Four wars (in 1947–48, 1965, 1971 and 1999), all initiated by Pakistan, have been fought across the ceasefire line, now dubbed the Line of Control (LoC), without materially altering the situation. In the late 1980s, a Pakistan-backed insurrection by some Kashmiri Muslims, augmented by militants infiltrated across the LoC and supplied with arms and money by Pakistan, began. Both the militancy and the response to it by Indian security forces have caused great loss of life, damaged property and all but wrecked a Kashmiri economy dependent largely on tourism and the sale of handicrafts. In the process, both countries have suffered grievously: India, whose citizens have been killed in large numbers and which has had to deploy over half a million men under arms to keep the peace, and Pakistan, whose strategy of ‘bleeding India to death’ through insurgency and terrorism, in Kashmir and beyond, has accomplished little of value, while making its military enormously powerful within Pakistan and disproportionately well-resourced (largely thanks to Kashmir, the Pakistani Army controls a larger share of its national budget than any army in the world does).
If Kashmir is, to Pakistanis, the main casus belli, the horrors that were inflicted on Mumbai by terrorists from Pakistan at the end of November 2008 remain the starting point for any Indian’s discussion of Pakistan. They have left an abiding impact on all Indians. India picked itself up after the assault, but it counted the cost in lives lost, property destroyed and, most of all, in the scarred psyche of a ravaged nation. Deep and sustained anger across the country — at its demonstrated vulnerability to terror and at the multiple institutional failures that allowed such loss of life — prompted the immediate resignations of the home minister in Delhi and the chief minister and his deputy in Maharashtra. But ‘26/11’ in Mumbai represented a qualitative change in Pakistan’s long-running attempts to pursue ‘war by other means’. The assault, and the possibility of its recurrence, implied that there could be other consequences, yet to be measured, that the world will have to come to terms with in the future — consequences whose impact could extend well beyond India’s borders, with implications for the peace and security of the region, and the world.
I had grown up in Bombay, as it was then called, and so watched the unfolding horror there in November 2008 with profound empathy. There is a savage irony to the fact that the attacks in Mumbai began with terrorists docking near the Gateway of India. The magnificent arch, built in 1911, has ever since stood as a symbol of the openness of the city. Crowds flock around it, made up of foreign tourists and local yokels; touts hawk their wares; boats bob in the waters, offering cruises out to the open sea. The teeming throngs around it daily reflect India’s diversity, with Parsi gentlemen out for their evening constitutionals, Muslim women in burqas taking the sea air, Goan Catholic waiters enjoying a break from their duties at the stately Taj Mahal Hotel, Indians from every corner of the country chatting in a multitude of tongues. On 26 November, barred and empty, ringed by police barricades, as it was seen on TV, the Gateway of India — the gateway to India, and to India’s soul — stood as mute testimony to the most serious assault on the country’s pluralist democracy.
The terrorists who heaved their bags laden with weapons up the steps of the wharf to begin their assault on the Taj, like their cohorts at a dozen other locations around the city, knew exactly what they were doing. Theirs was an attack on India’s financial nerve centre and commercial capital, a city emblematic of the country’s energetic thrust into the twenty-first century. They struck at symbols of the prosperity that was making the Indian model so attractive to the globalizing world — luxury hotels, a café favoured by foreigners, the city’s Jewish centre. The terrorists also sought to polarize Indian society by claiming to be acting to redress the grievances, real and imagined, of India’s Muslims. And by singling out Americans and Israelis for special attention, they demonstrated that their brand of Islamist fanaticism is anchored less in the absolutism of pure faith than in the geopolitics of hatred.
The attack on the Jewish Chabad-Lubavitch centre and the killing of its residents was particularly sad, since India is justifiably proud of the fact that it is the only country in the world with a Jewish diaspora going back 2500 years where there has never been a single instance of anti-Semitism (except when the Portuguese came to inflict it in the sixteenth century). This is the first time that it has been unsafe to be Jewish in India — one more proof that the terrorists were not Indian, since Indian Muslims have never had any conflict with Indian Jews, but that they were pursuing a foreign agenda. Indeed, this was clearly not just an attack on India; the terrorists were also taking on the ‘Jews and crusaders’ of Al Qaeda lore. With this tragedy, India became the theatre of action for a global battle.
After the killings, the platitudes flowed like blood. Terrorism is unacceptable; the terrorists are cowards; the world stands united in unreserved condemnation of this latest atrocity, and so mind-numbingly on. Commentators in America tripped over themselves to pronounce the night and day of carnage India’s 9/11. But India has endured many attempted 9/11s, notably a ferocious assault on its Parliament in December 2001 that nearly led to all-out war against the assailants’ sponsors, Pakistan. In 2008 alone, terrorist bombs had taken lives in Jaipur, in Ahmedabad, in Delhi and (in an eerie dress rehearsal for the effectiveness of synchronicity) several different places on one searing day in Assam. Jaipur is the lodestar of Indian tourism to Rajasthan; Ahmedabad is the primary city of Gujarat, the state that is projected by many as a poster child for India’s development, with a local GDP growth rate of 14 per cent; 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 the 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.
So the terrorists hit multiple targets in Mumbai, both literally and figuratively. They caused death and destruction to our country, searing India’s psyche, showing up the limitations of its security apparatus and humiliating its government. They dented the worldwide image of India as an emerging economic giant, a success story of the era of globalization and an increasing magnet for investors and tourists. Instead the world was made to see an insecure and vulnerable India, a ‘soft state’ besieged by enemies who could strike it at will.
Indians have learned to endure the unspeakable horrors of terrorist violence ever since malign men in Pakistan concluded that it was cheaper and more effective to bleed India to death than to attempt to defeat it in conventional war. There had, after all, been four unsuccessful wars — the failed attempts by Pakistan in 1947–48 and 1965 to wrest control over Kashmir, the 1971 war that resulted in the birth of Bangladesh from the ruins of the former East Pakistan and the undeclared Kargil war of 1999, in which Pakistani soldiers were dressed in mufti to conceal their identities when they surreptitiously seized the heights above Kargil in Kashmir, until being repelled in a heroic but costly action by the Indian Army. Attack after attack on Indian soil since then has been proven to have been financed, equipped and guided from across the border, including two suicide bombings of the Indian embassy in Kabul, the first of which was publicly traced by American intelligence to Islamabad’s dreaded military special-ops agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), and its ‘Directorate S’ that collaborates with and directs terrorists and militants. The risible attempt by anonymous sources to claim ‘credit’ for the Mumbai killings in the name of the ‘Deccan Mujahideen’ merely confirmed that the killers are not from the Deccan. The Deccan lies inland from Mumbai; one does not need to sail the waters of the Arabian Sea to the Gateway of India to get to the city from there. In its meticulous planning, sophisticated coordination and military precision, including the use of reconnaissance missions and GPS equipment, as well as its choice of targets, the assault on Mumbai bore no trace of what its promoters tried to suggest it was — a spontaneous eruption by angry young Indian Muslims. This horror, despite Pakistan’s initial (and subsequently discredited) denials, was not home-grown.