As the tragedy unfolds in Mumbai, I find myself wondering why no one is bringing up this fact:
This is by all definitions a foreign attack on Indian soil. India is not a Muslim country, and its own Muslim minority, apart from Kashmiris, by and large does not have a beef with the central government. There is no indigenous jihadi movement (SIMI’s radicalisation is, of course, a point of contention); what there is, is mostly encouraged, if not overtly funded, by Pakistan. In fact, India is the only non-Muslim country in the world where foreign-supported Islamic terrorists have killed hundreds of people since 2001. (I’m discounting Israel, as I think its problems are largely home-grown.)
So here’s the thing: If the U.S. was almost unanimously considered as being within its legal rights to attack Afghanistan after 9/11, wouldn’t an Indian attack on Pakistan be equally justified? Doesn’t a country have the right to defend its citizens from outside aggression? What, if not an act of war, would you call 10 simultaneous terrorist strikes in a country’s financial capital? And, most importantly, does the fact that both you and your opponent possess nuclear weapons mean you cannot retaliate at all?
Then again, I might be totally wrong. Here’s RAND’s Christine Fair in today’s NYT:
“There are a lot of very, very angry Muslims in India. [...] The economic disparities are startling and India has been very slow to publicly embrace its rising Muslim problem. You cannot put lipstick on this pig. This is a major domestic political challenge for India.”
“The public political face of India says, ‘Our Muslims have not been radicalized.’ But the Indian intelligence apparatus knows that’s not true. India’s Muslim communities are being sucked into the global landscape of Islamist jihad. [...] Indians will have a strong incentive to link this to Al Qaeda. ‘Al Qaeda’s in your toilet!’ But this is a domestic issue. This is not India’s 9/11.”
i think u are very right, but we have got a diff type of blood altogether it boils but freezes before it can do any thing. We Indians suffer from memory loss so dont worry everything will be fine nothing will be done and once again we will wait for another attack on ourself and we will talk again
There is a key difference between what happened in Bombay and what happed on 9/11. Pakistan has clearly come out condemning the attacks and it is a safe bet to imagine that the civilian elements in the government had absolutely nothing to do with it. The reasoning behind the American attack on Afghanistan was the refusal of the Taliban to hand over Osama bin Laden and other leading AQ members. The Taliban government for all intents and purposes had directly supported the attacks of 9/11 in American eyes. This is not the case with what happened in Bombay.
“The Taliban government for all intents and purposes had directly supported the attacks of 9/11 in American eyes.”
In Indian eyes, this is exactly the case with the Mumbai attacks. ISI is very much part of the governing civilian-military system in Pakistan, and — again, from the Indian perspective — whether the civilian component is responsible is beside the point. LeT is an ISI client, if not its creation, hence Pakistan is directly involved.
Now there seems to be a growing retaliation mood among hindu hardliners also…the malegaon blast is the beginning…the country seems to be going for a religious retaliation. If the central govt of india remains inactive, as it is to the growing intensity of the mumbai like attacks, the country may lead into a civil war..
The so called hot blood leaders also are showing their power to protest against some movie or the people of one state of India working in the other state…now where they have gone..no body knows..
Arab/Muslim states have funded their proxies, Hezbollah, Hamas and the PLO to help wage a war they couldn’t hope to win by direct confrontation. That doesn’t sound to home grown to me.