchable caste, which has traditionally occupied the lowest rung of Indian society.

The recent terror strikes may be Pakistani or transnational in their financing and implementation, but the urban geography in which it unfolded can be recognized from previous episodes of a more domestic violence. The difference is that this time, as in 1993, rich areas, not poor ones, were targeted. In both sets of cases, violence in media-dark ghettos has been followed by violence in the most public and media-bright parts of the city. The conception and execution of terrorism is both a method of violence and a method of publicity.

Media Effects

The media has expanded rapidly in India in recent years—with nearly two-thirds of the country now watching television with some regularity—which has made it into one of the principal motors of the economy. This tertiary ‘service sector’ industry has become more profitable than the primary or secondary sectors.

The attacks this past November are the first terror attacks in India to occur under the full glare of media spotlights, and, after many years of state-controlled media, in an era in which private broadcasters dominate the airwaves. Dozens of 24-hour news channels vie for the Indian audience, many of them subsidiaries of transnational media corporations. Few television markets in developing countries have witnessed such competition in news; it represents an attempt by businesses to capture the premium audience segment (which disproportionately tunes into news programs) while the entry costs are still relatively low, and viewer preferences are unformed.

In the past, when such violence occurred, the first response by the state-controlled media would be a news blackout, followed by terse and occasional news bulletins aimed at the political management of the situation; public safety took second place to the self-preservation of the ruling party. Citizens had to rely on rumors for information, and of course the source was never certain. Although there was often alarm and panic, any citizen responses were necessarily more diffuse. The role of an organized response was reserved for the state, which controlled the instruments of mass communication.

Since private media emerged, bomb blasts have occurred and drawn media attention, but these broadcasts always began after the explosions were over. The same was true for armed assaults, such as the attack on the Parliament buildings in New Delhi in December, 2001; news coverage had to diagnose dormant scenes of the crime, and thus lacked the capacity to retain audiences.

The latest attacks in Mumbai, by comparison, have received saturation coverage. There is no doubt that those who designed the attacks drew on the idea that the media constitutes war by other means; live action news about violence is akin to sequenced bomb blasts that can retain audiences for a length of time. Executed during the Thanksgiving holidays and located in tourist venues and heritage monuments, clearly including American and British persons in their targets, these attacks stretched over days. A global audience was envisaged for these attacks. The volume of coverage inevitably magnified the impact of the violence, prolonging its duration and escalating its rhetoric. The recent events are routinely described as India’s worst-ever terror attack, which not only ignores the greater toll of the 1993 blasts, but assumes that the numerous episodes of violence against Muslims, that claimed many hundreds more lives and often took place with the covert or overt support of law-enforcement agencies, did not constitute “terror.”

The question that has transfixed the media and provoked a demand for an answer is: who sponsored the killings, and how will they be caught? The question of why terror was launched was seldom asked, so habituated and dependent are the media to the spectacle of violence. The view of the media is akin to that of a policeman—the point is to catch the culprit.

With terrorism, the news media, and the police—and should we add, the judiciary?—seem to have merged together. We get information about attacks planned in Pakistan, emerging from the interrogation of the one attacker caught alive. No one can be under any illusion that this information comes from anywhere other than a torture chamber, but that vital and complicating bit of news is omitted. Also omitted is the possibility of Salafi funding from Saudi Arabia and elsewhere for the suspected groups, such as Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Muhammad and Jamaat-ud-Dawa, whose names keep changing. The tense but complicitous relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia, that helps to preserve absolutist rule in that country, is far too academic a point to even be mentioned in the police drama unfolded by television news.

After many years of protesting state-controlled broadcasting, private news media now sets the terms of discourse on Indian airwaves, but the result is not what was foreseen by free speech advocates. Instead of official propaganda, which no one believed, audiences in India now get crime news, which sidesteps the tedium of argument and party line and spotlights violence instead.

Violence, when it occurs, is ideally meant to confirm that the law is being enforced. When violence is in defiance of the law and intended as a spectacle, the harm is physical as well as symbolic—the ability of the law to control public space is challenged. We might say that the intention of such terrorism is to drive a wedge between the law and its representation, as well as to unsettle our understanding of the relationship between violence and visibility. To be seen in a public space could be to enter the crosshairs of a killer, whereas to remain invisible is safe. Terrorism thus inverts our understanding of the meaning of publicity, making the visible a site of persistent danger and of suspended legality.

While the state invokes non-state actors to authorize new forms of political intervention, the media take on increasingly state-like characteristics. Despite being unelected representatives, their demands have more effect. Previous episodes of violence in Mumbai, e.g. in 1993, made no difference to the tenure of political leaders at that time, although numerous allegations were made against some of them. Although the death toll is smaller on this occasion, the Union Home Minister and the Chief Minister of Maharashtra have had to summarily vacate their offices, largely in response to a media-generated furor against them. In fact, the actions of the media’s state-like behavior focus on results over accountability, on retribution over restitution, on drama over the tedium of fact-finding, and, most of all, on sympathy for the upwardly mobile middle and upper classes over the (often unseen) victims of violence, poverty, immiseration and political terror.

What is manifest in this process is elite power; the media in India is only nominally public. A majority of the population may watch television, but it is the elite who own the space and dictate the terms of its discourse. The news routines do not even pretend to be egalitarian. In the recent attacks hardly any attention was paid to the railway station where sixty people were killed. TV crews stayed focused on the luxury hotels, where “People Like Us” were affected.

In responses to terrorism state power is exercised in secrecy, while elite power becomes bolder and claims for itself the mantle of the public as a whole. Politicians are vilified as a group and their judgment is scorned, as media celebrities offer their wisdom on national security. Meanwhile, there is little sign of responses being planned or conducted by the state; torture and encounter killings do not make the news, and counter-insurgency operations occur off-camera and through third-party and non-verifiable sources.

A Possible Politics

The globalization of media has led to an increased overlapping of news angles by Indian and western news markets, and the recent attacks reflect this, as the elites in Mumbai ask where their Rudy Giuliani is to spearhead their charge after the attacks, assuming that they too must respond “like America.” We have also witnessed the remarkable attempt by some American commentators to locate the cause of violence in a civilizational clash between Hindus and Muslims, akin to the alleged clash between Islam and Christendom. In this improbable interpretation, pagan Hindus are on the side of Christendom against Islam, although the latter two faiths profess a religion of the book, while Hinduism is polytheistic and fissiparous. As a waning superpower struggles for political leverage in a multipolar world, it is not surprising to see a search for the means of making foreign conflicts tractable to the existing geopolitical vision of the United States.

If we are to take democracy seriously, however, the question is not only what identities people respond to, but what we wish them to become. The problem, in other words, is not only an anthropological one, of classifying the different peoples of the world, but also a political one, of indicating what kind of world we would like them to belong to. Democratization everywhere effects a transformation in identities; people have a right not only to improve their lives, but to choose the terms in which they express them. Against the democratization of terror we must assert a politics of humanity, although the terms in which to do so are hardly transparent. We grant humanity to those made visible to the law, but new technologies of publicity disclose the presence of those denied legality, albeit through criminal acts. If outlaws once laid the basis for law, today the challenge before the law is to respond not only to the terrorist, but as well to the migrant, the slum-dweller, the uprooted peasant and other victims of industrial development, and the religious and ethnic minority. The growing separation between politics and publicity, between those who are visible and subject to the law and those who are invisible or who force themselves into visibility, requires us to constantly reconsider who has a right to politics and who is to be denied it, and on what grounds.

