TODAY ONCE more comes that anniversary of the worst jihadi terrorist attack on Indian soil. It comes when Hamas has forced sensible people to realise that jihadism is the Nazism of our times. What happened in Mumbai on this day twenty-five years ago did not alert the world sufficiently to this diabolical, barbarous ideology because the response of India’s leaders to what happened in Mumbai was feeble and passive.
After seeing the flattening of Gaza and the death of more than 15,000 people – many of them children – the world is condemning Israel in one voice. There have been protests everywhere in support of Palestine, and the horror of what Hamas did on October 7 has faded into the background, because Israel’s response has been more brutal than it needed to be. It is wrong to punish children for crimes committed by adult terrorists, but it is important to remember where this started. It started with a jihadi attack so evil that it is hard to find words to describe the whole horror of it. Apologists for Hamas like to call it a ‘resistance movement’. It is not. It is a jihadist terrorist outfit and must be called this. Israel did not need to flatten Gaza in its rage and sorrow but what should it have done? And we must remember that it would not have come to this if the hostages had been released.
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There have been powerful voices urging Israel to show restraint instead of rage. And in doing this, there has been praise for India’s restraint after 26/11. This has been said by important international columnists. I need to say emphatically that they are not just wrong, they seem unaware of what really happened. Indian officials in power at that time are these days preening proudly about how well they handled a very difficult situation. They did not. They did nothing more than wander about the forums of the world weeping and wailing.
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Bharat-India-Bharat: The visual transformation of the Indian Constitution, Part 1 When our Prime Minister met Pakistan’s prime minister for the first time after the attack on Mumbai, he diminished its awful enormity by agreeing to also talk about Baluchistan. Why he did this remains one of the great mysteries of Indian diplomacy since it amounted to an admission that what Pakistan’s ‘non-state actors’ did in Mumbai was no different to Indian meddling in Baluchistan. If we were meddling, we were doing a bad job.
As someone who lives in Mumbai in that vicinity where the attacks took place, what has horrified me is how little has been done since 26/11 to strengthen our defences against jihadi terrorism. The Congress Party won the general election just months after the attack and convinced itself that this meant that the Indian people had forgiven and forgotten its incompetent, cowardly and shameful response to the worst terrorist attack ever in India. So nothing happened in the aftermath.
If another group of jihadi terrorists chooses to return to Mumbai in a small boat, they will find it as easy to do what they did last time. Nothing changed then, and nothing has changed now. In Mumbai’s streets you sometimes see armoured cars and men with ‘commando’ printed on their shirts, but the city’s policemen remain untrained in counterterrorism despite the current mood of aggressive Hindutva.
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Jihadism is more than a bunch of demonic killers. It is an ideology that is based on the insane belief that until every person on the planet becomes a believer in Allah and Islam, they must continue the ‘holy war’ that they think is sanctioned by their religion. In India we should have done more to convince our own Muslim communities that this is a very bad idea, and they need to remember that since India’s own political ideas are based on secularism, we do not like religious warriors.
When ‘secular, socialist’ Congress leaders ruled for decades they seemed to believe there was no reason to do this. When Hindutva leaders took charge, they went out of their way to show that they preferred Hindus to Muslims. Since this led in the past ten years to the rise of violent, religious ideas among Hindus, it lost them the right to tell Muslims that violent, religious ideas were wrong. If you encourage one lot to believe in this kind of pathetic rubbish, you will inevitably encourage the rise of similar ideas among the rest. So there has been the revival of violence in the name of Khalistan in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. And we have seen more support for jihadism among Indian Muslims than ever before.
What saddens me is that the 26/11 attack has been erased not just from the minds of ordinary Indians but of our leaders. When the 9/11 anniversary comes around every year, there are ceremonies of remembrance attended by the highest American leaders. A memorial has come up where the twin towers stood in New York and the names of those who were killed are engraved on the walls of its decorative pools. In Mumbai, there are no memorials of any consequence and although this newspaper had a remembrance ceremony for some years, almost nobody else does. Forgetting is to allow jihadis victory. Israel’s response in Gaza has been brutal and merciless and should end. Killing babies is not revenge; it is barbarism. But having said this, I wish India had done more when Mumbai was attacked.
