Why the terrorist attack on Mumbai is called India’s 9/11
Right when this was occurring, the relationship between 9/11 and Mumbai began to be made by the media.
Its become something of a cliché now. Anytime there is any attack they start to say this is our 9/11. You know whether it is the attack in London or the attack and Indonesia, everybody claims a terrorist attack now as their 9/11. There is something ominous about this. It means the state has to then follow the playbook laid out by the Bush Administration right after it experienced of course its 9/11. Which is to say you then go and start a war against an adversary that you claim did the attack and simultaneously, you begin to create a security apparatus inside your state to restrict the civil liberties of all people who live within that country.
So 9/11 or branding something as 9/11 has come to have these two aspects. One, go to war against somebody without any kind of full police investigation that is decisively shown us who has done the act. So one, a foreign war, secondly, what you might even consider to be a war against your own population. Where you start to restrict civil liberties far in excess of anything necessary. And of course, always fighting the last terrorist attack. So you build up this enormous apparatus of restrictions which is dealing with the previous attack against population and not trying to forecast the safety of the population into the near future. That is why the media started to talk about Mumbai’s 9/11.
The third reason is, the media had not really called any of the other attacks in Mumbai, and there have been many since 1992, 9/11, precisely because most of those attacks the have taken place in areas which afflicted the working poor, working-class, and middle-class people. This attack, for the first time, targeted places of the top elite. Very expensive hotels, leading restaurants, and this therefore, brought this kind of assault into the bedrooms, into the restaurant of the elite. And they found then that this is their 9/11. The other attacks were not called 9/11. There were the kind normal conditions of suffering borne by ordinary people in places like Bombay. So for these reasons, the media ratcheted up the rhetoric about this being Mumbai’s 9/11.
– Vijay Prashad
Who Sonal Shah is
Sonal Shah is a second-generation, South Asian, Indian American, who has just been picked, as you said, by the Obama team, as part of the transition team. There has been a severe controversy in the United States around her choice of even being on the transition team, and the primary reason is because she has two different lives. One life is as a liberal part of the whole Podesta establishment, etc., of the Democratic Party, and the other, which is still now unknown in the broader American public sphere, is that she has significant connections to the Hindu right wing, which Teesta, for instance, has referred to, etc.
She, herself, there’s documentary evidence that she served on the governing council of an organization called the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America, which is kind of a sister organization for the Hindu right-wing nationalists violent organization back in India, here in the United States, from the period 1998- 2001. She then went on to coordinate the national—became a national coordinator for the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America for the earthquake relief operations in 2001. And we know that the funds generated from there were used in an extremely discriminatory fashion back in India wherein villages being reconstructed after the earthquake were broken up into Hindu villages and Muslim villages, where earlier they were integrated villages. Lower-caste villages and upper-caste villages, where earlier there were integrated villages. So, she has a record for a certain period of time that’s very easily traced
She has issued a statement and said her quote, personal politics have nothing in common with the views espoused by VHPA or any other such organization, that she’s always condemned in the politics of division of ethnic or religious hatred or violence and intimidation as a political tool.
That may be true, but when she says something like—if that statement had been preceded by a line which said that I have participated in this organization, etc., etc., etc., then one would say, “ok, maybe there is a particular way in which we can read it, we can give this person a second chance, etc., etc.” But to obfuscate the fact that she’s had significant involvement with this group in the past, immediately puts the needle of doubt back on again. Especially because the first statement wasn’t issued by her, the first statement was issued by her family, which came out and said that the family as a whole didn’t ever have anything to do with this politics. In other words the family—and she herself defended her family saying that her family, again, has nothing to do with these politics, that they’re only involved with religious and cultural organizations, whereas her father has been out on election campaigns for the Hindu right-wing party. I mean, when Modi, “the butcher of Gujarat,” came to the United States the last time, the time before he was denied a visa, he stayed with them. The point is very simply that her statement is a good statement, but I think it is important to note that even within that good statement there’s a fair amount of obfuscation.
– Biju Mathew
Vijay Prashad, Chair of South Asian History and Director of International Studies at Trinity College, in Hartford, Connecticut and a regular contributor to Counterpunch and Frontline India. His latest book is “The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World.” His article on the Mumbai attacks comes out in Counterpunch today.
Biju Mathew, New York City based activist with the Campaign to Stop Funding Hate and the Coalition Against Genocide. He is a co-founder of the New York Taxi Worker Alliance and is the author of “Taxi! Cabs and Capitalism in New York City.” His latest article is published in Samar magazine dot org. its called “As the Fires Die: The Terror of the Aftermath.”
– from democracynow. 1 Dec 2008.