Despite the fact that more people died at the railway station and a hospital that was also attacked, it was hotels and other sites of elite and international interest, including a tourist restaurant and a small Jewish centre, that accounted for the majority of militant targets, hit as they were during prime media time in Europe and America but at an hour when Mumbai’s streets and public transportation had emptied out, thus allowing the terrorists to move quickly across the city avoiding the crowds of ordinary people whom they would otherwise have encountered. Reactions to the attacks have also been internationalized, not only because of the worldwide media attention they garnered, itself made possible by Mumbai’s accessibility, amenities and profile, but also by the fact that its middle class residents are themselves describing what happened to them as “India’s 9/11″ and paying their respects to those killed by setting flowers, candles and notes in public places or holding candle-light vigils practices previously unknown in this city that has been ravaged by terrorists so often but familiar to television audiences from events in other parts of the world. These protests, directed against a political class seen as cynical and corrupt as much as against the terrorists or their Pakistani backers, occupied a public arena that had remained ominously vacant after the attacks, with many fearing that it could be filled only by those calling for violent retribution against Pakistan or even India’s Muslims. To my knowledge the only precedent in India for such a mobilization and its “international” practices were the equally middle class demonstrations, also directed primarily against politicians who failed in their duties rather than criminals as such, that marked the outrage in Delhi over the acquittal of a politician’s son in 2006 of the very public murder of a model named Jessica Lall.

Whatever the global elements involved in these brutal events, from militant methods to media coverage, crucial is the fact that they were plugged into a local history of religious violence in Mumbai and elsewhere in the country, if only to scramble and so utterly transform this past. For instance a hospital was targeted by the gunmen fleeing a killing spree at the railway station, and though there appears to be no rationale for this attack apart from it constituting yet another diversionary tactic, the recent history of hospitals being subject to violence tells another story. In the Gujarat riots of 2002, the majority of whose victims were Muslims, with some two thousand killed, those taken to hospitals in Ahmedabad were sometimes attacked and murdered in their beds. In July of 2008, when crude bombs were set off in that city by a little-known outfit calling itself the Indian Mujahideen, hospitals to which the wounded were taken were also hit with explosions. Whether intentionally or not it appears as if a new tradition of violence has been created in this way.

The most recent terrorist outrages in Mumbai belong in fact to a tradition inaugurated by the first attacks on the city in 1993, a series of bombings across almost the entire length of this vast metropolis that followed upon extensive riots the year before in which hundreds of Muslims and dozens of Hindus had been killed and some two-hundred thousand of the former forced to flee their homes. These blasts, which were carried out by elements in the city’s Muslim underworld, probably with assistance from Pakistan, represented a radical departure from India’s long history of terrorism. Departing from the old-fashioned claims of responsibility and political demands that had characterized earlier forms of militancy, the serial blasts of 1993 were voiceless, including no claims or demands and thus exiting from politics altogether. Of course everyone knew that the bombs were retaliation for the riots of 1992, which had followed the destruction of a medieval mosque in the north of India claimed to have been built upon a temple by Hindu nationalists. And in this way the attacks constituted a silent dialogue of violence.

Since colonial times the practice of religious violence had possessed a mirror-like character, in which the defilement of a temple was repaid by that of a mosque or the murder of three Muslims by that of an equal number of Hindus, often leading to a spiral of violence as the stakes were incrementally raised. Such tactics lend a measure of control and predictability to tribal feuds as well as gangland conflicts in many parts of the world. The 1993 blasts, however, departed this logic for the first time to provide a different kind of “retaliation”, one that not only stepped through the mirror of religious violence but also exited the political arena because it was unattached to any political claim let alone to a political party, creating only a sense of existential self-respect and agency for ordinary Muslims that was much-remarked upon at the time. A consequence of the disparity of numbers between Hindus and Muslims, or between the firepower of militants and the state, terrorism effectively removed the mirror that had for so long been set between the two communities, with “Muslim” bombs and “Hindu” riots following each other until very recently, when it appears as if explosions at mosques and other places of Muslim resort indicate an attempt to “balance” mutual violence again.

Whatever its nature Hindu militancy remains within the political arena, supporting as it does established political parties and tied as it is to electoral struggles in different parts of the country. Outside Kashmir, however, and unrelated to the struggle for autonomy and secession there, Muslim terrorism lacks a politics. As if recognizing this lack, such bombings have never provoked Hindu retaliation, since according to the anthropologist Vyjayanthi Rao they appear to come from nowhere and cannot be linked to any particular Muslim population. Indeed these forms of violence indicate the increasing helplessness and even irrelevance of traditional Muslim authorities, both secular and religious, something of which they are well aware, being no longer in a position either to control militants or act as mediators and stop conflict between communities. All of this only proves Gandhi’s dictum that religious violence is a form of luxury because its combatants’ lack of political responsibility allows them to rely upon the state to reassert order. In the Mahatma’s day it was the colonial state that denied political responsibility to its subjects, thus making violence into an immature jockeying for power. If such a condition persists in independent India it is because Muslims have never regained the status of a political interest with institutions and a leadership of their own since the subcontinent’s partition in 1947.

The history of terrorism in India is lengthy and diverse, beginning with anarchist-inspired assassinations and bombings of British officials in both the east and west of the country at the end of the nineteenth century, and turning into incidents of shooting and bombing in the civil war type conditions that prevailed in the north and east with the end of colonial rule. After independence terrorism against the state and its agents emerged among communist-inspired peasants in eastern India during the nineteen-sixties and seventies, followed by separatist violence among a variety of religious and ethnic groups in places like Punjab, Kashmir and the north-east from the nineteen-eighties. Muslim terrorism outside Kashmir began with the 1993 Mumbai blasts, together with the resurgence and spread of a Maoist insurgency among peasants in large swathes of the country. The political psychologist Ashis Nandy has pointed out that for much of this time terrorist practices bore a resolutely Indian character, not simply because they were dedicated to local causes but also by reason of their amateur qualities and cultural peculiarities. The “world class” professionalism of the latest attacks in Mumbai has changed all this.

As a professional activity, terrorism emerged with Pakistani attempts to sponsor militancy in Kashmir, and from this base throughout India. Since Indian Muslims proved unresponsive to such sponsorship for many decades, Pakistan had to create, support or tolerate militant outfits from among its own citizens, who were infiltrated into Kashmir, and from the nineties the rest of the country. In recent years Bangladeshi groups have also started operating in India. The politics of Kashmiri secession, however, have remained resolutely regional, with little interest or sympathy subsisting between those in the valley and India’s Muslims more generally. It is only from 1993, in the aftermath of riots accompanying the destruction of a mosque by Hindu nationalists, that Indian Muslims have started forming their own terrorist outfits. Of these there are two important ones, the now inactive Students Islamic Movement of India, which had earlier existed as a study group, and the recently formed Indian Mujahideen, who carried out a number of crude bomb blasts in different cities including Jaipur, Ahmedabad and Delhi earlier this year. Amateurish and deadly at the same time, these outfits have been exclusively concerned with domestic issues, the latter even warning Pakistan’s Lashkar-e Taiba not to claim responsibility for their attacks in a recent communiqué where they call themselves “home grown”.

