After my last post on the Mumbai attacks, I actually found it difficult to post on anything. In the backdrop of the senseless tragedy, everything else seemed to be superficial. I’m not surprised that my next post is also on 26/11 albeit on some of the analyses following the attacks. Instead of putting everything in perspective unfortunately most of what I read made me angry all over again. Why is there so much intellectual dishonesty in the name of objective analysis?
Take this article from Sandip Roy in the Outlook ( link) titled ” Mumbai Terrorists wear uniform of Young India”. Using convoluted logic, he tries to tie the attacks to India’s 9% growth in GDP which , per Mr. Roy, leaves behind people like the young terrorists who held Mumbai hostage. Mr.Roy ends his pointless article with this gem
I don’t know who the young man in the VERSACE t-shirt was.
He might be an Islamic militant. He might be a frustrated small city boy shut out of the IT economy. He might be a village boy who trained in a camp somewhere.
Oh sure – it was his frustration at being shut out from the IT economy that drove him to find the Chabad house and murder a rabbi and his wife while their 2 year old son looked on. And of course the rich-poor dichotomy totally explains why those young men sprayed the platform at CST with bullets and also the Cama Public hospital.
How can we hope to secure the world against terrorism when we cannot even bring ourselves to agree that it was religion that drove those men into Mumbai with the intent of killing ? There – I said it.
Unfortunately, thats not the only Roy who uses pretzel-like logic to sound like an apologist for the massacre. Our very own Arundhati Roy ( sometimes I wished she stopped writing after she wrote ” The God of Small things” which will always be one of my favorite books) chimed in with a long piece that includes this:
There is a fierce, unforgiving fault-line that runs through the contemporary discourse on terrorism. On one side (let’s call it Side A) are those who see terrorism, especially “Islamist” terrorism, as a hateful, insane scourge that spins on its own axis, in its own orbit and has nothing to do with the world around it, nothing to do with history, geography or economics. Therefore, Side A says, to try and place it in a political context, or even try to understand it, amounts to justifying it and is a crime in itself.
Side B believes that though nothing can ever excuse or justify terrorism, it exists in a particular time, place and political context, and to refuse to see that will only aggravate the problem and put more and more people in harm’s way. Which is a crime in itself.
She then goes on to disingenously state:
But where would Side A accommodate the sayings of Babu Bajrangi of Ahmedabad, India, who sees himself as a democrat, not a terrorist? He was one of the major lynchpins of the 2002 Gujarat genocide……And where, in Side A’s scheme of things, would we place the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh bible, We, or, Our Nationhood Defined by MS Golwalkar, who became head of the RSS in 1944
Ms.Roy’s main point is that we must understand the context in which the attacks occurred and then she tries to tie them to what she terms as acts of terror by the Indian state ( such as training the LTTE). Nuance, people, nuance!
Acutally , Ms.Roy , you are the one who sees things as black and white; as a dichotomy between what is “right”( i.e. your views ) and what is “wrong” ( i.e. everyone else’s views). Did you ever stop to think that there is also a Side C that sees all violence against civilians as wrong and all terrorism – Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, Christian, state-sponsored etc as unacceptable and also sees what happened in Mumbai as un-understandable and unforgivable and hopefully unrepeatable. There is also perhaps a Side D and a Side E .. and a Side Z. Simplifying issues into a simple Side A- Side B question is morally wrong and ethically questionable.
I subscribe to a left-leaning mailing list and post 26/11 my mailbox has been inundated with emails from the list members telling me what to think. There was one member who is convinced that the displacement of slum dwellers from Delhi by the government is morally equivalent to what happened in Mumbai.
Can’t we allow the dead the dignity of being mourned? Can’t we allow Mumbai and India to feel anger without obfuscating issues with intellectually and logically deficient arguments that are devoid of any empathy for the victims?
Tell me : has the world gone mad or have I ?
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