NEW DELHI - As the death toll continues to mount
in Mumbai’s ghastly serial bomb attacks of
Tuesday, it is becoming clear that India is
witnessing a human tragedy of the same dimensions
as the Madrid train bombings of March 2004, in
which 192 people lost their lives. The bombings
were Europe’s worst-ever case of sub-state
terrorism.
Spain responded to that humanitarian disaster by
replacing conservative prime minister Jose Maria
Aznar with Social Democrat Jose Luis Rodriguez
Zapatero and withdrawing Spanish troops from
Iraq, sent as part of the United States-led war
coalition.
India does not seem about to execute such a big
political change, but the Mumbai bombings, that
targeted commuters returning home and which have claimed about 200 lives, have
raised a number of questions in the minds of
observers and analysts of the country’s society
and politics.
Some of these are: do such professionally
coordinated, well-articulated bombings really
pose a serious, systemic threat to the fabric of
India’s society and its democracy? Who carried
these out and from what motivation? How should
India respond to such violence without losing its
democratic and constitutional obligation to
defend human rights while bringing the culprits
to book?
And not least, what will be the likely impact of
the attacks on the India-Pakistan dialogue
process? In the past, Indian leaders typically
blamed Pakistani secret agencies or
Islamabad-supported militants for terrorist
attacks against Indian civilians.
The last question may be easier to answer than
the first three. A senior Pakistan high
commission official in New Delhi told Inter Press
Service, "We do not see any hitch in the coming
round of bilateral talks. Pakistan was among the
first countries to condemn the Mumbai bomb
attacks. No fingers have been pointed at us by
Indian officials. And we believe that both states
are serious about their two-year-old
understanding that no incident of violence would
be allowed to wreck the all-important dialogue
process."
The process was not interrupted by recent
terrorist violence, including in the disputed
Kashmir Valley last week. Pakistani officials
expect their foreign secretary’s visit to India,
likely next week, to be “a smooth affair” with
positive engagement between the two sides.
Although Indian intelligence agencies do not rule
out the involvement of “rogue” elements within
Pakistani secret services in anti-India
terrorism, they note that President General
Pervez Musharraf has pitted himself against
Islamist extremists in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
As the Indian public experiences the full impact
of the blasts, with their sickening violence
against ordinary civilians, it is increasingly
apparent that it cannot duck these questions.
Yet, there are no consensual answers to some of
them. But, despite a lot of confusion over the
past couple of days, the Indian public refuses to
be shaken off its feet by the blasts’ trauma and
to lose its robust democratic bearings.
In sheer numbers, the serial bombings of Mumbai
represent one of worst episodes of terrorism in
India, only slightly smaller in scale than
Mumbai’s March 12, 1993 bombings, which claimed
257 lives.
The 1993 blasts were widely seen as “retribution”
for the demolition of a 16th century mosque and
systematic demonization of Muslims. The present
blasts are random: you are targeted not because
you belong to a particular category, but because
you happen to be one of the 4 million-plus
commuters who use the city’s suburban rail system.
"This randomness makes the violence especially
frightening," says Achin Vanaik, a political
scientist with Delhi University. "It is meant to
intimidate you and make you feel extremely
vulnerable. But beyond that, it poses no real
challenge to the political system or to Indian
democracy," Vanaik adds.
In the past, terrorism has typically failed to
create a sense of grave systemic crisis or
near-collapse of governance in India; to
encourage social schisms and alienation; or to
lead to Hindu-Muslim violence. The Indian public
simply refused to be provoked.
This is a tribute to the ordinary citizen’s
maturity and affirmation of social assimilation
and pluralism in India, rather than the state’s
handling of terrorist violence. "This handling is
marked by lack of intelligence, sloppy
investigation and collation of evidence, absence
of thorough interrogation of witnesses, loose
framing of charges, and poor conduct of
prosecution," says Nitya Ramakrishnan, a civil
liberties lawyer based in Delhi.
Adds Ramakrishnan, "The state fails to gather the
information necessary for successful prosecution
of culprits in case after case, or to create a
data-base on different groups and their links.
There are hardly any cases where an alleged
terrorist is prosecuted on adequate evidence.“The police often stage fake”encounters" and
claim that the terrorists opened fire on them
when surrounded; they killed in “self-defense”.
India’s criminal justice system, creaking under
antiquated procedures and delays, rarely succeeds
in bringing criminals to book. Most of India’s
major cases of hate-crime, religious violence or
state repression go unpunished. Some 80,000
people have perished in state killings and
sub-state violence in Kashmir and the northeast.
But only a minuscule number of officials have
been punished.
This has created a culture of impunity, a
phenomenon observed after the butchery of
2,000-plus Muslims in western Gujarat state in
2002.
Lack of hard evidence of the involvement of
specific groups in violent incidents means that
everyone engages in speculation. In the present
case, officials and the media have hinted at the
involvement of Islamist-extremist groups like
Lashkar-e-Toiba based in Pakistan, and the
Students Islamic Movement of India. But no hard
evidence has emerged.
The political left and the right in India have
reacted differently to the blasts. The left,
which supports the government from the outside on
an agenda of maintaining the country’s secular
character, has counseled restraint and appealed
to citizens not to overreact.
The right, especially the Hindu-chauvinist
Bharatiya Janata Party that leads the national
opposition, has accused the government of
“ignoring” national security. It demands the
return of draconian anti-terrorism laws, in
particular, the notorious Prevention of Terrorism
Act, which was repealed after numerous instances
of its abuse came to light.
"Draconian laws can only abridge the citizen’s
fundamental rights and devalue democracy," says
Vanaik. "That would be tragic, not least because
stiff restrictions on basic freedoms will only
brutalize ordinary people and encourage official
irresponsibility, dereliction of duty and abuse
of power. Such measures divert attention from the
far graver damage that state excesses, including
war and terrorism, can inflict upon the public."
More answers are expected to emerge as India
comes to terms with the grave tragedy still
unfolding in Mumbai.