Though they deploy some of the jargon of the Global War on Terror, as do the Hindu nationalists who claim to be their greatest enemies, the Indian Mujahideen are so focussed on their country as to represent a perverse form of Indian nationalism. So they expend great efforts, in statements emailed to the press, to demonstrate an awareness of Muslim oppression by describing examples of it throughout the country-even if some of these instances, like insults and land grabs, seem too minor to justify the mortal punishment promised in retaliation. Furthermore these texts are written in English, precisely a national rather than regional language, at least for the Indian middle class. The great difference between Indian Mujahideen operations and those of the immediate past is their voluble accompaniment. Not only does this group release lengthy statements, it proves its claims to responsibility by sending emails to the media just before or during attacks. Unlike the deadly silence of their predecessors, the Indian Mujahideen’s violence gives voice to Muslim grievances and constitutes in this way the closest thing to political speech among Islamic terrorists outside Kashmir. But their distance from any political party or institution is revealed by the Mujahideen’s concern with purely existential forms of agency and self-respect, for example in their condemnation of the secular and leftist Indians who sympathize with persecuted Muslims, and who uncover and publicize instances of this persecution by Hindu militants still at large following the Gujarat riots of 2002. These sympathizers are berated for portraying Muslims only as victims, given that their pity does not usually result in justice being done.

With the latest attacks in Mumbai terrorism has again lost its voice and therefore its capacity to enter the political arena. After all the probable reasons of those who planned the attacks, such as fomenting war-like conditions between India and Pakistan to divert attention and resources away from the Afghan border, thus allowing the Taliban and Al-Qaeda a respite there, constitute a gambler’s gestures rather than a set of political calculations that might result in securing the terrorists some advantage in future negotiations. Moreover the violence deployed was taken to an entirely new level by the kind of highly professionalized Pakistan-based outfit behind the carnage of Mumbai, one whose traditional preoccupation with Shiite and Hindu enemies is now augmented by experience in Afghanistan and Pakistan’s tribal territories, fighting alongside the Taliban and Al-Qaeda against the Coalition forces from which it seems to have learnt the most. For this new kind of terrorism resembles a military operation more than it does the amateur and individualistic militancy of Al-Qaeda, to say nothing of the tribal warfare of the Taliban. Whatever its larger aims, in other words, the terrorism that revealed itself in Mumbai represents Al-Qaeda’s displacement from the cutting edge of militancy. Indeed the world’s most celebrated terror network appears to have been swallowed whole and fully digested by the Pakistani outfits that protect its leaders, which is the same thing as saying that the global has disappeared into the local to animate it from within. Having fitted itself into a long history of militancy in the region, these attacks were quickly bogged down in purely local concerns, however global their aims may have been. And indeed if it is the Lashkar-e Taiba that was behind the terrorism in Mumbai, then this entrapment by history is even more pronounced, since what the group says it wants is neither any military or political advantage for Pakistan, nor a global Islamic caliphate, but rather some version of the British Raj-given that its ideologues imagine a South Asia pockmarked with “Hindu” and “Muslim” countries that largely coincide with the princely states of colonial times. Bizarrely pluralistic in conception, and much like some British plans for the subcontinent, this vision of India’s future represents a profound failure of the militant imagination, one that in fact possesses no future of its own.

Jihad and Fitna: The anguish of a divided community

While the dichotomy of “moderate” Muslims and “extremists” is prevalent in many media representations, this binary hides more than it reveals. For one thing, to group the modern forms of violence perpetrated by militant Muslim groups, both internal to Muslim groups and directed against non-Muslims, in the single category of “fundamentalism” simply does not work. While fundamentalism is frequently said to involve a literalist understanding of scripture and an emphasis on juristic conception of religious commands, modern forms of jihad (or holy war) are perpetrated by groups that, while accepting the overall authority of the Quran, wish to reorient the traditional Quranic verses on jihad. The form of jihad has varied historically, and traditionally Muslims make a distinction between the greater jihad—that is, a war an individual wages within himself or herself for self-improvement—and the lesser jihad, a war waged against the enemies of Islam. Historically, the latter form of jihad was only permitted to be waged by a Muslim king—individuals did not have the right to take up jihad against non-Muslims. What is more, non-Muslims under a Muslim ruler (if they accepted the legitimacy of the ruler) had the right to be protected as non-Muslim minorities—a provision that is present, for instance, in the constitution of Pakistan. In the history of South Asia there are many instances in which a king, even when urged by certain sections of the Muslim clergy, refused to wage jihad against a Hindu ruler with whom a treaty had been signed. The modern jihadists ignore these classical traditions and instead trace their genealogical connections to twentieth century reinterpretations by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, who tried to reorient the classical tradition to make jihad into an individual obligation.

Whether post-independence India is to be characterized as dar-ul-harb (land of infidels) has been debated. Although there is some controversy surrounding this issue, I have examined many fatawas from seminaries that declare India to be dar-ul-aman—a country of order, which, though not ruled by Muslim rulers, is a land where Muslims are free to follow their religion. These fatawas were of-course, delivered in response to specific questions posed by individuals, seeking guidance about whether Muslims were obligated to migrate from India to Muslim lands, or whether Indian Muslims were obliged to follow strict shariat rules regarding investment of money or earning interest on investments. I bring these fatawas up because many media discussions have obscured the fact that discussions of India’s place in the theological reasoning of the Muslim ulama (learned clergy) have historically generated not one but many different answers. We should at least acknowledge that there is no single Muslim opinion, and that not only are Muslim opinions on this and many similar issues complex, but there have also been many attempts by reform seminaries in post-independence India to think of Muslim contributions to the development of India. Even a cursory glance at the official website of the seminary Dar-ul-uloom in Deoband, India, which has been characterized by many as the seat of fundamentalist revival, shows that the mission statements on its history are in four languages—English, Hindi, Arabic and Urdu—each of which assumes a slightly different audience. The text in Hindi, for example, places emphasis on Islamic education in the context of Indian culture, while the text in Urdu discusses the efforts of the seminary to preserve Islam in the face of fears that it will decline in a non-Islamic state. Hence, even texts from the same seminary might emphasize different aspects of the imperatives of shaping Muslim identity in the contemporary world of nation-states.

Jihad has received much attention in the context of a supposedly global terrorism, while the other term with which conflict is associated—fitna—has been overlooked. Fitna refers to internal division among Muslims. One of its meanings recalls the first fight for succession, after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, which tore the Muslim community apart. During ethnographic fieldwork among urban Muslims in Delhi, I would often hear sorrow at the state of the Muslims, recalling the first fitna and the various ways in which Muslims were failing Islam. One often hears the secular media and the Hindu right bemoan the fact that Muslims do not protest the actions of the terrorists, yet not only have fatawas been issued declaring the actions of terrorists to be in violation of various Islamic moral injunctions to which the militant groups pay no heed, but also Muslims in both India and Pakistan are terrified of the escalating tensions. The outrage many Muslims feel as a result of the perpetrated violence can be gauged by the refusal of Jama Masjid Trust in Mumbai to allow the nine slain gunmen to be buried in a Muslim graveyard. Some will read only political gesturing in these actions, while others will accuse Indian Muslims of shaping their Islam to the demands of the Indian polity rather than to the principles of Islam. Such accusations ignore the strong imperative faced by many sections of Indian Muslims (and not only moderate or secular Muslims) to interpret Islam according to principles that contest the interpretation of certain passages in the Quran or the hadiths (sayings or actions) of the Prophet literally. Such conflicts of interpretation are of course not new, but participate in a long history of hermeneutic and legal contests.

