India: After the Horror

Of all the images out of Mumbai since Nov. 26 — a wild-eyed gunman in cargo pants and T shirt, black smoke engulfing the grand dome of the Taj Mahal Palace hotel, a cherubic toddler robbed of his parents — the one hardest to grasp is Mumbai without people. Driving toward south Mumbai on the morning after the attacks, the city’s normally teeming streets were emptied of life. In one sense, this was lovely, if disturbing: you had unimpeded views of the city’s stately colonial buildings, its stone-paved avenues and the glittering sea. But this absence of humanity also revealed how stunned and baffled Mumbai’s citizens were by the brazen attacks on their home. They stayed inside because they knew this was more than just another random bomb blast, the kind Indians usually shake off like so many mosquitoes.

Today, the people of Mumbai have re-emerged. They are angry, at both Pakistan, which many believe was the source of the atrocity, and their own government. And they have awakened to a realization that something fundamentally has altered, and that their city, indeed nation, needs fixing, perhaps even a rebirth. “We’ve been attacked before,” says Rohini Ramanathan, a radio talk-show host whose morning program has been flooded with emotional phone calls. “But after these recent attacks people are saying, ‘Let’s not pretend everything’s all right.’ We don’t need to make a show of the Mumbai spirit when what we need now is to make sure this will not be forgotten. All will not be normal again.” It’s not just Mumbai. Among the 185 dead were visitors and expats from Israel, Singapore, the U.S. and Britain, and those who had come seeking work in India’s most exciting place from all over the country: a software engineer from Bihar, a hotel manager from Manipur, a lawyer from Andhra Pradesh.

How can Mumbai’s rage be channeled into real change for all of India? Indians want better intelligence, more responsive emergency services, stronger border defense, but some are also calling for an acknowledgement of the poisonous disaffection among Indian Muslims, widespread corruption among local police and the other ugly realities under the surface of India’s much heralded economic boom. “Deep down, there is this pervasive feeling of massive government failure,” says Mujibur Rehman, a political scientist at the Centre for Dalit and Minorities Studies at the Jamia Millia Islamia university in New Delhi. The attacks on Mumbai have forced India to confront those issues on an unprecedented scale. This is the first attack that has made a significant impact on India’s wealthy and middle classes, those who have so far been insulated from the worst of the violence that has pockmarked so much of India over the past 20 years. “We, meaning the middle classes, live in this little bubble that we’ve created around us,” says Pankaj Mishra, the author of several books about contemporary India. “But the problems around us will explode and continue to explode.” How the country and its leaders respond to that call will determine whether Mumbai’s tragedy turns into a national one.

Bordering on War
The shock of the attacks and the slow agony of watching the three-day siege unfold on television immediately invited comparisons to the Sept. 11, 2001, acts of terror in New York City. “This is our 9/11,” was the refrain heard from both Mumbai’s citizens and other Indians. It wasn’t long before someone followed that thinking to its logical conclusion: bomb Pakistan, just as the U.S. bombed Afghanistan. Simi Garewal, a former actress and talk-show host, said on a cable news show that “America gave out the right signals to the world that they cannot be messed around with … You carpet bomb where these [Pakistani militants] are, you carpet bomb the area.” Her comments were quickly followed by outraged condemnations of warmongering in a wounded city. Yet she was tapping into a very real emotion. “We’ve let them get away too many times,” says Rohan Gohil, a real estate agent in Mumbai. “But now we should teach them a lesson once and for all.”

Blaming Pakistan is almost a reflex among Indian politicians; they have been right — and they have been wrong. Pakistan has been accused of promoting the Punjab insurgency in the 1990s (its leaders were Indian Sikhs) and in more recent bombings that have since been pinned on Indian jihadis or, in one case, a Hindu nationalist group. In the Mumbai attacks, the Pakistan link is more substantial: the one suspect who was captured alive and arrested, Ajmal Amir Kasab, has been identified by Indian authorities as Pakistani. (The other nine suspects were killed by police.) U.S. intelligence officials have pointed to a Pakistan-based militant group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, as the likely perpetrator. This trickle of evidence has heated up the simmering tension between the countries, pushing them down an alarmingly familiar path — the same one that led these two nuclear-armed countries to the brink of war after the 2001 attack on India’s Parliament. That was also blamed partly on Lashkar-e-Taiba, and more than half a million Indian and Pakistani troops faced off along the border.

The bellicose talk is obscuring a more difficult but far more significant conversation. “There are obviously people in Pakistan who are intent on undermining India and attacking India, and the Mumbai attack reminds the world of that fact,” says Mishra. “But we in India have been using this Pakistani involvement to ignore the growing problems within India.” First among those is the increasing disaffection of India’s Muslims because of what historian Ramachandra Guha calls “the failures of the Indian state.” The country’s 138 million Muslims, who comprise 13.4% of the population, are poorer and less educated than the rest of India and vastly underrepresented in both India’s largest employer, the state railway system, and its élite civil service.

