Gateway to Genocide

By Partha Banerjee



ONE


In the wake of Thanksgiving week’s horrific terrorism in Mumbai and death of many innocent people – both Indians and Westerners – barrage of anti-government protests, name-calling and finger pointing have begun. Many fear that the genocide at the Gateway of India is going to unfold a new stained chapter in the violent, bloody history of the British-partitioned subcontinent.

Intellectuals and liberal oped writers have flooded the print, TV and cyber media with their instant thoughts and esteemed analyses. I’ve collected a few articles for my files. I share with you some excerpts and my personal thoughts.

It’s not easy to filter through the three days of horror, chaos and mass confusion exacerbated by the Indian and U.S. media and people in power. Also, I’m not from Bombay and don’t particularly know the city so well. But I know India like the back of my palm, and I know its political landscape. I’ll therefore use some of those notable overviews, and offer my two cents.

Suketu Mehta, author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found and journalism professor at New York University, wrote in the New York Times: What They Hate About Mumbai http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/29/opinion/29mehta.html

"Mumbai is a “soft target,” the terrorism analysts say. Anybody can walk into the hotels, the hospitals, the train stations, and start spraying with a machine gun. Where are the metal detectors, the random bag checks?"

[Mehta also writes: "In Mumbai, it’s impossible to control the crowd. In other cities, if there’s an explosion, people run away from it. In Mumbai, people run toward it — to help." To me, that’s too condescending: people in other parts of India would not appreciate that comment. Ask anyone from Kolkata.]

The security collapse theme is now central in anti-government allegations in India, and they are quite justified. Just like the Bush administration had completely failed to protect the lives of three thousand civilians on September 11, the U.S.-blessed Indian government led by Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi have shown their laughable inefficiency to save the industrial metropolis. The only difference in the immediate aftermath is that the powerful Indian home minister Shivraj Patil, the man in charge of the nation’s domestic security, has now resigned yielding to public criticism, in stark contrast to the post-9/11 mayhem when John Ashcroft and other U.S. strongmen never took any responsibility, and assumed unprecedented power; the corporate media and two-party oligarchy never put any serious pressure on them for their grotesque failures. Consequently, we saw the immediate passing of the PATRIOT Act, mass round-up of countless “perceived terrorists,” and other rampant breach of civil rights and liberties. The Afghanistan and Iraq genocides began soon thereafter.

India is getting ready to hold its five-year ritual of elections in a few months, and these horrific incidents bring the possibility of the ultra-right wing to come back to national power. Particularly in the city of Mumbai and its parental state Maharashtra and adjacent state Gujarat, the two most affluent provinces, Hindu chauvinism and fanaticism have garnered maximum strength: in both places, extremists have caused anti-minority barbarism in recent years. Contrary to Mehta’s assertions, in the possible scenario of a future anti-minority hate resurgence, very few including the local governments would show up to the rescue of the poor and the vulnerable.

(Of course, as Mehta pointed out, Amitabh Bacchan would sleep tight with his gun tucked under his pillow.)

And Mehta knows very well that the Indian police forces are notoriously inefficient and corrupt: everyone who knows the country knows that practically the only two-fold role the police play there is brutalize the powerless and extort bribes. They also have active and direct collusion with the underworld smugglers and political mafia – powers that rule especially the city of Mumbai and its precious Bollywood.

Recent Indian governments, especially in the last two decades, have followed the footsteps of its police malfunction and resorted to extreme corruption, muscle power and underworld money laundering to remain in power. Basic administrative services changed hands from once-reputed state machineries to arrogant and violent political goons sponsored by New Delhi bosses. The very visible consequence: countrywide terrorist activities on one hand and massive, escalating rich-poor disparity and civil service failure on the other.

The fact is that the Mumbai carnage is not the first of its kind; just in the past few months, a number of gruesome, parallel violent incidents have occurred in various parts of India, resulting massive bloodshed. Shashi Tharoor, author and former senior UN official, mentioned it in TheDailyBeast.com: City Under Siege http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2008-11-26/terror-in-mumbai/

"This year alone, terrorist bombs have taken lives in Jaipur, in Ahmedabad, in Delhi and […] several different places on one searing day in the state of Assam. Jaipur is the lodestar of Indian tourism to Rajasthan; Ahmedabad is the primary city of Gujarat, […]; Delhi is the nation’s political capital and India’s window to the world; Assam was logistically convenient for terrorists from across a porous border. Mumbai combined all four elements of its precursors: by attacking it, the terrorists hit India’s economy, its tourism, and its internationalism, and they took advantage of the city’s openness to the world. A grand slam."

And then, we have the usual “strength and resilience” platitude often exercised by the liberal elite: ones we’ve seen in the post-9/11 "soul-searching." Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek gave an interview to the magazine’s online edition: The Mayhem in Mumbai http://www.newsweek.com/id/17100

"I think India is showing remarkable resilience. They're trying to get back to business as usual. They were planning to open the stock market, which is not far from the Taj; they ultimately decided that that might have been a bridge too far, but they're encouraging people to go back to work. That's the best thing about an open society. They're trying to project an image of resilience."

Remember the Republocrat resilience rhetoric?

What else can you do? What else especially the subcontinent's working poor and middle class can do? From New York, I called my sister and nephew in Mumbai on the morning after the terror strike. Both of them work in the private sector, one as a receptionist, and other as a junior computer professional. Both of them told me that their companies had not called them yet not to come to work, even though it was extremely dangerous to go out and even in Mumbai where the subway is the lifeline of millions of commuters, it was all but shut down. Resilience? Of course, my sister and nephew must go back to work and “show courage” to stand up against those ghastly cowardice forces. Or else, Zakaria must know, the private sector would show them the door.

Welcome to the globalized, neo-liberal, Wall Street-modeled world, India being at its forefront, along with its corrupt, criminals and crooks.

Post-script: Manmohan Singh has already announced that an Indian version of Homeland Security is on the way! What's next? Follow the Giuliani-Bush-Ashcroft-Rumsfeld daily diaries. On the other side of the football field, note how the Indian KKK are busy cooking up the next round of mob lynching.


[To be continued]