Bid to Make 7/11 India's 9/11
    By J. Sri Raman
    t r u t h o u t | Perspective

    Thursday 20 July 2006

    After the United States' 9/11 and Britain's 7/7 comes India's 7/11 - that is how powerful sections of opinion-makers are trying to project the two series of bomb blasts that shook India on July 11, claiming a combined toll of about 210 human lives.

    Obvious is the objective of such a presentation of the terrorist strikes in Srinagar, capital of the India-administered state of Jammu and Kashmir, and Mumbai (formerly Bombay), the country's financial capital. The series of dates aims to stress the place of India in the "alliance against global terror." The aim is also to call upon India's rulers to play a role befitting an alliance led by George W. Bush and his loyal Western lieutenants like Tony Blair.

    The eight bomb blasts in crowded suburban trains carrying Mumbai's commuters home that Tuesday evening eclipsed the five in tourist buses in Srinagar. The mayhem in Mumbai was less expected than the carnage in Kashmir, to which the state and the country has grown accustomed. Predictable, however, has been the response of political forces that have always sought to thrive on such tragedies.

    According to the far right and its many friends in the media, India's reaction to 7/11 should be as bloody as the Bush regime's to 9/11, and as contemptuous of human rights considerations and norms of international conduct. They concede that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's government cannot quite emulate the example of mighty Washington. But India, they insist, must at least imitate the current offensive of Israel.

    A sample of media counsel of this kind: "the Israeli military is relentlessly bombarding the airport of Beirut, the capital of Lebanon. The reason for the rain of hell fire is the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers by the Lebanese terror outfit, Hezbollah. So, is Israel overreacting? Apparently yes. But given the history of Islamic violence that Israel had to contend with ... its actions reveal a stern wisdom: the only language Islamic terror understands is counter-terror, preferably pre-emptive!"

    Another specimen from a leading newspaper brings in Bush himself: "The US president refused to calm Israel and asked Lebanon to stop cross-border terror! See, in contrast, what India, seen as an emerging superpower, does when over a thousand innocents are roasted and injured on its soil by terror from across its borders."

    The counsel is based on the conclusion drawn without any investigation and immediately after the serial blasts that they were the handiwork of "cross-border terrorism." Very soon, calls for preventive official steps against terrorist strikes were giving place to demands for "dismantlement of terrorist infrastructure on Pakistan's soil" - and, as in the above quotes, for a "pre-emptive" offensive.

    As I write this, news comes of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, one of the main players in the Gujarat massacre of 2002, adding its voice to the call for a "pre-emptive" counter. Says VHP president Ashok Singhal, "Two Israeli soldiers were abducted in Lebanon [last week] and Israel has launched a full-scale war [on Hezbollah]. India should immediately act in a similar way with Pakistan without bending to any pressure from the Muslims and international community."

    The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) hastened to gladden all far right hearts by calling for a "hot pursuit" of the terrorists on the assumption that they were from Pakistan though none had been apprehended. A senior BJP leader, Jaswant Singh, subsequently conceded the impracticality of the idea, but the party has yet to officially disown the earlier demand.

    This was only a re-run of the far right's response to 9/11 under former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's government. Then, too, the proposition of the pro-Bush political brigade was that India's participation in the "anti-terror alliance" should entail recognition of the country's right to stage a pre-emptive strike against Pakistan, particularly in Kashmir.

    Predictable, too, was the attempt to use the blasts to assail and stall the India-Pakistan peace process. The media coverage of the tragedy was interrupted with motivated speculation about a possible cancellation of proposed official-level talks as part of the process. New Delhi played along, for its part, lending some credence to rumors of an indefinite delay, if not a downright abandonment of the dialogue. Mercifully, it has now been made clear that only a cooling-off period before the next round of talks is being contemplated.

    The far right, however, is unlikely to forfeit the blast-given advantage and let the process proceed further smoothly.