It would not be wise, or correct, to say that there is no support from Indian Muslims for the violence perpetrated by groups who speak on behalf of Muslim suffering. Muslims in India have legitimate grievances about discrimination—communal riots such as those that occurred in Gujarat and the human rights violations in Kashmir are causes for great concern among Muslims and others. Neither do I wish to say that there are no legitimate Hindu grievances in the neighboring countries of Pakistan or Bangladesh. What I do want to say, however, is that it has becoming increasingly common for Indian Muslims to be in complete disagreement with certain actions being taken in their name. A political community in which individuals have not agreed to be represented is inconceivable; when an individual cannot agree with what is being done in his or her name, the question of action is as acute in politics as in religion. Thus, the responses of ordinary Muslims to militant actions can take various forms—ranging from feelings of helplessness to those of outrage, as expressed in the decision of the Jama Masjid Committee to refuse burial to the militants, even though many think this is in violation of the Muslim obligation to give burial to unclaimed Muslim bodies within three days of death.

The difficulty of reality

The question remains: how should we even begin to conceptualize such a configuration of forces? First, it is important to acknowledge that it is not easy to find the terms with which to characterize the kind of violence perpetrated in Mumbai. We have no way of knowing the extent of the involvement of the Pakistani army or spy agencies in training and financing such operations against India or against Muslim groups such as Shiis (Shia) or Ahmadis in Pakistan. However, the clearly high level of training these militants received makes it possible that these gunmen were in fact commandos, in the mold of those trained by modern armies to kill ruthlessly. So are these acts now a new form of warfare? If so, is this jihad or something different, that relies less on actual damage to life and property and more on the effects that it hopes to generate? These effects could have been communal riots, more suspicion between Muslims and Hindus, further weakening of the recently elected government in Pakistan, and, ultimately, a war between India and Pakistan. The success or failure of this violence should then be gauged in terms of its containment.

Finally, there is the uncertainty that marks any suppositions of who the perpetrators were, what they represented, and how such a spectacular operation was possible. If one reads the Pakistani press, the comments are skeptical of any claim of Pakistani involvement made by India. Some wonder if this is an Indian plot to defame Pakistan, while others try to read every little sign on the bodies of the perpetrators to say that they were not Muslim. It is easy to dismiss all of this commentary as denial, but it seems to me that it is indicative of the helplessness many feel when their actions cannot control those who have come to speak on their behalf. After all, in the most recent elections in 2008 Pakistanis decisively rejected the alliance of Islamic Parties (MMA), which could only win three seats in the National Assembly and even lost in its stronghold in the North West Frontier Area. Yet the civilian government that was elected is not strong enough to deal with the army or the spy agency (which is not surprising, given the long history of army coups). The Indian government has been shown to be unprepared as well, but its failure is not only the failure of the security mechanism. The fact is that the vast underground shadow economy, controlled by Mafia figures, has been allowed to grow in Mumbai and elsewhere to such an extent that the police force has become completely ineffectual because many of its members are part of that underworld economy. Any long-term solution would have to restore the integrity of this and other institutions so that they once again become responsible to the populace. This will need stronger action than even dealing with militants, because a very large number of poor people derive everyday sustenance from participation in the underground economy as well.

Civil action as response to violence

While there has rightly been a lot of concern about failed and weak states, there has to be some appreciation of how civil action succeeded in thwarting the effects that the brutal violence had surely hoped to provoke. People in Mumbai have responded to this set of issues with strong civic action. Similarly, during the movement to restore democracy in Pakistan, new groups of lawyers and students came out in the streets to demand free and fair elections. Over the past eight years I have seen and documented concerted efforts in Muslim neighborhoods in Delhi to engage in discussions about what it means to be Muslim in India. I think that there are shifts in subjectivities that happen over small, sometimes imperceptible, everyday events, which eventually inform political action. The most mature response from India would be to neutralize the terrorist threat by refusing to produce the effects it wishes. The public actions of Muslims in denouncing the violence in India are not simply reactive. Similarly, there are sensible calls to rule out the option of war by various groups in India and Pakistan. It must be understood that even when powerful state actors, such as the army, or global actors, such as the transnational underworld, are involved in sponsoring or producing acts of terrorism, they do not represent the larger polity. Ordinary people in both nations are trying every day to form their relation to political events through their actions in small local communities. Perhaps some of these actions will support the cause of violence, but many others will try to find different solutions.

Behind the division of nation-states in South Asia, there is the long history of empire in this region that connects networks that have moved from Sri Lanka to Afghanistan, and there are the many fluid boundaries that still mark memories of connections and disconnections. Placed in a longer history, the relationships between different social groups carry traces of earlier conflicts and solidarities. This is why a rush to turn Mumbai into India’s own 9/11 is too hasty. Impatience with the messiness of these categories might be much more disastrous than tolerance of uncertainties. A resolution to attend to the necessary everyday reforms, rather than waiting for “wake up” calls, faces enormous obstacles, but just as civil society asserted itself by refusing to respond to the violence in Mumbai with hate and panic, so too it might succeed in supporting the saner elements of Indian and Pakistani politics.

I studied with the Jesuits in St. Xavier’s School, in Dhobi Talao, no more than two kilometers from the Taj and the Oberoi Trident. We had the most recent reunion of the Class of 1965 at The Ritz Hotel in January 2008, only about five hundred meters from the Taj and the Oberoi. This reunion brought together a group of “old boys” near their sixtieth birthdays. They included Goan Catholics who are now engineers, hoteliers and priests; Marwari, Gujarati and Sindhi classmates who are now portly magnates or diabetic executives; Parsis and Iranis in various walks of business and commercial life; and Tamil-speakers who are about to retire from the software, medical and academic worlds. Some had come from California, some from the Persian Gulf, some from New York, many from other cities in India, a few from London. But the majority was still in Mumbai, though they now lived in places further away from South Mumbai than before. It was a riotous polyglot event, to which spouses were not invited for reasons of space and cost. A drunken set of singing, reminiscing “boys,” joking about their bald heads and big bellies, making plans to see each other again in Dubai, or Toronto, or San Francisco or perhaps Mumbai again, in another five years.

No one at the reunion talked about Hindutva, or Islamic terror, or Mumbai’s class cruelties or about the poorer members of our graduating class, who could not afford the $25 fee for the food and drinks, or were too ashamed that their lives and careers had gone nowhere. The night was a palace of memories, a requiem for our dreams of a Bombay of mixing and fixing.

