Photo by Azhar Chougle under the Creative Commons
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Mumbai skyline
Mumbai
By Christopher Hitchens
Slate, December 1,
2008
Slate, December 8,
2008
Edited by Andy Ross
On my first visit to India, in 1980, I stayed at the Taj Mahal in
Bombay. When Salman Rushdie
wrote, in The Moor's Last Sigh in 1995, that "those who hated India, those who
sought to ruin it, would need to ruin Bombay," he was alluding to the Hindu
chauvinists who had tried to exert their own monopoly in the city and who had
forcibly renamed it — after a Hindu goddess — Mumbai.
India is emerging in many ways as our most important ally. It is a huge and
officially secular federal democracy that is based, like the United States, on
ethnic and confessional pluralism. Its political and economic and literary
echelons speak English better than most of us do. Its parliament in New Delhi
was viciously attacked by Islamist gangsters and nearly destroyed in December
2001. Since then, Bombay has been assaulted multiple times and the Indian
Embassy in Afghanistan blown up with the fairly obvious collusion
of the same Pakistani forces who are helping in the rebirth of the Taliban.
Did our nominal ally Pakistan have a hand in the latest atrocity in the heart of
Bombay?
To get an additional perspective on this mystery, take a look at
Joshua Hammer's excellent essay
about Syria in the current Atlantic.
If you are a Lebanese politician or journalist or public figure, and you
criticize the role played by the government of Syria in your country's internal
affairs, your car will explode when you turn the ignition key, or you will be
ambushed and shot or blown up by a bomb or land mine as you drive through the
streets of Beirut or along the roads that lead to the mountains. The explosives
and weapons used, and the skilled tactics employed, will often be reminiscent of
the sort of resources available only to the secret police and army of a state
machine.
Hammer's article shows just how much trouble the international community will go
to precisely in order not to implicate the Assad family in this string of
unfortunate events. Might not young Bashar Assad, who managed to become
president after the peaceful death by natural causes of his father, become
annoyed and petulant and even uncooperative if he were found to have been
commissioning assassinations?
In rather the same way, the international community is deciding to be
nonjudgmental in the matter of Pakistani involvement in the Bombay
unpleasantness. Everything from the cell phones to the training appears to be
traceable to the surrogates of an ostensibly banned group known as
Lashkar-e-Taiba, which preaches holy war against Hindus, Jews, Christians,
atheists, and others. The link is most inconvenient for the government of
Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, a new and untried politician who may not
exactly be in charge of his own country or of its armed forces but who
nonetheless knows how to jingle the keys of peace.
The Syrian and Pakistani situations are a great deal more similar than most
people have any interest in pointing out. In both cases, there is a state within
the state that exerts the real power. In both cases, official secularism is a
mask for the state sponsorship of theocratic and cross-border gangster groups.
Christopher Hitchens is a
columnist for Vanity Fair and the Roger S. Mertz media fellow at the Hoover
Institution in Stanford, California.
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Indian popular religion old and new. Left: Shiva. In Hinduism, the absolute God or Brahman, pure spiritual reality, is suprapersonal, yet manifests on the personal level with a wide array of archetypes, such as Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. For Shaivas, Shiva is the auspicious one who subsumes and becomes all three aspects as the absolute Brahman. Right: Miss Bollywood, Shilpa Shetty (Manchester, 2007)
Behind Mumbai
By
Robert D. Kaplan
The Atlantic, November 2008
Edited by Andy Ross
The Mumbai attacks will aggravate a growing divide between Hindus
and Muslims within India.
India is home to 154 million Muslims, the third largest Muslim population in the
world after Indonesia and Pakistan. India has more to lose from extremist Islam
than arguably any other country in the world. The Mumbai terrorists announced
themselves as the Deccan Mujahideen. The Deccan is a rugged plateau region in
south-central India that Aurangzeb, the fierce Sunni emperor of the Mughals
could never subdue before his death in 1707. The Islamic Mughals vanquished all
of northern India, Pakistan, and a good part of Afghanistan, but they could
never consolidate the Deccan against the Hindu Maratha warriors.
In the early Cold War decades, India's ruling Congress Party, the party of
independence, sought to unite both Hindus and Muslims under the umbrella of a
shared community and new nation-state. In the 1980s and 1990s, with the opening
up of the Indian economy to the outside world, Indians, especially the new Hindu
middle class, began a search for roots to anchor them in world civilization.
The Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People's Party, or BJP) is
one of several Hindu nationalist organizations that promotes a revisionist view
of Indian history. In their view, the Mughals and other Muslim dynasties of the
medieval and early modern era are interlopers in what should have remained a
purely Hindu civilization. At the same time, a similar process occurred within
parts of the Indian Muslim community, who joined a world Muslim civilization
that competed with Indian nationalism for their loyalty.
The divide exploded in full force in early 2002 in the northwestern province of
Gujarat. Following the massacre of 58 Hindus on a train, Muslim areas of Gujarat
were besieged by Hindu mobs. Hundreds of Muslim women were raped, more than a
thousand were killed, and 200,000 were made homeless. The Hindu nationalist BJP
government in Gujarat was implicated in the killings. The atrocities have lived
on in infamy.
Robert D. Kaplan is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and a senior
fellow at the Center for a New American Security.
AR Nice to read Chris Hitchens preaching again. As for Bombay or Mumbai, the main thing is to close ranks against the militants and back up words with real solidarity.