The sources of that anger are not just economic. India has made little progress in resolving its decades-old dispute with Pakistan over Kashmir; in the meantime, the Indian troops who occupy it have turned the state into a swamp of resentment and virulent anti-Indian sentiment. The most raw grievance is the 2002 violence in the western state of Gujarat: nearly all of the 2,000 victims were Muslim, but only a handful of cases have been prosecuted. Gujarat, Kashmir and the 1992-93 anti-Muslim violence in Mumbai — in which hundreds were killed yet only three people convicted — have become rallying cries for jihadist groups across South Asia. While the Mumbai terrorists issued no manifesto, one of them called the India TV news channel and demanded, “Are you aware how many people have been killed in Kashmir? Are you aware how your army has killed Muslims? Are you aware how many of them have been killed in Kashmir this week?” Says Guha: “This is the poisoned fruit of the deliberate polarization of Hindus and Muslims.”

(See pictures of the days of terror in Mumbai.)

India’s Katrina
There is one glaring discrepancy in comparing the Taj to the Twin Towers. Americans of all political stripes came together on 9/11 and during its aftermath. In India, the feud between the ruling Congress Party and the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), composed of Hindu nationalists, never paused. On Nov. 28, while Mumbai was still in the grip of terror, the BJP released a campaign ad for coming state elections that said, “Brutal terror strikes at will. Weak government: unwilling and incapable. Stop terror. Vote BJP.” Narendra Modi, the Chief Minister of Gujarat who has been widely criticized for failing to stop the 2002 anti-Muslim violence, appeared before the cameras to announce an award of $200,000 for the families of those “who have been martyred while fighting the terrorists” and to criticize Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s address to the nation the day before as “disappointing.”

The political fallout has made this tragedy look more like Hurricane Katrina — a shock that exposes a nation’s structural weaknesses. The most obvious problems were the inability of the central and state governments to anticipate the terrorist attack and to respond adequately once it had begun. Home Minister Shivraj Patil, in charge of internal security at the central government, was the first to resign. He has been under intense criticism for months, the pressure mounting with each new bombing elsewhere in the country. There have been at least 10 major blasts over the past 18 months, the most recent one in Assam. Two Maharashtra state officials fell next: Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh, who took his actor son Ritiesh and the Bollywood director Ram Gopal Varma on a tour of the gutted Taj, and Deputy Chief Minister R.R. Patil, who resigned after he was quoted saying, “Small things do happen in big cities. They wanted to kill 5,000 people; we have minimized the damage.”

The intelligence infrastructure that Patil leaves behind is a hornet’s nest of competing interests and gaps in coordination. There were warnings earlier this fall based on telephone intercepts of an attack targeting the city, originating in Pakistan and using a sea route from Karachi, the same route used by those who smuggled explosives into the city before the 1993 Mumbai blasts. That intelligence was passed on from the foreign-intelligence bureau to the domestic-intelligence bureau and then, according to procedure, to the state police. But there was no follow-up with the local Mumbai police, who would have been the only ones to notice unusual activity in the days before the attacks. “Internal intelligence could have done better if they tried to work out the details on the ground,” says M.K. Dhar, former joint director of India’s intelligence bureau. “We were exposed very badly.”

Perhaps most disturbing, the attacks revealed a lack of training, organization and equipment among the police. Bob Nicholls, a South African security consultant who was dining on the top floor of the Taj, decided to act as soon as he heard blasts because he figured there would be no hotel security or police at hand. He herded fellow guests into a secured room, but for two hours was unable to get any official information about what was happening. He and his team saved 150 people. An eyewitness who saw two gunmen walk toward Cama Hospital said that more than 30 minutes passed between the first blast he heard and the arrival of the police.

The men in khaki were everywhere around Mumbai after the attacks, and 16 of them lost their lives in the blasts and gunfire, but their leaders failed to fulfill one of their basic functions: to secure calm and order in a crisis. Police and army leaders gave out little information to the public, and Mumbai’s police chief, Hasan Gafoor, gave his first press conference to the hundreds of journalists gathered in Mumbai on Dec. 2, six days after the attacks. In the absence of any official line, sensational cable-television broadcasts and newspapers were full of anonymous police sources giving out conflicting information about the number of terrorists, the number of hostages, the number of people trapped and the progress of the siege. At one point, while the siege was still on, several local channels reported that fresh firing had erupted at four locations near the railway station. This time, the police arrived immediately with sirens blaring — but the rumor turned out to be false.

The India That Doesn’t Shine
In these days of extreme emotions, one of the biggest surprises has been the relative calm of the Indian stock market. It is about where it was the day before the attacks, with no sudden drop or panicked selling. Yet investors have certainly noticed the attacks; Mark Matthews, chief Asia strategist for Merrill Lynch in Hong Kong, says that India missed the rally over the past week enjoyed by the rest of the Asian markets. “India didn’t get a share of that bounce.” In the long term, he says, investors may simply start thinking of India as a place where terror attacks happen regularly and price its market accordingly. “Investors tend to get used to it.”

