Republican values in a reign of terror

There is a strategic challenge that has to be grappled beyond simply empowering security services as shown by histories of persecution of earlier terror cases. Justice lies elsewhere for citizens; so does prevention of terror

Sukumar Muralidharan Delhi

Mumbai is a generous city, a city that for all its signs of decay still manages to accommodate any needy person in search of a livelihood. And as Mumbaikars showed the very day after the serial bombing of their city’s lifeline, it is a courageous city. Both by compulsion and by unswerving commitment to the basic credo of getting on with life, while likewise allowing all others, Mumbai is a city whose rhythms can never be silenced.

Following the July 11 attacks on Mumbai’s suburban transportation system, there was much lament in public fora that India’s struggle against terrorism had gone seriously adrift. The proposition was advanced, not unheard of before, that force can only be combated by an equal, opposite, perhaps even a disproportionate, application of the same principle. And there was some bemoaning of the fact that India’s campaign against terrorism, after its brief victory in the early 990s in the Punjab theatre, had lost sight of the basics in subsequent challenges: in Kashmir and in the proliferation of affronts that the Indian state has had to face in diverse corners of the country.

The closest perhaps that Mumbai has come to having its spirit broken was for two weeks in January 1993, when its streets were taken over by rampaging mobs intent on inflicting maximum violence on a vulnerable minority. And just two months later, it was paralysed into silence and submission when a retaliatory sequence of bombings devastated crucial nodes of its daily life.

Since that horrendous outrage, there have been several attacks on civic life in the city that have challenged the common citizen’s loyalty. And yet, with all the provocation, there has been no occasion since when civic peace has been disturbed, when the fabric of inter-community understanding has been in danger of being shredded.

If there is a lesson underlying all this, it is simply that a citizenry committed to peace and determined to preserve the civic responsibilities that make life in a big city possible, is the principal resource that a state can count upon in its struggle against terrorism. It is a curiosity then, that in all the policy deliberations that followed Mumbai’s tragedy, not to mention the advisory opinions that the media so generously proffered, this issue never featured in any significant manner.

As a term, “terrorism” may remain slippery and evasive, though there is little that is vague about the real world manifestations of the threat. India in particular, has suffered enormously from successive, and intimate, encounters with the random and insensate violence of terrorism, designed with deliberate intent, to disrupt the rhythms of daily life for a civilian population and sap public loyalty to the political order. The motives of terrorism could be various: a sense of grievance at real or imagined injustices, a quest for vengeance against palpably real atrocities. But in terms of its long-term calculus, terrorism invariably targets the will of an entire people, to sap their stated and unstated consent in the perpetuation of a political order.

That Mumbai has defied this calculus despite repeated provocation is a tribute to the resilience of the city and to the vital stakes that all of India has in its well-being. At the very least, it would seem, the citizens of Mumbai need recognition for their fortitude, an example for the whole country, and this can only come through pursuing the perpetrators of July 11 with all the determination and fairness that the law mandates.