An attack on India’s future

We were sitting in the air-conditioned tedium of a traffic jam close to that great monument to the Raj, the Gateway of India, where soldiers and civil servants arrived and departed in the closing years of the Imperial age. Outside, the evening crowds pulsed homewards. A group of eunuchs dressed in bright saris advanced towards the waterfront bickering loudly. Nobody seemed to pay them the slightest attention.

‘Do you see all of those people out there?’ my guide asked. She pointed a slender, well-manicured finger in the direction of the teeming crowds. ‘They don’t know how lucky they are. Ah how lucky! To be born in this place and time.’

She was the wife of a close friend and had been given the thankless task of showing the visitor around Bombay (now Mumbai) while her husband participated in the city’s great unifying purpose, the pursuit of wealth. And at that particular moment, after several days spent enduring the city’s bustle, I could do nothing but agree; not because I had been battered into submission by the force of the city’s energy, but because she was undoubtedly right.

I had seen the ghastly poverty, the wretched and ragged sleeping on the streets; I had spent days interviewing victims of the booming Aids crisis (in Mumbai everything booms) and hearing the stories of the outcast. It would have been easy to be deceived by the crumbling, mould-stained buildings, the grinding traffic and the all-too-obvious evidence of poverty.

But I had been electrified by a parallel reality. Only perhaps in Shanghai had I felt anything close to the same excitement, the sense of a ‘new world’ in the making, where the economic boom was an adventure of the human spirit. This is the future, I thought to myself, and it is happening without quibble or restraint, a hell-for-leather gallop to build, accumulate and grow. There was an explosion of energy here of a kind which occurs rarely in human history.

In other times it might have led to wars of conquest and the foundation of an empire. But in Mumbai, at the beginning of a new century, the force of all that human vigour was channelling itself in what appeared to be an entirely peaceable direction. Little over a decade had passed since the bitter Hindu–Muslim riots of 1993.

More than 1,000 people, two thirds of them Muslim, had died at the hands of mobs inflamed by the Hindu Right. The violence had erupted after the demolition of a mosque in Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh. Yet it seemed to me a place where the sectarian bitterness of the past had been, if not overcome, then at least set to one side. For the majority of the population the preachings of the fundamentalists on both sides were something to be ignored.

I write this homage to Mumbai to explain why I was so depressed when I heard the news of the rush-hour bombings. For beyond the explicit human cost — the dead torn apart by high explosives, the wounded and the bereaved — the bombings were an assault on what this great city, on what all great cities, can represent.

Mumbai is overcrowded, diverse, freedom-loving. It is both secular and devout, rule-bound and corrupt, an epic contradiction which should not work but magically does. It is a living challenge to the ideals of the obscurantist and the fundamentalist. In his magnificent book Maximum City the Indian writer Suketu Mehta writes of feeling crushed in the city but also comforted by ‘a lovely vision of belonging’.

One can imagine how this place — like New York, Madrid and London — would offend the sensibilities of the fundamentalists who dream of a ‘pure’ Muslim India, their vision narrowed to nothingness by the promise of heaven. Such are the men of Lashkar-e-Toiba — the ‘Army of the Pure’ — who are the principal suspects for the bombings. The Lashkar have plenty of form. They are blamed for attacking the Indian Parliament in Delhi in 2001; two years later they attacked Mumbai and killed about 50 people. They are also accused of attacking a Hindu temple in Varanasi and scores of other attacks in Indian-administered Kashmir.

There is plenty of history to animate this violence. Just as the Taleban sprang from a generation radicalised by the war against the Soviet occupiers of Afghanistan, many of the men who joined Lashkar were shaped by the bitter conflict in Kashmir. Some also fought in Afghanistan. The cycle of atrocity and reprisal provided fertile ground for radical mullahs who promised the utopia of a pure Islamic state.

Of course not every fighter deserted the nationalist struggle in Kashmir for the more religious war fought by Lashkar and other like-minded groups. But enough young men followed the call to make the fundamentalists a potent threat. Long before al-Zarkawi and his kind were beheading Western hostages in Iraq, the fundamentalists in Kashmir were butchering their captives. Who now remembers the name of Hans Christian Ostro? He was the first Westerner to be beheaded by fundamentalists, and it happened in the high mountain lands of Kashmir. That was back in 1995 when six Western hostages disappeared on a hiking trip to the Himalayas. Scores of Indians have met a similar fate there.

Many of the Lashkar’s fighters are grad-uates of military camps in Afghanistan and share a strong affinity with the Taleban and al-Qa’eda. They trained and fought together. Over the years the Lashkar is believed to have received strong backing from Pakistan’s Inter-Services-Intelligence (ISI) which is accused of backing the Taleban troops fighting the British in Afghanistan.

The Indian government has a problem here, not unlike that facing Britain and the United States, in its dealings with Pakistan. Make too much of the ISI’s role in backing such groups and you risk destabilising the regime of General Pervaiz Musharraf, who was the target of a fundamentalist assassination attempt in 2003 and who performs the most perilous tightrope walk in international affairs.

India and Pakistan have been attempting a rapprochement for the past two years. They have talked about trade and water, they have restored long-lost transport links and eased visa restrictions. And they have played cricket in each other’s countries. These may seem like relatively small things until you consider the recent history.

This thaw in relations only came about because the countries went to the edge of war in 2001 after the fundamentalist attack on the Indian Parliament that killed nine people. For the first time in the long history of antagonism between the two states, there was the very real possibility of nuclear weapons being deployed. I was in Islamabad at the time and I remember the febrile atmosphere. Up at the Line of Control separating the two armies I saw hundreds of villagers fleeing in anticipation of war. As a diplomat later put it to me, ‘They looked into the abyss and very nearly tottered into it.’

The Americans estimated that a nuclear conflict between the two would kill 12 million people. Such an eventuality would have catastrophic consequences far beyond the borders of the subcontinent. There would be economic collapse and refugees in their millions. The last great taboo, one that has endured more or less unchallenged since the Cuban missile crisis, would have been broken.

This is the scale of the threat posed by fundamentalist violence in the region and a powerful reason for India and Pakistan to keep talking, whatever the provocations provided by groups like Lashkar. See it in this way and you understand why what has happened in Mumbai matters profoundly to us all.

There are those in Washington and London who worry that Indian patience will eventually snap. But though it is early days the signs so far are encouraging. Within hours of the bombing the Pakistani government was offering interviews condemning the atrocities. The Indians resisted the temptation to denounce Islamabad. Just as important, certainly for the people of Mumbai, was the absence of an immediate sectarian response. In the past, attacks on one community have often led to horrific retaliation.

But there is that other universal imperative urging us to pay attention. Like the previous targets of such attacks — New York, London and Madrid — Mumbai is a place where ingenuity and energy are the spurs to human progress. The kind of economic boom which Mumbai is experiencing depends on openness and on the free movement of people. It is the very openness of Mumbai, of all our cities, that makes it so easy to attack. Striking at the city’s high-speed transport lines represents not only an attempt to maximise casualties but is an assault on the idea of modernity which Mumbai is rushing to embrace.

Every year many hundreds of thousands are drawn to this sprawling port city on the Indian Ocean. They come not to answer the siren calls of the Hindu Right or the Muslim fundamentalists, but because they have heard stories of what a man or woman might achieve there.

Will they be cowed and turned back to their villages and small towns by the horrors on the railways? More important, will they be transformed from energetic and questing citizens of a new India into vengeful fundamentalists? On both counts the answer must be a resounding ‘no’. The energy of the ‘Maximum City’ will see to that.

Fergal Keane reported on the Mumbai bombings for the BBC Ten O’Clock News.