In the mid 1960s, I attended a great colonial institution, Elphinstone College, the academic jewel of the University of Bombay. It is hardly a hundred meters from the Café Leopold, whose customers were butchered by the gunmen from the sea, a hundred and fifty meters from the Taj, and perhaps three hundred meters from Nariman House where Tel Aviv and Jerusalem were re-enacted in miniature. Those were magic years too, where seventeen and eighteen year old boys and girls from high schools across the city discovered Tennyson, Ionesco, calculus and joyous libidinal upticks. My college had magazines and “wallpapers” (early versions of blogs) in English, Marathi, Urdu and Gujarati, and our beloved “canteen,” a filthy little hangout, was the scene of political banter about Marx and Mao, chit-chat about the theatre of the absurd, loans of tattered copies of The Waste Land and the latest James Bond novel, as well as of feverish efforts to prepare for exams in logic, Indian history, development economics and much else. The high-end South Mumbai flaneurs among us fancied ourselves the envy of the “vernaculars” (who still were most comfortable in various Indian languages) but some of these boys and girls from humble and unglamorous backgrounds ranked first in the examinations and put the South Bombay slickers to shame. Elphinstone College was an aristocracy of the mind. We hardly knew anything about Delhi, and almost none of us had heard about St. Stephen’s College, which we only learned to envy when we met the Delhi Dons in Oxford, or Cambridge or Berkeley or New York, years later.

We lived blissfully in the cocoon of South Mumbai, roaming past the Taj, wandering through the cafes of Colaba Causeway, including Café Leopold, sneaking away from classes to the Regal cinema to watch re-runs of Rock Hudson and Doris Day, hoping for own nights of pillow talk. Our cosmopolitanism extended from Satyajit Ray to Ingmar Bergman, from Raj Kapoor to Charles Bronson, from Encounter to Photoplay, and from Bakri-Id to Diwali. I grew up thinking that Jews were a sect of Muslims and that the distance from Vohras to Bohras was no more than a typo.

Our parents also thrived in this golden period of friendships and business relationships which cut across differences of language and food, religion and neighborhood, though always restrained by the exclusions of caste and class, which we Anglophones were privileged to ignore. I left Bombay for the United States in 1967 and though I visited regularly thereafter, I soon knew that things had begun to change. The first big sign was the 1984 attack on the Golden Temple by the Indian Army, which led to a nationwide and shocking series of attacks on Sikhs, inspired in part by the regime of Indira Gandhi, who had been killed by some Sikhs among her bodyguards. This was the first major ethnic trauma of India’s still young secular democracy after Partition. Sikhs were painted as India’s enemies, in effect a fifth column of faux Hindus, Muslims in disguise. The rape, burning and brutalizing of poor Sikh populations, especially in Delhi, was the first sign that any Indian minority could henceforth be the “other” and that Hindu mobs were capable of organized bestiality on a grand scale.

The mid 1980s also saw the rise to respectability of the Bharatiya Janata Party and its sister organizations committed to Hindu nationalism, some of whom had already won their colors in the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in 1948. The BJP rose to national prominence at the very same time that Rajiv Gandhi (the son of Indira Gandhi) opened up India’s markets and laid the foundations for free market competition, state capitalism and cyber-technology, even before the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In India, 1989 marked the moment when the Hindu Right became politically legitimate and launched its major nation-wide campaign of mobilization, propaganda, revisionism and violence against Muslims, which culminated in the now notorious destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, which could have been prevented by the Government had they had the will and the courage. This led to a wave of Muslim mobilizations and reactions across the country and created a powerful link in the minds of young Muslims between the devastating nature of Indian state violence in Kashmir and the growing terror against Muslim religious institutions, identities and organizations across India from the Hindu right, both official and informal.

The late 1980s, widely seen as the period when Islamic fundamentalism went global, also witnessed the birth of an aggressive global Hinduism, sponsored by traveling Hindu ascetics, youth camps, newspapers, and fund-raising campaigns that connected overseas Hindus, especially in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom to their models and teachers in India. Their message was simple: India is Hindu; all non-Hindus in India are potentially treacherous minorities; Muslims are especially dangerous because they substantially support Pakistan; and Pakistan is armed, dangerous and belligerent, especially in Kashmir. Muslim militants in Kashmir, meanwhile, linked their struggles to Palestine, Chechnya, Kabul, as well as to London, Europe and elsewhere in Asia. Today, the global Hindu Right is forcefully represented in the United States by Indian lobbying groups, pseudo-academics, cultural cover organizations and bland philanthropic para-organizations, who work assiduously to peddle soft Hindutva even as they whitewash genocide and cultural terror in India. This twenty-five year process today threatens to sneak by even the sharp eyes of President-elect Obama’s transition team.

Through the 1980s and 1990s, Indian Hindus and Muslims became globalized together. Muslims were brought together by fundamentalist messages from the radical elements of the Sunni world, by funds from Saudi Arabia to build mosques and madrassas in India, by the opportunities for smalltime Arab men from the Persian Gulf to purchase poor Muslim brides from India, and above all, by the increasing brutality of India’s military forces in Kashmir. Pakistan, meanwhile, steeply morphed into South Asia’s most dangerous failed state, provoked Muslim anger against the West in India, Afghanistan and elsewhere, helped to breed the Taliban in its Northwest provinces, hosted Al Qaeda in the late 1990s and after, and has recently discovered that it is now a hostage to Islamic terror itself.

These parallel globalizations met fatefully in Mumbai on November 26 and that too in multiple ways. Global Islam seems the easier to describe. The suspects clearly had ground support in Pakistan, quasi-official elements in Pakistan must have known of the plan, Kashmir was invoked by the lone survivor among the gunmen, and other evidence exists not only of Pakistan-based support but also of India-based human infrastructure for the attack. All this is clear, and in coming weeks the forensic wheat will be separated from the chaff.

What of the Hindu side? On the face of it, Hindus (and Muslims, Jews and Christians) were apparently just victims. But global Hindutva was also implicated, at least in two ways. First, Mumbai is the major site where global finance intersects with the major Hindu fascist party of the last 40 years, the Shiva Sena. The Shiva Sena, which began as a bunch of lumpen Marathi-speaking thugs who took advantage of the linguistic chauvinism of Marathi-speakers has grown into a forceful, protean and sustainable source of vile anti-Muslim propaganda from the 1960s until today. Second, Narendra Modi, the Chief Minister of Gujarat, perhaps the most dangerous and persuasive BJP ideologue in India today, an aspirant for the Prime Ministership, and a remarkable blender of genocidal Hindu nationalism and soft development-speak in Gujarat, has been to Mumbai regularly in the last few years, including since the recent terrorist attack.

Not only is this a God-given opportunity for Narendra Modi, few analysts have observed that Modi’s recurrent appearances in Mumbai over the last decade and his highly publicized appearances with major Mumbai-based business leaders in Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Delhi and elsewhere remind us that Gujarat never forgave Marathi nationalists for successfully annexing Mumbai to their side after the linguistic riots of 1956. Gujarati-speakers still regard Mumbai as their city, usurped by the Maratha peasantry and the Marathi-speaking lumpenproletariat of the city. Among other things, the recent events in Mumbai are a struggle between the Indian Ocean (the Arabian Sea) and the Marathi and Gujarati hinterlands for control over Mumbai. Modi is the voice of the Gujarati jihad against the Islam of the Arabian Sea, just as Bal Thackeray is the voice of lumpen Maharashtra against its land-based enemies from Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, U.P, Bihar, etc., all now telescoped into the battle against land-based Islam in India.

