OPINION

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Mumbai’s great spirit will help city rise above terror

attacks

The city’s cosmopolitan camaraderie allows people of all faiths to live cheek by jowl

Nov 30, 2008 04:30 AM

 Haroon Siddiqui

 India and Indians – Mumbai and Mumbaikars, in particular – have a remarkable capacity to rebound from tragedies.

They have done so repeatedly, after horrendous domestic sectarian killings and bombings, especially in Mumbai in 1993, 2003 and 2006.

It’s not just kismet, the fatalism shared by Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs and others alike. No, it’s a far greater force, the will to welcome the dawn of every day as yet another opportunity to live life. It’s an optimism born of beating the incredible odds of India.

But this time, one can’t be so sure that India will mourn and move on. The latest terrorist attack is not just more brazen, better planned and highly co-ordinated than the previous ones. It has the international imprint of bombings in Islamabad, Bali, Jakarta and other places.

The agony is personal. In the 1960s, I lived in the area now under siege, not far from the Taj Hotel where I took tea and dined at prices I could ill-afford, and met the then Canadian high commissioner, Roland Michener, who suggested, “young men like you should go to Canada,” advice ignored with youthful arrogance and acted on only reluctantly years later.

The area has a rich past and a richer present.

Yards from where the majestic Taj overlooks the Arabian Sea is the port where the British colonials came in the 16th century and departed in 1947, and whence the British traded opium to China. It is where the grand Gateway of India, begun in 1911 to mark the visit of King George V, still stands.

This is the district where Rudyard Kipling was born and where the maharajas and maharanis from British India’s 556 states came to party at the Taj in “little London,” which boasted the most Gothic buildings outside of Victorian England.

Post-colonial Bombay married old money with new. It became a bigger financial hub, with corporate headquarters and the gold and diamond bazaar, along with the dream factory called Bollywood and also cricket.

The area around the Taj – one of the most expensive pieces of real estate in the world but which retained its old neighbourhoods, such as Colaba, home to Zoroastrians – formed the backdrop of Canadian author Rohinton Mistry’s novels, especially the Dickensian A Fine Balance.

But Mumbai has remained a safe city, despite its periodic bouts of political or sectarian violence and the mayhem of the Mafia. The city retains its cosmopolitan camaraderie and egalitarianism. The smell from Colaba’s fish market gets into the nostrils of paupers and billionaires alike.

People of all faiths live cheek by jowl. The small Jewish community has rarely, if ever, been targeted before. The apartment I used to live in was shared by Muslims, Hindus and a Jewish woman.

The sacred and the profane coexist. Red light districts thrive near temples and mosques. The streets are shared by hookers and priests. There is no room for NIMBY-ism.

Terrorism is not new to the subcontinent.

After living in relative peace for centuries, Indians were engulfed in sectarian killings with the 1947 creation of Muslim Pakistan and largely Hindu but secular India. In the cross-border stampede of nearly 12 million, almost a million were massacred.

There have been repeated sectarian riots since, Muslims being the main victims. Still, an easy peace prevailed.

Then came 1992, when the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party desecrated an obscure mosque in a place called Ayodhya in an attempt to turn it into a temple. That led to intercommunal killing of more than 1,000 people, mostly Muslims.

In retaliation, Mumbai’s stock exchange and other locales were bombed, killing 260 and injuring hundreds. India blamed crime syndicates in the Bollywood underworld, and said that the Muslim perpetrators had found refuge in Pakistan.

The aftershocks of Ayodhya were felt in 2002 in the state of Gujarat, north of Mumbai. Nearly 2,000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed and tens of thousands made homeless. Police in the BJP-run state were accused of complicity.

Since then, there have been many bombings, most attributed to Muslim extremists. In the last three years alone, Muslims have been blamed for at least 700 killings.

Last month, there was a new twist: Christian-Hindu savagery by Maoists and Hindu extremists in the eastern state of Orissa. More than a dozen people were killed, and a girl escaped being burned alive, her face looking no different than that of the Afghan girl in the recent acid attack by the Taliban.

This month, police unearthed an extremist Hindu terrorist cell following the bombing of a Muslim area near Mumbai.

It is anybody’s guess who or what caused the Mumbai attack. It’s possible that Pakistani militants were involved. Or it may have been revenge for the ongoing persecution of India’s Muslims. Or, as one of the terrorists indicated, it was about Kashmir, the border Muslim-majority state, over which India and Pakistan have fought two wars, and where there has been recent unrest.

What we do know is this:

It used to be said – as a compliment to Indian democracy, the world’s largest – that there wasn’t one Al Qaeda or Al Qaeda-like member among that nation’s 150 million Muslims. We can put that bit of self-delusion to rest.

There’s much hand-wringing that Mumbai police and security personnel didn’t have a clue about what has just transpired. The FBI didn’t either about 9/11.

The attack is bound to turn India’s high-profile hotels and buildings into fortresses. The easy accessibility of public spaces and the openness of people to each other, so characteristic of Mumbai, would change.

India’s $10 billion a year tourism industry, with 4 million visitors, may suffer a temporary setback.

But India is at such a stage of economic and political development that terrorists are unlikely to hold it back for long. Its $1.2 trillion economy, feeling the pinch of global recession, is still forecast to grow by more than 7 per cent.

India’s greatest strength, though, lies in the indomitable spirit of its people, of all faiths. The humanity of the overwhelming majority should continue to triumph over the periodic savagery of some of its extremists. One hopes and prays so.

 

Haroon Siddiqui is the Star’s editorial page editor emeritus. His column appears Thursday and Sunday. hsiddiq@thestar.ca

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