'Brutality, Incompetence And Cynical Duplicity'

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[Opening Remarks]

Well, first of all, I think, it is very difficult, as you said inthe beginning, to articulate exactly how deeply we were affected bywhat we saw. I think there were many days when it was almostimpossible to think, let alone to speak about what was happening,specially I think to those of us who grew up on those streets. And bythe way, I think we have all agreed before hand that we are going tocall the city by its proper name, which is Bombay. It is Bombay thatwas attacked and not Mumbai. And, by the way, I cannot say, and thisis the only time I will say it, the words "Chhatrapati ShivajiTerminus". This railway station is and always will be VT. And so,because these are the names of love, the others are the artificialnames imposed by the politicians. But these are the names of the citythat we love.

I think it was something like a perfect storm that happened inBombay, that you put together the incredible brutality of the killers,fuelled as we now know by industrial quantities of cocaine and otherdrugs that were found in their bodies and in their possessions.Combine that with, what I think is generally seen as a collapse of theIndian response, the Indian security response really was negligible.Three hours to get a fire engine to the Taj, a hotel that stands rightnext to the water. Twelve hours before the commandos were able to goin because they didn't have a plane to get to Bombay. Etc Etc. So that's the second part of it.

But I think the third part of it that has become increasingly clearis perhaps the dominant element and that is the absolute duplicity andhypocrisy of the Pakistani state. So much so that even today, thePresident of Pakistan, interviewed by the BBC said there is no evidencethat Pakistan was involved in this. Even when the father of thesurviving terrorist has identified his son as being a Pakistani, thePresident of Pakistan says that is not evidence.

So here you have these three forces coming together: Brutality,incompetence and cynical duplicity and what that did was to createthis horror.

I wanted to read just a brief passage about -- since we are talkingabout our beloved place, so let's talk about that. This is a passage I wrote in my novel,The Moor's Last Sigh andit was written actually after another series of atrocities in 1993explosions in Bombay which themselves were in the aftermath of thedestruction of Babri Masjid and so it's in that context. But I thinkit applies, and it certainly applies to what I think about, about thecity...

"Bombay was central, had been so from the moment of its creation:the bastard child of a Portuguese-English wedding, and yet the mostIndian of Indian cities. In Bombay all Indias met and merged. InBombay, too, all-India met what-was-not-India, what came across theblack water to flow into our veins. Everything north of Bombay wasNorth India, everything south of it was the South. To the east layIndia's East, and to the west, the world's West.Bombay was central;all rivers flowed into its human sea.

It was an ocean of stories; wewere all its narrators, and everybody talked at once.What magic was stirred into that insaan-soup, what harmony emergedfrom that cacophony! "In Punjab, Assam, Kashmir, Meerut--in Delhi, inCalcutta--from time to time they slit their neighbours' throats andtook warm showers, or red bubble-baths, in all that spuming blood.They killed you for being circumcised and they killed you because yourforeskins had been left on. Long hair got you murdered and haircutstoo; light skin flayed dark skin and if you spoke the wrong languageyou could lose your twisted tongue. In Bombay, such things neverhappened. --Never, you say? -- OK: Never is too absolute a word.Bombay was not inoculated against the rest of the country, and whathappened elsewhere, the language business for example, also spreadinto its streets. But on the way to Bombay the rivers of blood wereusually diluted, other rivers poured into them, so that by the timethey reached the city's streets the disfigurations were relativelyslight. -- Am I sentimentalising? Now that I have left it all behind,have I, among my many losses, also lost clear sight? -- It may be saidI have; but still I stand by my words. O Beautifiers of the City, didyou not see that what was beautiful in Bombay was that it belonged tonobody, and to all? Did you not see the everyday live-and-let-livemiracles thronging its overcrowded streets?

Bombay was central. In Bombay, as the old founding myth of thenation faded, the new god-and-mammon India was being born. The wealthof the country flowed through its exchanges, its ports. Those whohated India, those who sought to ruin it, would need to ruinBombay..."

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[On Pakistan's Dysfunctional Power Elite]

We need to say something about where they came from. And about theenormous resentment that the Pakistani power elite has felt about thesuccess of India. There is this you know this thriving... I mean, Ithink of course we can all, you know, elucidate the many things thatare wrong with India. That would be an interesting discussion but...another one. We don't have time.

But here you have this country that is, broadly speaking,democratic and, broadly speaking, economically successful and, broadlyspeaking, free. On the other hand you have this basket case, you know,where the Punjabis hate the Sindhis and everybody hates the North WestFrontier and Balochistan is trying to get away.

Laughs

And half the country already got away, you know. So you have thisdecreasingly functioning society which has no institutions on which afree society could be built, in which the army is increasingly Islamicised, the army leadership is increasingly Islamicised, the ISI-- the Inter Services Intelligence, the Pakistani intelligence agency-- is totally out of control and the civilian politicians are not thatmuch better. President Zardari, I remember, when, as Benazir Bhutto'shusband, he was known as Mr 10 Per cent because of the amount ofgovernment money he had siphoned off. And then in Pakistan theydecided that it was unfair, unjust to call him Mr Ten Per Cent. Sothey changed his nickname to Mr Twenty Per Cent which was a clearerreflection of his actual skills.

