Putting Mumbai Into Context

It seemed that, within only a few hours into the several days it took for the terrorist attacks in Mumbai to play out, the news media had already dubbed it “India’s 9/11″. Not just the typically overwrought American news organizations, but the Indian media itself, and even such normally non-sensationlist outlets as the BBC rushed to brand the event with that still-portentious label.

The trouble is that the parallels are very few between the two incidents except for what appears to be a lot of time spent planning the details and also the clever subversion of the in-place security systems against themselves to give the attackers quick and easy access to their targets. Equally troubling, at least to me, is that though political violence is not the least bit uncommon in India, usually resulting in many more deaths than the 180-odd victims in Mumbai, the Western media in particular couldn’t seem to give a rat’s ass about the struggle between Muslims and Hindus in India until it affected rich, white American tourists staying in one of the poshest hotels in the world. As soon as some of the released hostages started telling the press that the attackers were singling out Americans and Britons, this went from being a story covered in the “also today” part of the news to being Story Number One, complete with live updates and all the fancy newsgraphics you could handle.

Because Mumbai is a media capital, complete with the world’s largest film industry, money, power, and the people who control both are familiar sights there than they are in Delhi or other Indian cities (except possibly for the outsourcing hub of Bangalore). Jeopardize a few blond-haired-blue-eyed people with well-lined pockets and suddenly you’ve got the latest chapter in The War Against Terror. This also just happens to be perfect fodder for the outgoing Bush people AND the incoming Obama people, all of whom can posture as much as they like without actually having to do anything except issue “statements of condemnation”. America LOVES terrorist attacks when they happen somewhere else! We didn’t even have to interrupt the Thanksgiving football games for those annoying “Special Reports”.

Writing in the New York Times on Tuesday, Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh talks about the important distinctions between 9/11 and Mumbai and also explores his memories about the violence in India in 1984 over Punjab separatists and Kashmir, which resulted in the massacre of over 2000 Sikhs and the assassination of Indira Gandhi. The scope of political violence in India, he says, makes the Mumbai attacks seem relatively minor within India, and he compares the incident more to the Madrid railway bombing of 2004. Resultingly, he says, he thinks the official response by the Indian government should be more aligned with the efforts in Europe that treated the incident as a criminal investigation than the Grand Guignol of 9/11.

Writing in The Nation, contributing writer Lakshmi Chaudhry similarly finds little on-the-ground rationale for making the 9/11 comparison. She also talks about the rush on the part of many to wrap Mumbai up in the web of The War Against Terror, as yet another battlefield in the struggle between God-Blessed America and the Muslim Evildoer Bin Laden, rather than an incident that is almost completely explicable within the framework of long-standing Indian internal strife. She points out that the struggle to frame the incident isn’t even over, as now in the aftermath there is much debate about who the terrorists were, who supported them, and what their larger objectives were. Ultimately, though, she concludes that the enduring symbolism of 9/11 provides a framework for any group which finds itself victimized by terror to explain their grief to the world in a way that they connect with. The danger is in letting the power of the idea outweigh the reality of the situation.