Atop this deep struggle, which could arguably be read back into the geo-politics of the Indian Ocean for at least the last five centuries, lie the interests of New Delhi, which sees Mumbai as a homegrown Shanghai in its aspirations for global economic stardom. In addition, Mumbai is the home of the Western Command of the Indian Navy, by far the most powerful base for Indian ships, sailors and naval strategists, all of whom have a massive presence within a few hundred meters of where the terrorist visitors landed on the night of November 26, 2009. Mumbai is also the home of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (in Chembur) perhaps 30 kilometers from the major attacks, and a key part of India’s nuclear apparatus. A vast proportion of Mumbai’s real estate is directly or indirectly controlled by the Indian Navy, the Indian Army, the Mumbai police and various other military or security agencies. Mumbai is armed to the teeth, though it is primarily seen as India’s commercial hub. This makes the terrorist attacks an amazing kick in India’s military teeth.

Last, but hardly least, Mumbai has been the cosmopolis of criminal interests in gold smuggling, arms smuggling and other forms of oceanic crime linking the Persian Gulf, Pakistan and the states of Gujarat and Maharashtra for at least a few centuries.  Inland from the West Coast of India, and on the Eastern side of the hills known as the Western Ghats, Maharashtra and Gujarat have massive differences, a history of ethnolinguistic conflict and a classic struggle between elites based in commerce (Gujarat) and elites based in warfare and agrarian control (Maharashtra). But on the West Coast of India, looking out to the Persian Gulf, it’s a different story, in which smugglers, pirates, fishermen and politicians, as well as ship-owners, dhow captains, commercial brokers and policemen have seamlessly crossed the lines between coastal languages, castes, classes and ethnicities.

Mumbai is where this coastal world meets the Mumbai underworld and it has long been a meeting place between communities of Hindus and Muslims from as far afield as Tamil Nadu, Afghanistan, Goa, Konkan, Kerala, and the island world surrounding Mumbai. True, the major criminal figures who have long been involved in linking smuggling, gold, cinema and real estate in Mumbai, famously Dawood Ibrahim, have been Muslims. But beneath this religious identity lies a complex patchwork of identities and biographies that range across much of the West Coast and peninsular India. In short, the links between Mumbai, Pakistan and the Gulf are now profoundly multi-lingual and do not easily match the tensions between speakers of Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil and Hindi that constitute the land-based politics of the Shiva Sena. Thus it is not a minor matter that Dawood Ibrahim is a Muslim from the Konkan region, between Goa and Kerala on the West Coast of India.

In other words, as we learn more about the deep geo-politics behind the terrifying attacks on Mumbai earlier this month, we need to recognize that there is a tectonic struggle going on in and near Mumbai on at least three axes: the deepest axis (from a historical point of view) is the struggle between the Indian Ocean commercial/criminal nexus and the land-based nexus that stretches from Mumbai to Delhi to Kashmir. The second, more recent struggle is the struggle between political and commercial interests now located in Maharashtra and Gujarat for control over Mumbai, a struggle that was superficially resolved in 1956, when Bombay was declared the capital of the new state of Maharashtra. The third, most subtle, is between a land-based, plebeian form of Hindu nationalism, best represented by the auto-rickshaw drivers and small street vendors of North Mumbai and Greater Mumbai, who would be happy to see South Mumbai destroyed; and the more slick, market-oriented face of the Bharatiya Janata Party, whose elite supporters know that South Mumbai is crucial to the mediation of global capital to India, and where business tycoons like Mukesh Ambani are building homes larger than many global hotels.

The gunmen who struck Mumbai are probably unaware of these tectonic struggles. Those who answer the call to self-immolation in the cause of war rarely are. But the way they arrived on Mumbai’s shores, the sites of their targeted violence, the fact that they could blend into the local population a few hundred meters from the might of the Indian Navy, and the fact that they struck sites where both upper and lower class Mumbaikars rub shoulders with each others most, should give us two kinds of pause. The first is to be sure to place the politics of the world after 9/11 in various longer histories of Mumbai and its terrestrial and oceanic hinterland. The second brings me back to my fears as a child of Mumbai in its magic years.

Many well-meaning observers have stressed the “resilience”, the mutual generosity, the quotidian heroism and the remarkable resistance of Mumbaikars to jump to quick conclusions or hasty reprisals. I too congratulate and celebrate these facts. But I fear that all resilience is historically produced. And what history gives, history can take away. Yes, we are all Mumbaikars now. But in a world that links Mumbai, Kashmir, Karachi, Madrid, Peshawar, London, Wall Street, Washington and Faridkot, that is not necessarily a source of comfort. Resilience is a public resource. But, unlike terror, it is not indefinitely renewable.

“A major world power is being threatened by these civilizational tensions.”

Robert Kaplan, Center for a New American Security

The leitmotif of old Bombay is its diversity. Populations with varied beliefs and languages were agglomerated by the British into an ever growing city, first as a trading post which then slowly transformed into an industrial and financial powerhouse. As the city grew, it spread, reclaiming land and absorbing islands, pushing outward into the hinterland that was linked by the railways. All along the rail lines and across the bay grew beautiful mansions and congested slums. Beside them rose skyscrapers and hotels, Irani restaurants and street food stalls. The films came in time, building on Bombay’s polycultural theatre scene. Mumbai accounts for a quarter of India’s gross domestic product. Some of it comes from the gangsters of the streets; most of it comes from the brokers at Dalal Street. This is a city alive and swelling, which is why journalist Suketu Mehta’s opus called it maximum city.

Credit for the city’s cosmopolitanism goes to the mill workers. It is they, writes the late historian Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, who gave the city its “diversity and hybridity, not wholly surprising in a city of migrants. Its public life was marked by its secularism, its equidistance from the particularisms of caste and religious community and often its transcendence of their differences.” When globalization’s authors padlocked the textile mills, the workers’ culture took a turn from popular secularism to virulent communalism. Without an agenda for the betterment of the lives of the workers, the Congress Party tried to gain legitimacy by making connections based on religion. The Congress was outflanked from the right by the Shiv Sena, whose ascent in the 1970s presaged that of the Bharatiya Janata Party in north India ten years later. Slowly, surely, the politics of the Shiv Sena and the BJP, as well as their allied organizations, wore down the forms of secular culture that had been in formation for a century. Pressure on those who were not Hindu Marathis came from these parties and their various cultural fronts.

After the destruction of a sixteenth century mosque in Ayodhya in 1992, riots broke out across northern India. In Bombay, the forces of the Hindu Right led the riots; its armies killed a thousand Muslims. Two hundred thousand other Muslims fled the city. This was a form of ethnic cleansing that had a profound psychological impact on the city’s residents. A retaliatory attack led by a former Bombay gangster killed 257 people. Since then, attacks have come with remarkable frequency, almost one a year. Blame for these attacks often rests at the gates of either ex-Afghan Jihad veterans whose organizations are banned in Pakistan (such as the Lashkar-e-Toiba) or the foot-soldiers of the family of organizations that gather around the BJP. Violence is their tactic and their strategy; they have little else.

