Pax Indica: India and the World of the Twenty-first Century by Shashi Tharoor Read Free Book Online Page A

openness of the city. Crowds flock around it, made up of foreign tourists and local yokels; touts hawk their wares; boats bob in the waters, offering cruises out to the open sea. The teeming throngs around it daily reflect India’s diversity, with Parsi gentlemen out for their evening constitutionals, Muslim women in burqas taking the sea air, Goan Catholic waiters enjoying a break from their duties at the stately Taj Mahal Hotel, Indians from every corner of the country chatting in a multitude of tongues. On 26 November, barred and empty, ringed by police barricades, as it was seen on TV, the Gateway of India—the gateway
to
India, and to India’s soul—stood as mute testimony to the most serious assault on the country’s pluralist democracy.
    The terrorists who heaved their bags laden with weapons up the stepsof the wharf to begin their assault on the Taj, like their cohorts at a dozen other locations around the city, knew exactly what they were doing. Theirs was an attack on India’s financial nerve centre and commercial capital, a city emblematic of the country’s energetic thrust into the twenty-first century. They struck at symbols of the prosperity that was making the Indian model so attractive to the globalizing world—luxury hotels, a café favoured by foreigners, the city’s Jewish centre. The terrorists also sought to polarize Indian society by claiming to be acting to redress the grievances, real and imagined, of India’s Muslims. And by singling out Americans and Israelis for special attention, they demonstrated that their brand of Islamist fanaticism is anchored less in the absolutism of pure faith than in the geopolitics of hatred.
    The attack on the Jewish Chabad-Lubavitch centre and the killing of its residents was particularly sad, since India is justifiably proud of the fact that it is the only country in the world with a Jewish diaspora going back 2500 years where there has never been a single instance of anti-Semitism (except when the Portuguese came to inflict it in the sixteenth century). This is the first time that it has been unsafe to be Jewish in India—one more proof that the terrorists were not Indian, since Indian Muslims have never had any conflict with Indian Jews, but that they were pursuing a foreign agenda. Indeed, this was clearly not just an attack on India; the terrorists were also taking on the ‘Jews and crusaders’ of Al Qaeda lore. With this tragedy, India became the theatre of action for a global battle.
    After the killings, the platitudes flowed like blood. Terrorism is unacceptable; the terrorists are cowards; the world stands united in unreserved condemnation of this latest atrocity, and so mind-numbingly on. Commentators in America tripped over themselves to pronounce the night and day of carnage India’s 9/11. But India has endured many attempted 9/11s, notably a ferocious assault on its Parliament in December 2001 that nearly led to all-out war against the assailants’ sponsors, Pakistan. In 2008 alone, terrorist bombs had taken lives in Jaipur, in Ahmedabad, in Delhi and (in an eerie dress rehearsal for the effectiveness of synchronicity) several different places on one searing day in Assam. Jaipur is the lodestar of Indian tourism to Rajasthan; Ahmedabad is the primary city of Gujarat, the state that is projected by many as a poster child for India’s development, with a localGDP growth rate of 14 per cent; Delhi is the nation’s political capital and India’s window to the world; Assam was logistically convenient for terrorists from across a porous border. Mumbai combined all the four elements of its precursors: by attacking it, the terrorists hit India’s economy, its tourism and its internationalism, and they took advantage of the city’s openness to the world.
    So the terrorists hit multiple targets in Mumbai, both literally and figuratively. They caused death and destruction to our country, searing India’s psyche, showing up the limitations of its