Introspecting Aloud

Jethmalani on Kasab's right to legal defense

Somewhere down the line, the lawyers of our country (just like most other professions) have forgotten that they form an essential pillar of India's democratic structure, where their services are required, and not merely solicited. I don't consider it too much different from the defense forces, where if you are called for duty on behalf of the country, you are required to serve regardless of how unjust you find the cause of the war. As I have mentioned before, many Indians, in a misplaced sense of patriotism, ironically do the most un-patriotic of actions - attacking the very foundations of what we claim makes India different from other countries - a modern, democratic and free country. There are many ways to react to what these 10 young men did in Mumbai, but acting like a blood-thirsty lynch mob should not be one of them. That is what we think people are in those "other countries", right? The ones, where your limbs are chopped off for trivial reasons? So how are we being different by summarily sending off this lone caught boy to the gallows without even a modicum of justice? Jethmalani puts it quite well :

The measure of any civilisation is the way society treats those whom it hates.

So what kind of civilization do we stand for? If our country's founding fathers have made legal defense a fundamental right (Jethmalani has mentioned the specifics in his article), it only shows that they had a much grander vision of the Indian civilization than what Shiv Sena and their ilk can dream of. It is actually quite easy to make out when a position is wrong :) . As soon as you see that you are agreeing on a position with Shiv Sena, a red light should flash in your head. After all, this is a "sena" or army, which only believes in fighting with people from its own city rather than the actual aggressors in their city. (via Communalism Watch)

The age of celebrity terrorism?

The media and the blogosphere is filled with anger and vitriol. Perhaps, we Indians are too close to the scene of tragedy and are mostly incapable of seeing the large ramifications of what just happened in Mumbai. In this volatile time, perhaps some of the best analysis of the situation can be depicted by observers who are sufficiently detached from the incident and are therefore not as affected with the emotions running in this country. BBC has this brilliant analysis by Paul Cornish, who theorises about whether this is a new chapter of terrorism - "the age of celebrity terrorism".

Quite apart from the scores murdered and the hundreds injured, what the Mumbai terrorists really wanted was an exaggerated - and preferably extreme - reaction on the part of governments, the media and public opinion. In these terms, the attackers received as much attention as they could possibly have hoped for, and the Mumbai outrage can only be described as a very significant terrorist success.

Nothing too new there. The media frenzy about blame game, the war mongering by sections of the society. We all are reacting very predictably. But wait, here is the part of the article which is interesting.

The character of modern terrorism is widely understood to have been shaped by a mid-19th-Century idea known as the "propaganda of the deed" - a strategy for political change in which the message or cause is contained within, and expressed by the violent act. In a novel twist, the Mumbai terrorists might have embarked on propaganda of the deed without the propaganda, in the confident expectation that the rationalisation for the attack - the narrative - would be provided by politicians, the media and terrorism analysts. If so, then Mumbai could represent something rather different in the history of terrorism, and possibly something far more disturbing even than global jihad. Perhaps we have come to the point where casually self-radicalised, sociopathic individuals can form a loose organisation, acquire sufficient weapons and equipment for a few thousand dollars, make a basic plan of action and indulge in a violent expression of their generalised disaffection and anomie. These individuals indulge in terrorism simply because they can, while their audience concocts a rationale on their behalf. Welcome to the age of celebrity terrorism.

Read the complete article for a more detailed explanation behind the theory. We still don't have all the details of this attack to prove any of this. The only details that we have are premature and contantly revised and denied press revelations by the administration. But even if a bit of the theory of the article is true, we are in for really disturbing times. And it is even more unsettling to know about this possibility and watch the media and the government take the country inexorably to where the terrorists want it to be.

Is anger the best response to Mumbai?