Mirror images of each other, the Hindu Right and the Islamic Right offer nothing for the future, but boil the resentments of selected parts of the population, to artificially hasten their hope for change with promises of martyrdom and paradise. These are the alchemists of resentment, who use bombs and swords, guns and axes to do their magic for them. There is no development of the protracted struggle to change the conditions of the present, only the irrational commitment to fleeting acts of terrible violence. Terror in saffron robes or draped in green flags has absolute contempt for the desperate needs of people who are increasingly abandoned by the policies that bring homelessness and hunger to hundreds of millions.

**

Robert Kaplan appears to know none of this: neither the long history of Bombay’s settlement and secularism, nor of the destruction of that tradition in a flash, a fatality of the social process of globalization that has put on the soiled garments of tradition. Like much neo-conservative commentary on the entire social crisis of the present (what neo-conservatives call the War on Terror), Kaplan resorts to a story without history and without geography. The adversaries are plucked from a late medieval fairy tale: civilizations arrayed against each other in an endless, final battle.

Islam, within South Asia, is not a “civilization.” That is preposterous. If the present dynamic continues, Indian Muslims might gather in hidebound organizations and revive older ideas of forgotten greatness—notions now the preserve only of the most reactionary and marginal groups who are able to inflate their power by the bomb. Since the 1980s, North Indian upper-caste Hindus have certainly come to link their new-found economic “opportunities” with their own religio-cultural identity. This has been a consequence of the work done by the Hindu Right. It is not a natural state of things, and it is not an irreversible condition. If one takes the “civilizational tensions” view seriously, one would have to disavow the long history of conviviality and its potential, and exchange it for a state of permanent and painful war.

Mumbai is certainly not what it was in the 1950s and 1960s. The mills, for instance, remain shuttered, and their worth is now reduced to real estate. FIRE is the order of the day: Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate. The film industry, which once celebrated plebeian culture, now revels in upward mobility and gangsterism. It accurately reflects the shift in aspirations and commitments. These movies push what the critic Sudhanva Deshpande calls “a fantasy of endless consumption.” The dynamic of social development is sidelined. Alongside a ferocious revival of the traditions of conviviality, this dynamic is an essential tonic against the current conditions. Mumbai, and India, are not in the midst of civilizational tension; there are social problems that require sober and honest solutions. One can’t allow seven million people (sixty percent of the city’s population) to live in slums and believe that history has ended. The question isn’t this, but rather: what kind of history we will make, and who will be allowed to be History’s subject?

Foremost on the minds of many is what brought on this terrifying attack? To this there are no obvious and firm answers.  Nevertheless it is possible to hazard a few plausible explanations even in the absence of incontrovertible evidence. At the outset, it is possible to dismiss the claim of responsibility of the “Deccan Mujahideen.” Indian intelligence and police sources have made clear that they have no evidence of the existence of any such entity. More to the point, the cell phone transcripts reveal that the callers did not even have a clue about their demands. At best, this call was a deliberate distraction and at worst, a prank. The inability to articulate a set of explicit demands suggests that it was the latter.

Did the attack emanate from within or without India? Again, while the evidence is murky, based upon the available circumstantial evidence there is undoubtedly a Pakistani connection. One of the captured terrorists is of Pakistani origin, he and his fellow marauders came ashore on rubber rafts from the Arabian Sea and the Indian Navy has apprehended a trawler that had sailed from the Pakistani port of Karachi.  Does this corpus of evidence implicate the Pakistani state in this dastardly act of terror?  Perhaps. However, there are levels of culpability and presently it is impossible, with any degree of certainty, to assign a precise degree of involvement or responsibility.

That said it is equally impossible at this stage to easily exculpate Pakistan of any possible responsibility in these attacks. From the 1980s to the present day, various Pakistani regimes have either encouraged or allowed its Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate  (ISI-D) to exploit a range of India’s home grown political difficulties. To that end, it is well known that Pakistan trained, supported and provided sanctuaries to Khalistani separatists in the Punjab and continues to do the same for separatists in the Indian-controlled portion of the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir. Indeed in Kashmir, thanks to the ISI-D’s role and involvement, a mostly spontaneous, local uprising against Indian rule has been transformed into a vicious, religiously motivated extortion racket. Despite Indian diplomatic entreaties and military pressures, the Pakistani state has steadfastly refused to eschew its support to the jihadis.  Indeed, Hafiz Mohammed Sayeed, the leader of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, an organization implicated in multiple attacks on India including the most recent, remains comfortably ensconced in the city of Lahore.

Yet the complexity and organization of the attack suggests that it could not have been carried out without domestic support.  If the attackers were indeed Pakistanis, without a doubt, they had the assistance of disaffected Indian Muslims.  No operation of this complexity could have been orchestrated solely from abroad. Why would any members of the Indian Muslim community be a party to this carnage? In recent years, a small but significant minority of Indian Muslims has responded to the siren call of radical Islam. The reasons for their turn to Islamist extremism are complex.  At the time of the partition of India, a significant segment of the Muslim elite departed for Pakistan.  Elements of that elite remained and thrived in post-independence India.  Others who managed to avail themselves of educational opportunities prospered and blended into India’s vast, plural society. On a day-to-day basis, they face little or any discrimination because of their religious identification.

Other less affluent parts of that community, however, are hardly so fortunate. They have long endured routine discrimination in everyday life, in employment and in housing opportunities.  Past generations passively acquiesced in these daily humiliations.  Ironically, because of the relative openness of Indian society, lower middle class Muslims are now much more politically conscious and mobilized and less prone to accept their consigned lot.

Against this social backdrop, two salient incidents can be deemed as the catalysts for their political radicalization. The first was the spate of anti-Muslim riots that swept across much of northern and western India in the wake of the destruction of the Babri Mosque by Hindu zealots in the state of Uttar Pradesh in 1992.  Hundreds of Muslims lost their lives as Hindu mobs went on a rampage, especially in Bombay, with the police acting as passive bystanders. The second episode was the pogrom that occurred in the western state of Gujarat in 2002 in the immediate aftermath of a fire on a train with Hindu pilgrims which, some claim, was set alight by Muslim miscreants.  Sadly, few, if any, individuals who were involved in the Bombay riots or the Gujarat pogrom have been prosecuted. Not surprisingly, following these two episodes, Muslim radicalism has emerged and flourished.

Despite this growing menace of domestic Muslim extremism, the Congress Party, the principal component of the ruling coalition, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), has been in willful denial about it. Its reasons are straightforward. Muslim constituencies in various parts of the country constitute important swing voters and can thereby determine the outcome of a number of electoral contests. Fearful of alienating these critical voting blocs, Congress has preferred to turn a Nelson’s eye to the problem.

The failure of the national government to forge a set of policies designed to address the social roots of Islamist zealotry are apparent. To worsen matters, many of India’s state-level police forces, when confronted with the challenge of violent Islamist radicalism, have failed to muster the requisite intelligence, forensic and prosecutorial tools necessary to suppress it. Instead they have resorted to the random arrests of young Muslims, have tainted evidence and have abused draconian anti-terrorist laws. In turn, far from curbing the rise of Islamist violence, their actions have actually provided a boost.