TODAY ONCE more comes that anniversary of the worst jihadi terrorist attack on Indian soil. It comes when Hamas has forced sensible people to realise that jihadism is the Nazism of our times. What happened in Mumbai on this day twenty-five years ago did not alert the world sufficiently to this diabolical, barbarous ideology because the response of India’s leaders to what happened in Mumbai was feeble and passive.
After seeing the flattening of Gaza and the death of more than 15,000 people – many of them children – the world is condemning Israel in one voice. There have been protests everywhere in support of Palestine, and the horror of what Hamas did on October 7 has faded into the background, because Israel’s response has been more brutal than it needed to be. It is wrong to punish children for crimes committed by adult terrorists, but it is important to remember where this started. It started with a jihadi attack so evil that it is hard to find words to describe the whole horror of it. Apologists for Hamas like to call it a ‘resistance movement’. It is not. It is a jihadist terrorist outfit and must be called this. Israel did not need to flatten Gaza in its rage and sorrow but what should it have done? And we must remember that it would not have come to this if the hostages had been released.
There have been powerful voices urging Israel to show restraint instead of rage. And in doing this, there has been praise for India’s restraint after 26/11. This has been said by important international columnists. I need to say emphatically that they are not just wrong, they seem unaware of what really happened. Indian officials in power at that time are these days preening proudly about how well they handled a very difficult situation. They did not. They did nothing more than wander about the forums of the world weeping and wailing.
When our Prime Minister met Pakistan’s prime minister for the first time after the attack on Mumbai, he diminished its awful enormity by agreeing to also talk about Baluchistan. Why he did this remains one of the great mysteries of Indian diplomacy since it amounted to an admission that what Pakistan’s ‘non-state actors’ did in Mumbai was no different to Indian meddling in Baluchistan. If we were meddling, we were doing a bad job.
As someone who lives in Mumbai in that vicinity where the attacks took place, what has horrified me is how little has been done since 26/11 to strengthen our defences against jihadi terrorism. The Congress Party won the general election just months after the attack and convinced itself that this meant that the Indian people had forgiven and forgotten its incompetent, cowardly and shameful response to the worst terrorist attack ever in India. So nothing happened in the aftermath.
If another group of jihadi terrorists chooses to return to Mumbai in a small boat, they will find it as easy to do what they did last time. Nothing changed then, and nothing has changed now. In Mumbai’s streets you sometimes see armoured cars and men with ‘commando’ printed on their shirts, but the city’s policemen remain untrained in counterterrorism despite the current mood of aggressive Hindutva.
Jihadism is more than a bunch of demonic killers. It is an ideology that is based on the insane belief that until every person on the planet becomes a believer in Allah and Islam, they must continue the ‘holy war’ that they think is sanctioned by their religion. In India we should have done more to convince our own Muslim communities that this is a very bad idea, and they need to remember that since India’s own political ideas are based on secularism, we do not like religious warriors.
When ‘secular, socialist’ Congress leaders ruled for decades they seemed to believe there was no reason to do this. When Hindutva leaders took charge, they went out of their way to show that they preferred Hindus to Muslims. Since this led in the past ten years to the rise of violent, religious ideas among Hindus, it lost them the right to tell Muslims that violent, religious ideas were wrong. If you encourage one lot to believe in this kind of pathetic rubbish, you will inevitably encourage the rise of similar ideas among the rest. So there has been the revival of violence in the name of Khalistan in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. And we have seen more support for jihadism among Indian Muslims than ever before.
What saddens me is that the 26/11 attack has been erased not just from the minds of ordinary Indians but of our leaders. When the 9/11 anniversary comes around every year, there are ceremonies of remembrance attended by the highest American leaders. A memorial has come up where the twin towers stood in New York and the names of those who were killed are engraved on the walls of its decorative pools. In Mumbai, there are no memorials of any consequence and although this newspaper had a remembrance ceremony for some years, almost nobody else does. Forgetting is to allow jihadis victory. Israel’s response in Gaza has been brutal and merciless and should end. Killing babies is not revenge; it is barbarism. But having said this, I wish India had done more when Mumbai was attacked.
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