I am not sure whether this is because of the subliminal mass indoctrination done by certain sections of the political class of this country, but I seriously disagree with the notion that Mumbai happened because India is "soft on terror". If being "hard on terror" is like behaving like Israel or USA, then I am sorry, but we have the wrong role models. Wouldn't it be more correct to call India incompetent in handling terror? It might sound similar but there is a big difference in our approach to the problem if we look at it differently. After all most citizens are convinced that our political leadership is incompetent, the bureaucracy is incompetent, the police and intelligence is incompetent. Wouldn't a mass incompetency of our entire political-police setup of the country have the same result when faced with such acts of terrorism? Why turn incidents like the Mumbai attacks a juvenile question of virility? That doesn't sound like a mature country! Why not grow up and just demand better and principled administrators of this country from now on? Question yourself. Why do we have only three pathetic major political parties in India? One, the Congress, which has no idea what it stands for and just prefers to "go with the flow". Two, the BJP who would rather make the entire country go in flames to achieve their 80 year old thinly disguised agenda of turning India into a Hindu equivalent of Pakistan. And three, the BSP who shamelessly exploits the image of a great man(Ambedkar) and has a leader who acts like a medieval queen. Have you ever thought why we haven't had a single political leader since Nehru (that also in his early days), who we have unquestionably admired and respected? Anger is justifiably the first response to what happened in Mumbai. But decisions taken in anger has rarely ever provided the best response. Why am I not seeing a single discussion, whether in the media or in the web, where people have sat down calmly and thought "why did these terrorists do this? What was their agenda?" After all these terrorists are not murderous psychopaths who kill because they like to kill. These are highly ideologically motivated people, and their leadership always have an agenda for every act that they do. They practice a form of politics in which the instruments are not speeches, lies and horse-trading like our politicians. Rather their instruments are acts of terror. But their aims are similar to politicians - to achieve a political goal. Political and security idiots from around the country are dismissing the whole act as merely "an act of destabilizing the country". While that might be true, it seems to me a dangerous over-simplification. Dangerous, because it is making the rest of India to stop thinking. They think they have got their answer to "why" and then keep raising the familiar ruckus of blaming the political class. Over the next few days, we would probably see the real reason of this attack come out in the open. Some say that it is already coming out in the open. As reports emerge of Pakistan considering moving a large part of its troops from the Afghan border to the Indian border in anticipation of a belligerent Indian response like after our parliament attack, the consequent results should be clear. The LeT and other terrorist leadership which organized the Mumbai attack were getting a lot of  heat from the combined US-Pakistani operations in Afghanistan border recently. The Indo-Pak escalations will take this heat off and help them consolidate their grip in that region. This theory might be proven wrong with information that we get in the coming days and months, but if this is the real agenda, then by irrational response to the Mumbai attack, we would only prove ourselves to be mere puppets in the hand of terrorists. For those eager to put labels on our country, being such a puppet would be a much better reason to call ourselves a soft state. I still prefer the term incompetent state though, even though idiot might be a better choice if it had not been so inflammatory. :) So the call I would like to make out to my country men, is to first defeat the terrorist's agenda (the real one, not the one which the political idiots have been mouthing), and then go ahead to discuss how to fix the country so as to prevent it from being so vulnerable and so easily manipulated.

Time magazine on the attackers

Nice analysis by Time. About the background of the attackers:

What we should be certain of, though, is that the Mumbai attackers were combat trained. You do not sustain a military assault for three days, taking only combat naps, unless you know what you are doing. You have to have been shot at before. You cannot be intimidated by flash-bang grenades, or commandos fast-roping down the side of a building. And it is almost certain that the planners of the attack understood that the only way to get into India with the amount of weapons and explosives used in the attacks was by sea — the risk of smuggling them in over land was too great.

About lessons learnt from the attack:

There are two lessons we should be taking away from Mumbai. The first is that all large cities are vulnerable to attack. Even if it doubled the size of its police force, there is no way New York City could could ever protect its hotels, schools or other public buildings from attacks of this type, short of turning them into fortresses. There is no way for the NYPD to prevent a car bombing on Wall Street, sending the stock market into an even worse plunge, or a single suicide bomber from blowing himself up in the subway. Plans are available on the Internet for making bombs like these with ingredients available in hardware stores. The second reminder we should take from Mumbai is that the longer the wars go on in Iraq and Afghanistan, the more combat-experienced men there will be available to planners of terror attacks. And we should count on the veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan going global — there is no reason they could not blend into the waves of immigrants crossing the Mediterranean from Northern Africa to Europe every day.