Dedicated to the memory of Mourad Amarsy and Loumia Hiridjee Amarsy, who were murdered  at the Oberoi Hotel on Wednesday, November 26, 2008.

NEW DELHI
December 6, 2008

I am writing this in my hotel room as we prepare to return home to the U.S. after a Thanksgiving vacation here spent contemplating the bitterest of harvests.  Our planned American-style Thanksgiving dinner with relatives never made it to the table.

I can see dawn breaking through the heavy morning mist over the Houses of Parliament.  Seven years ago, almost to the day, I was sitting here, perhaps in this same room, when Parliament was attacked by a band of murderous assassins.  Six terrorists and six defending policemen were killed in the gun battle.  Utter chaos followed, India and Pakistan almost went to war brandishing nuclear arsenals, some eight hundred Indian soldiers lost their lives in the “build-up” over the next six months, but outright war was somehow averted. What will happen this time?

On Friday, November 28, the Taj Hotel was still burning. The terrorists were still rampaging there. Smoke was coming out of Nariman House, the Chabad-Lubavitch center, where six people had been brutally murdered. The blood had dried on the floor of the train station, still littered with abandoned luggage, caps, shawls, scarves, dupattas, shoes, slippers, sandals, chappals – desperate detritus of desperate people. All this we could see in the repeated loops playing endlessly on TV.

We had just heard the news of our friends’ deaths in the Oberoi/Trident Hotel.  And in this ongoing nightmare, in front of the same hotel, we saw a man holding a press conference.

This man was Narendra Modi  of the BJP ¹, Chief Minister of the neighboring state of Gujarat, where, in 2002, he had orchestrated one of the most vicious pogroms in recent Indian history:  over two thousand Muslims slaughtered, women and girls systematically raped and killed, 150,000 displaced and still homeless. What was he doing there in Bombay? He was there in no official capacity, he was in the way of ongoing security operations. He was there to proclaim this was “India’s 9/11” and fan the flames of hatred against Muslim Pakistan. This was in less than 36 hours since the attacks began – there had been no official announcement about the terrorists’ nationalities as yet.

USA Post 9/11 Legacy:

The 9/11 political cliché is being used as short-hand to rouse India to “fight back”, to take the fight to the enemy, to follow the example of  the redoubtable George W. Bush (who is not otherwise that popular here and no matter that the U.S. War on Terror was widely regarded here as a catastrophic failure a few days ago). “Enough is Enough” blares a 24/7 cable TV channel, with the ubiquitous, garish  Fox News style splash.

What is conveniently being overlooked is the rest of the corrosive residue of 9/11:  Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, abrogation of civil rights, violations of human rights, torture, extreme rendition, roundup of immigrants as “terrorists”, Neighborhood Watch snitches, no trials, show trials, and as yet no “results”.  In fact, the Indian media closely followed and publicized cases of Indians being dragged off trains in Boston, murdered in Phoenix, dying at the MDC Brooklyn as well as a welter of cases from the U.K. They expressed indignation and horror then, but are baying for blood now. 

Indian Government Response

The Prime Minister of India is Dr. Manmohan Singh, an Oxbridge-trained economist by profession, a reluctant politician at best, a man of uncommon and uncompromised probity and intellect (truly unique for a politician, and not just in India). He (and more importantly, Sonia Gandhi who is the President of the Congress Party and the real power behind the throne) does not appear to be tempted to give in to the jingoistic war cries of the rabid right. But national elections are due in a few months, and if the opposition’s “Soft on Security” charge gains traction, things might change. Elections in some states are going on right now and their results may be crucial in determining the politicians’ response – the BJP has lost no time in putting up election posters showing a burning Taj Hotel with the message “Fight Terror – Vote BJP”.

India’s options are limited at best, if the terrorists were indeed from Pakistan, as seems highly likely.  Being railroaded into war against a nuclear-armed neighbor bespeaks of a certain insanity and Dr. Singh and Sonia (everyone in India seems to be on a first name basis with her) are eminently sane. (The 2002 confrontation with Pakistan was under the aegis of a BJP government). Furthermore, the Congress Party won the last election running on a populist (out of the 1.2 billion citizens, the billion Indians on whom the BJP’s “India Shining” sun had not shone), secular (the 150 million Muslims, the 100 million “tribals”, the countless lower castes and untouchables) platform. They realize that it is this constituency that will bear the brunt at home of the abusive aspects of a Bush-style 9/11 response. And so far, they’re not going there.  Finally, Dr. Singh is putting to the test the axiom that democracies (symbolized in India by the picture of Parliament above) do not go to war against each other. President Zardari of Pakistan has echoed the same sentiment.

Coda: 

Mourad and Louima leave behind three beautiful chidren -- Naeem, Ilana and Rayane, aged six to twelve.  They are with their grandmother in Bombay. My friend and their uncle, Ghoulam, has flown in from Montreal to make arrangements for their future. May their future never see such an atrocity as this one.

The Amarsys belong to the Khoja Shia Muslim community, which is very close-knit  even though its members are widely dispersed across the globe. The world-wide community has come together bound in grief and caring and will be the chidren's extended family.

Of the more than 170 victims of the attack (no official list is available yet), 7 are known to have been Jewish, over 40 Muslim, 16 Christian and the rest mostly Hindu. The killers were clearly no respecters of religion.

Om Shanti. Shanti. Shanti.

Footnote:

(1) Narendra Modi is a leading light of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Hindu fundamentalist party whose avowed aim is to subvert the secular Indian Constitution in favor of a Hindu India. The BJP is the main opposition party at the national level but is in power in many states, such as Gujarat. This is the same Modi under whose aegis, with State Police actively complicit in many murders, some two thousand Muslims were killed in Gujarat in 2002.  In a rare act of principle, the State Department has denied Modi visas to enter the U. S. as a foreign government official who "was responsible for or directly carried out, at any time, particularly severe violations of religious freedom". 

The BJP is the offshoot and political arm of an organization called the RSS, one of whose members assassinated Mahatma Gandhi in 1948 for being too accommodating towards Muslims.