Author: Swapan Dasgupta
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: November 19, 2006
The media is a dog-eat-dog profession. Nevertheless, I must record my heartfelt admiration of the Indian Express for recording the lives of 187 Indians who were blown to death in Mumbai on July 11. The profiles are revealing - a student who had just secured admission to an American college, a small-time insurance salesman, someone who just moved into his new flat, a woman who supplemented the family's income to give her children a better life and a man who thought he was through with commuter trains. Their lives personified the drive, the energy, the dreariness, the frustrations and the aspirations of middle class India.
Life is at a permanent discount in India. The names of those faces in the crowd who went to work on the morning of July 11 and never returned home won't make it to the history books. Like the liveried attendant in Parliament who slammed the door on the attackers and paid with his life, the victims of terrorism end up as statistics - mourned for the mandatory fortnight and then dumped into the recycle bins of history.
Our enemies have a more profound self-esteem. They have celebrated their jihad by conferring social honour, family pensions and assurances of a blissful after-life to the merchants of death. The lesser mujahideen who have suffered the misfortune of getting caught have become campaign themes of human rights entrepreneurs and Booker Prize winners. If the Afzal Guru campaign is shrill, wait till the sentences are awarded to the 1993 Bombay bombers.
It's a good time, we have been told, to think out of the box. The more intellectually innovative of our public spirited citizens have concluded from the findings of the Rajinder Sachar Committee that India's prison population must faithfully mirror the country's ethnographic mix. Since larger numbers of incarcerated terrorists would probably add to the existing communal imbalance, it follows that a robust, no-nonsense policy of anti-terrorism would add to India's unfortunate record of social discrimination. Such iniquity, the Government has repeatedly told the country, just won't do.
The victims of the Mumbai blasts - all 187 of them - have been overtaken by history. In the first few weeks after the explosions, it seemed that all of India was united in outrage. The Prime Minister broke off the Foreign Secretary-level talks with Pakistan; the ghoulish National Security Adviser came on TV every week to feed the country details of Al Qaeda threats to our nuclear plants and Pakistan's involvement in India's domestic terrorism; after two months of apparently relentless investigations, the Mumbai police commissioner announced to the world that case had been "cracked" and the perpetrators were Pakistani jihadis belonging to the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba; and in a major diplomatic offensive, the Government announced that it would share the details of bad neighbourliness with the Americans and British.
Something inexplicable then happened. First, there were protests from Communists and the usual suspects that the anti-terrorist inquiries were targeting the proverbial "members of a particular community." The protests became very shrill after the Malegaon blasts. Second, the NSA proclaimed that the Mumbai police lacked "clinching" evidence. And finally, basking in the Cuban sun, the Prime Minister and his new Foreign Secretary announced that Pakistan was as much a victim of terrorism as India. Last week, as the Foreign Secretaries of India and Pakistan met, the relegation of the 187 Mumbai victims from the front page to the inside pages was institutionalised. As the Pakistani side gleefully noted, the Mumbai blasts weren't even mentioned by India. Instead, there was the bizarre understanding that a joint anti-terror mechanism would ensure that terrorism would never let the dialogue process be stalled. It was a gesture akin to turning the other cheek, for a few dollars more.
In July, the Government fearing an explosion of anger acted with inept urgency. When the backlash never materialised, it mocked the memory of 187 ordinary Indians who just happened to be on the wrong train at the wrong time. Pakistan has reason to be delighted that it is confronting a nation led by wimps.