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Editorial: Car bombs in Mumbai
Sixty-four innocent people have been killed and 150 wounded in India’s megalopolis Mumbai Monday. The world, already in the grip of terror at the hands of Al Qaeda and its regional allies, has reacted with shock and anger. The blasts came in the shape of two taxis stuffed with high explosives (presumably RDX or Semtex) at the Gateway of India and near the temple of a goddess that gave her name to the city, Mumbai Devi. The countries that expressed outrage at the blast included Pakistan whose spokesman in Islamabad ‘condemned’ the blasts and ‘sympathised’ with the victims’ families. One hopes that our prime minister and president too will send messages to their counterparts in India, this time ‘sympathising’ with the New Delhi government too. For, whatever these messages are worth in the prevailing environment of distrust, they must be exchanged because the two countries are faced with the same threat, regardless of what has been happening in the past.
Deputy prime minister Lal Krishna Advani has opined that the blasts could have been organised by Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) and Lashkar-e-Tayba. SIMI has been banned after 9/11 and is India’s homegrown fundamentalist Muslim group with jihadi contacts and possibly big Arab money. Mr Advani has lumped it together with Lashkar-e-Tayba because most SIMI activists are Ahle Hadith. SIMI came into being in the 1970s, not as a terrorist organisation but as an agitation protesting discrimination against the Muslims in India. After the Arabs began dominating the Afghan jihad, SIMI too became open to their financial support. It was accused of bring complicit in the Lashkar-e-Tayba attack on the Indian parliament in December 2001 which led to nearly a year-long standoff between India and Pakistan. It is possible that before long New Delhi will start accusing Pakistan of being involved in the latest act of terrorism. So far, it has reacted positively to Pakistan’s statement of sympathy.
It is often not in good taste to criticise a secular India over the plight of the Muslims, but after the rise there of communalist leaders under the umbrella of the grand Hindutva alliance, and the power of Shiv Sena and its fascist leader Bal Thakeray in Bombay, some facts will bear some airing. In rural India, 29 percent of Muslims earn less than $6 a month, compared to 26 percent of Hindus; in the cities (where a third of all Muslims live) the gap rises to 40 percent as against 22 percent. Almost 13 percent of India’s population is Muslim, yet Muslims account for just 3 percent of the government employees. Private Hindu businesses stay clear of them too. Almost 30 percent of the Muslims in the cities remain illiterate as against 19 percent of Hindus. India has never been free of communal riots in which 75 percent of those killed comprised Muslims. After Gujarat’s 2,000 dead earlier this year the figure has gone up.
Mumbai was subjected to a big blast in 1993 in the aftermath of the destruction of the Babri mosque at the hands of Hindu extremists that included the current deputy prime minister himself. The underworld of Mumbai was blamed and its kingpin Daud Ibrahim was fingered for having organised the blast. What followed was a messy affair. Pakistan swore it was not involved but could not keep Daud Ibrahim from going underground in Karachi. Hence, when the Indians put before Pakistan a list of terrorists it wanted handed over it included the name of Daud Ibrahim. But after the 1993 blast, the Mumbai police went after the Muslims and killed thousands of them. If that blast was organised by Muslims it ended up killing more Muslims and made their lives more difficult in India after facilitating the rise of the BJP and its umbrella Hindu organisations. The latest two car bombs have come in the wake of an archaeologists’ ‘finding’ that there were remains of a Hindu temple underneath the site of the Babri mosque.
Our ‘analyses’ of what has happened in Mumbai will unfortunately end up blaming Indian policies, which would be the wrong line to take. There is no doubt that the current wave of terror is owed, among other factors, to the rise of Hindu fundamentalism. We can hardly be credible moaning about Hindu fundamentalism sitting in the midst of a virulent brand of Islamic fundamentalism threatening to rise politically just like the BJP in India. While there is no one fighting against fundamentalism in Pakistan, in India there are strong social and political forces fighting Hindutva. When we condemn India across the board and dismiss the participation in the Indian incidents by foreign-based Muslim terrorists, and deny possible complicity by Pakistani organisations that we have banned here for terrorism, we simply force these secular forces to close ranks behind the BJP.
Let not the pot start calling the kettle black. Both India and Pakistan are threatened by the same internal forces of disorder. And in both cases religion is involved, with links established with the underworld of international terrorism. We blamed India for the Quetta killings. Will India now blame Pakistan for the Mumbai killings? If that happens, it will spring from a conditioned reflex of the past. We have seen much jerking of the knee on both sides. If it happens again, it will be tragic. |