Despite this lugubrious analysis there is no imminent danger of India falling apart along the civilizational fault lines that Robert Kaplan has sketched out.  Even after the spate of bombings that a domestic Islamist terrorist organization, the “Indian Mujahideen,” have carried out this past year, including in the capital city of New Delhi, they have abjectly failed in promoting Hindu-Muslim discord and violence.  Even the crassest of India’s politicians have not tailored their electoral rhetoric along religious lines to exploit the attacks of the “Indian Mujahideen.”  Instead, they have concentrated their fire solely on the Congress-led coalition’s apparent ineptitude to contain the growing scourge of domestic terror.

Also, India’s feisty press has been at pains to underscore that Muslims have frequently been the victims of a number of terror attacks.  Earlier significant segments of the press had also done yeoman reporting on the complicity of the state government of Gujarat in the pogrom that took place in 2002.  These bold attempts of the press to highlight the callousness of the Islamist extremists as well as the culpability of a state government in promoting ethnic strife and violence, in turn, has prompted India’s quasi-official National Human Rights Commission to investigate and report on the malfeasances of various state governments. Such public shaming though hardly a substitute for judicial probes and public prosecutions, nevertheless can act as an important restraint on the fecklessness of politicians keen on exploiting ethnic tensions for electoral gains.

These constraints notwithstanding, there is no gainsaying the tragic fact that India faces terrorist threats from within and without. Nevertheless, the imminent fracturing of India’s state and society are, like Mark Twain’s death, greatly exaggerated. The country has been witness to worse times in its 60 odd year independent history. On each occasion it managed to defy the doomsayers. Its societal and institutional resilience, though frayed, is not beyond repair. Tragically, the Bombay attacks may provide the impetus for such an effort.

To say this is not to deny the many long-term problems that can cause partisan ire in the subcontinent. To be sure, Kashmir is a problem that bears on Hindu-Muslim tension in the region and urgently needs to be addressed, but this will not happen overnight. True, India needs to work with people and officials in Pakistan who are also against terror, for it is important to foil any attempts to cause friction between India and Pakistan. But much depends on Pakistan being able to mobilize a political will to engage merchants of death such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba (one does not know of similar groups in India bent on producing destruction and mayhem in the neighboring country). It is also true that the politics of hatred and division promoted by the BJP or Shiv Sena weaken the Indian nation by alienating minorities. But this again is a long-term problem: so long as there are effective votes in these divisive sentiments, political parties are not going to abstain from using them.

The most recent Mumbai tragedy points to a general way in which some of the negative effects of globalization are changing the nature of democracies in the twentieth century. Given the diverse global tensions in the world—terrorism, economic-environmental crises, and civil wars that dislocate populations—democratic states will increasingly tend to develop a strong security aspect in the coming decades. The violence in Mumbai was perceptibly different from the terrorist violence that India has seen before. This time the terrorists themselves wanted to create a “global” event. Their targets included many “ordinary” Indians, but also the international elite that patronizes the most well-known hotels of Mumbai, itself the most global city in India. Their technology and targets were global—witness their use of a Voice over Internet Protocol system to keep in touch with their masters in Pakistan, and their deliberate targeting of a small Jewish community from overseas. Thanks to this orgy of violence, Indian democracy has now, sadly, been ushered into a major debate of the twenty-first century: should democratic states become security-states as well? Security measures are, of course, no substitute for the political processes needed to heal rifts between countries and communities. But they cannot be ignored either. The terrorists have already threatened to repeat in Delhi what they did in Bombay. How could India ignore questions of security in the lackadaisical way it has so far?

This immediately raises two challenges. One is related to questions of democracy in general. The prospect of a security state understandably and rightly concerns rights-activists. Yet it is clear that, given the globalization of all major problems of the world, one of the great debates of this century will be about liberty of individuals versus security of populations. In the developed countries today, it is hard to distinguish measures adopted to fend off terrorist attacks from the politics of refugees and “illegal” immigration. Realistically, I cannot see how liberal-democratic nations can now avoid demands about their citizens’ right to security, and balance this against other rights. Of course, the balance cannot be decided in any a priori fashion, which is why it always should be open to debate with reference to specific contexts. There is, besides, the very important question of ensuring that the pursuit of security does not become a tool for oppression of and discrimination against minorities or immigrants. But the globalization of this debate is what marks our times. One now expects this debate to gain further momentum in India.

The second challenge, in this context, arises from deep within the history of Indian politics and is peculiar to India to some extent.  To have an effective cordon sanitaire against terror would require India to inject a degree of efficiency, alertness, and performance into an administrative apparatus that simply has not delivered on these scores for decades. For many interesting historical reasons (that need not detain us here), government and public institutions in India gradually ceased to be effective deliverers of goods and services, beginning in the 1970′s. There is much that democracy in India has achieved, including the famous overturning of the autocratic Emergency Rule that Mrs. Gandhi once imposed and the sense of participation many low-caste communities have in the country’s governmental institutions. But democracy in India has also become predominantly a means of electoral empowerment of different groups—low-castes, dalits, minorities, or even majoritarian Hindus who claim to have been “weakened” by the “privileges” accorded to minorities.

The growth of this politics of identity has made elections into the mainstay of Indian democracy. It has distanced politics from issues of governance, and has gone hand in hand with a deepening degree of corruption, financial and otherwise, on the part of politicians and officials. A large number of the elected members of parliament have criminal cases pending against them, and media reports suggest an elephantine, unaccountable, inefficient bureaucracy mired in the self-indulgent use of resources (corruption and inefficiency often going together). There was, as last week’s events made clear, no effective coast guard force on the Indian seas, in spite of the government having been warned of possible terror attacks on Mumbai from the sea. When the Taj Hotel caught fire, it took the first lot of firefighters three hours to respond. The commando force had to be dispatched from Delhi and it took about nine hours to mobilize them, as they are usually kept busy providing “security” to politicians, many of whom see such security as a matter of status and prestige. It also turns out that the majority a very large grant recently given to the Bombay police for its modernization was spent on buying luxury cars and other expensive items for the use of senior officers and their ministers! Creating a security system that will effectively protect the population from terrorist attacks will not be easy. Corruption follows public money in India, as it does, unfortunately, in many countries, and undermines performance. Additionally, the effective functioning of any institution in India in a non-partisan manner would require that institution to be insulated from political interference. The second condition is not easily met in India. The required reforms thus call for a certain kind of political will that the political class in India has not quite shown in recent times.

Yet India cannot avoid debates over security and other rights any longer. The government has already announced certain measures that will make anti-terror laws more stringent than before. Other reforms will certainly follow on paper, and perhaps in action as well. Many members of the Indian educated middle class are currently angry at the inability of their government to protect them. We do not know how effective that anger will be in bringing about change. If the nature of the political class remains the same, Indians will probably have to get used to living with a degree of terror the exact quantum of which is difficult to predict at this stage. My most optimistic scenario is this: that Indians will address both the long-term and short-term problems together so that, important as security considerations are, this tragedy will initiate not just a rethinking but also a revitalization of democratic institutions in India as they cope with the challenges of this global century.