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opinion: 25 terrorists, 2 billion hostages —Rafia Zakaria

India needs to transcend the rapacious need for revenge and respond instead with the circumspection of a world leader that sees the urgent need to redefine the war on terror in a way that unites instead of maligns

As I write this on November 27, 2008, the grotesque showdown in Mumbai continues. An organised group of terrorists entered India’s mega-city from the sea on November 26, 2008. Once inside the city, they unleashed a wave of terror unprecedented in one of the largest mega-cities of the world.

In the hours that followed, shootings, blasts and hostage-taking ensued with hundreds caught in the crossfire. Over a hundred casualties have already been reported with several hundred injured. Mumbai’s Anti-Terror Squad chief Hemant Karkare and several other top officials were also killed. The Taj, a constant in the city’s changing urbanscape, has been burning for two days.

While responsibility for the attacks has yet to be pinned on a definitive group, rumours and speculation abound: some are blaming a local offshoot of the Indian Mujahideen known as the “Deccan Mujahedeen”, others are choosing to focus on the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e Taiba.

According to an intelligence assessment issued by StratFor, the Indian government, facing elections in the near future, is likely to blame the latter, which would allow it to take a more assertive stance against Pakistan. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s address to the nation, which focused on “outside connections” of the perpetrators of these attacks, substantiates the fear that the incident will further sour relations between India and Pakistan. This deterioration in relations would leave the latter in a strategic vice with both the United States and India punishing the Pakistani state for the actions of non-state groups allegedly tied to it.

However, the strategic dimensions of the conflict represent one plane of analysis of the macabre saga; another is the incredible burden yet another high profile terrorist attack places on the world’s two billion Muslims. Muslim minorities in various countries, already castigated through negative stereotypes and maligned as innately violent, will now have an even heavier burden of prejudices to counter. Once again, the world has been stunned by “Islamic” terrorists, whose ruthlessness and inhumanity have garnered global attention and focused the spotlight once again on a hijacked religion.

As the tragic saga in Mumbai continues, and the choral chants of “Islamic terror” emanate from a world media wedded to the inveterate clash of civilisations framework, few will pause to consider the fact that in neighbouring Pakistan, a Muslim country, nearly 500 Muslims have lost their lives to suicide bombings just this year.

According to the Christian Science Monitor, over 33 suicide bombings have taken place this year in Pakistan, which has outdone Iraq for most suicide attacks in a year. Innocent shopkeepers, little children, security personnel, women have all been targets of the wrath of groups seeking to bring down the Pakistani state and destroying any modicum of normalcy in the region. In the most prominent of these attacks, less than a year ago, Pakistan lost its most prominent political leader, Benazir Bhutto, leaving the country stunned at the barbarity of the perpetrators.

In the words of Salman Masood, who has covered many of these bombings for the New York Times, “perhaps now Indians will understand how the ordinary Pakistani feels — helpless, besieged and pessimistic about the future”.

However, this possibility of mutual understanding facilitated by the common experience of suffering the inhumanity of terrorism is an unlikely scenario. Instead, religious tensions are likely to escalate both within India and between India and Pakistan. Indian Muslims, already alienated and disenfranchised, are likely to face the brunt of Indian wrath. Economically disenfranchised, nearly thirty three percent of them live below the poverty line. Nearly half of Muslim women are uneducated and over a quarter of Muslim children between the ages of 6-14 have never attended school.

This already beleaguered minority, limited in its ability to influence policy or stake a claim in the Indian state, is likely to be pushed further into the recesses of discrimination: easy, accessible victims to avenge the wrath of a nation eager to avenge the horror unleashed in Mumbai.

The Mumbai attacks represent yet another episode in the cruel and seemingly unending saga of terror that seems to have the world in its grip. Since this latest attack is against non-Muslims, Muslims around the world will again face repeated scrutiny and questions regarding the relationship of their faith with terrorism. Once again, ordinary Muslims will be scrutinised and lumped together with the minority that has hijacked their faith.

In essence, as with the nineteen who bombed the World Trade Centre seven years ago, the twenty-five terrorists who have perpetrated this mayhem in Mumbai have managed once again to take the world’s two billion Muslims hostage. Few around the world will pause to consider that the ordinary Muslim is as helpless before the nefarious agendas of terror as the ordinary Christian, Jew or Hindu. However earnest the efforts of Muslims condemning terrorism, however persistent these denunciations, they are unlikely to garner attention from an angry world that refuses to see terror as a agenda against humanity rather than a campaign lodged by the world’s Muslims against all those who oppose them.

The challenge before the world is immense. Great terror engenders great fear and fear is a blinding force. Will this latest terror attack allow India and the world to go beyond appearances and recognise that the war is not between Muslims and non-Muslims but against a committed and utterly ruthless minority that hates and destroys Muslims, Jews, Christians and Hindus with impunity?

Or will the world, reeling under the unprecedented weight of the cruelty of terrorism, once again pin blame on all of the world’s two billion Muslims?

The world stands with the Indian nation today, as it did with America in the days after 9/11. Will India use this international solidarity to build the kind of broad consensus against terrorism that America failed to do? It needs to transcend the rapacious need for revenge and respond instead with the circumspection of a world leader that sees the urgent need to redefine the war on terror in a way that unites instead of maligns.

Rafia Zakaria is an attorney living in the United States where she teaches courses on Constitutional Law and Political Philosophy. She can be contacted at rafia.zakaria@gmail.com

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