Multinational firms doing business in India make a different calculation. One terrorist attack, or even a series of them, might change their security arrangements, but it does not affect their business plans. War with Pakistan, on the other hand, is a much bigger risk, says Amitabh Dubey, director of India research for Trusted Sources, a London-based risk consultancy firm. “An increased probability of conflict — that would change people’s business plans,” he says. That’s exactly what happened in 2001, when the two countries moved to the brink of war and companies moved their operations out of India. “At the back of everyone’s mind is the nuclear factor,” he says. And the memory of that global crisis of confidence may well keep the two countries from reaching that point again.

(See pictures of the days of terror in Mumbai.)

It would be a mistake, however, to interpret the financial world’s sanguine reaction to such a serious attack on India’s financial and commercial capital as a sign of great hope for India’s future. Business comes to India simply because it can’t ignore a billion-strong consumer market with an economy growing at 7% a year even in a global recession. But investors have come to realize, as anyone who lives in India has, that the rising superpower once touted at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, as “Incredible India” has been oversold. Some of its strengths, left unmanaged, turn into weaknesses. India’s rapid urbanization, for example, is energizing its cities by bringing new aspirations and new consumers from rural to urban areas. But these migrants are also taxing the infrastructure. India might have more billionaires on the Forbes 400 than ever before, but 80% of its population still lives on less than $2 a day. Public schools are ineffective: 40% of enrolled 8- to 11-year-olds cannot read a page. More than 440 million Indians, 40% of the population, are under 18, and it is not clear how India will generate enough jobs over the next two decades to employ them. Facing those hard realities, the global corporate world has begun to see terrorism the way many Indians do — as one of those utterly shocking and yet immovable problems, such as child labor, unsafe drinking water and filthy streets, that become part of the background of living and working in India.

For all the drama and pathos, it is possible to imagine the Mumbai attacks receding into the background because that has already happened for so many of India’s other violent conflicts. Since the July 2006 bombing of a Mumbai commuter train, which killed 184 people, there have been nine other blasts in major Indian cities, killing 300 more. Naxalites, the Maoist insurgents who have made claims on a wide patch of central India, have clashed repeatedly with police and paramilitary forces, killing at least 175 this year, according to the South Asia Terrorism Portal. In Orissa, anti-Christian violence has claimed the lives of at least 50 people and turned thousands more into refugees. Officials and analysts are correct to call the Mumbai attack a threat to the idea of India as an open, secular, multifaith democracy. But it is hardly the only one. For separatists and other militant groups throughout India, Mishra says, “this idea of India is fatally compromised.”

The Culture Gap
There are two phrases that anyone moving to one of India’s Hindi-speaking big cities quickly learns. The first is, “Chalta hai.” Literally: “It goes.” Figuratively: “It works well enough, so why bother?” The second is “jugaar,” referring to the web of favors and imperfect, improvised, less-than-legal solutions through which most things in India still get done. Taken together, these two cultural touchstones are the biggest reasons why India has not yet found the political will to address its deepest problems. “Chalta hai,” Indians say about everything from traffic to political corruption to substandard education — that this is the best that a poor country of 1 billion people can do. And when any of those problems affect you, with a well-placed favor and a willingness to look the other way, there’s always a solution.

It is worth remembering, though, that India has overcome this culture before. When a few bureaucrats and economists pushed through the 1991 economic reforms, no one thought the “license Raj” would ever fall. At the time, the political decisions behind the reforms were unpopular, and its possibilities were not yet apparent. A few prominent businessmen formed a group — the Bombay Club — to oppose the reforms, surely unaware that they would one day be among their biggest beneficiaries. As incomplete as those reforms have been, they have brought India into its new place in the world. The attacks were an acknowledgement of that. The targets chosen were not just Mumbai landmarks but symbols of India’s deepening connections to the global economy.

The answer to the challenge of tackling the inertia that still afflicts India is not obvious. Those who attacked Mumbai did so not with clear demands or ideology, but with simply a desire to tilt India’s troubled state toward violence and conflict. Tightened security and better intelligence are important, but they cannot replace political solutions in Kashmir and Gujarat. Shows of unity and strength won’t erase the pervasive culture of corruption in public service. There are no guarantees of the real change Mumbai is clamoring for, but, says Guha, “it’s more likely now than at any time in the past.” And it has already begun. It’s there in the frankness of tycoon Ratan Tata’s comments about his beloved Taj, acknowledging the “woefully poor” response of the police, and the three hours that passed before the fire engines arrived. It’s there in the families of the dead police officers who rebuffed the grandstanding condolences of politicians. And it was there on the streets of Mumbai, too. On the morning after the morning after, the vegetable sellers came out in the badly hit Colaba district. All the other shops were still closed, but these men and women stacked up their tomatoes and eggplants, breathing that first bit of life back into the city. The siege was far from finished, and they couldn’t know what that new day would bring, but they were there to be part of it.

— with reporting by Madhur Singh/Mumbai

(See pictures of the days of terror in Mumbai.)