Here you have a country in the face of the world's agreement aboutwhat happened, just blindly refusing to accept it: "No, we don't know.What is the evidence? Where is the evidence? Show us the evidence. Andwe will fearlessly prosecute them..."

...

[Interjecting when a reference to root causes and justice came up]

Speaking of the roots, I think one of the, I think one of the mostworrying developments in the aftermath of the attacks, has been thewillingness of a number of commentators, particularly on the left, toplace the question of roots in the concept of justice.

People have said that the the reason for these attack was thatthere is injustice, that Indian Muslims are economically disadvantagedin India, that they have much lower educational qualifications, theyhave much higher unemployment rates and then of course there is thegreat injustice of Kashmir. As the argument be that while thoseinjustices exist that is the thing from which these actions spring.

And as our colleague Arundhati Roy wrote the other night, as she endedher article, she said: You have a very simple choice: Justice or civil war --and you choose. As Suketu said, that is the entire spectrum of possibility fromA to B.

[Suketu Mehta on his part agreed with what Rushdie had to sayand pointed out that the attack on Parliament in 2001 for examplepredated the Gujarat pogroms]

[Laughs]

I want to really take issue with this. Because I mean, I think,anyone who knows what I have written in my life knows that I am quiteseriously concerned with the condition of Kashmir. And I think thatIndian authorities are culpable in the way in which they have treatedthe ordinary people of Kashmir but so are Jaish-e-Mohammad andLashkar-e-Toiba.

And you have the people of Kashmir caught between a rock and a hardplace. You know, you have a kind of fanatic Islam arriving fromPakistan which is not in keeping with the sufistic Islam that istraditional in Kashmir. So you have this Arabised Islam being forcedupon people on the one hand, at the point of a gun, and on the otherhand you have Indian security forces treating all Kashmiris as if theyare terrorists, and often very brutally. So that's there.

But the point I want to make is that I do not believe that theterrorists such as these -- I do not believe that their project hasanything to do with justice.

Ask yourself the question that if the Kashmir problem were resolvetomorrow, if Israel-Palestine reached a lasting peace, do we believethat al-Qaeda would disband? Do we believe that Lashkar-e-Toiba andJaish-e-Mohammad would put their guns down and beat them intoplough-shears and say we would now be farmers because our job is done.

I mean the point about is that is laughable, right? And the pointabout that is that that is not their project. Their project is power.This is a power grab by the most obscurantist, revanchist,old-fashioned, medievalist idea of modern culture that attempts todrag the world back into the middle ages at the point of modern weaponry...

[The moderator: "You mentioned Arundhati Roy. This leads me to aquestion that came from the audience and I want to make sure that we get to asmany of these as we can. This question mentions another point that was made inthis article, in which the phrase was "the Taj is not our icon" and acriticism that ... and I know you have written lovingly about the Taj...  Addressthat criticism,that it may be somebody's icon but is not ours" [ArundhatiRoy in her article had actually written: "We're told one of these hotels isan icon of the city of Mumbai. That's absolutely true. It's an icon of the easy,obscene injustice that ordinary Indians endure every day."--Ed ]

I thought that particular remark in her piece was disgusting. The idea that the deaths of the rich don't matter because they are rich is disgusting. The idea thatthe 12 members of the Taj staff, who heroically gave their lives to save many of the guests, are to be discounted because theywere presumably the lackeys of the rich -- this is nauseating. This is amoral.And she should be ashamed of herself.

[On the ineptitude of the response -- why the private sector isdynamic, efficient and responsive while the public sector is not]

Because of the venality and cynicism of so much of the political class in India, which I think now people in India feel an enormousamount of scorn and contempt for. You saw what happened after theattacks, that the father of one of the police officers who was killed,was was visited by the chief minister of a state, he threw him out. Hedidn't want to have anything to do with you. And that's a prettygeneral attitude towards politicians in India. I mean, look at thescale of how bad the response was.

We now hear that Indian intelligence had informed the coast guardon that evening that they were expecting an attack -- aLashkar-e-Toiba attack by sea. That evening. And the coast guard hadbeen alerted to go and find the ship. They failed to find it. The Tajhotel had been repeatedly told about an attack by sea and to beef uptheir security which they did for about two months and then nothinghappens and so they took it down, the security down again. And thenthe attack happened.

The police officers who were wearing bullet-proof vests werewearing clothing so old that it could not stop the high velocityrifles that were being used and so three senior police officers werekilled within moments of the attack beginning because the bullets justwent through their protective armour.

The commandos who eventually went in were actually based in Delhiand had no dedicated aircraft. So they couldn't get to Bombay. It tookthem 12 hours to enter the buildings. And as I say, the fire engines.In a city that sits by the sea, hotels that sit by the water wereallowed to burn for three hours before water got to them.

Well, this... People could of course with some legitimacy say thatthe United States was caught unprepared as well you know, and theradios didn't work in the wall street zone...and you could of coursemake a similar catalogue of errors about what happened on that day onSept 2001...But it was awful to watch as this pile of mistakes grow,while meanwhile the city was burning...The fact that there were - fourterrorists in the Taj - who could hold on the Indian army for fourdays...when they were coked out of their heads, you know, snortingcoke in one nostril, while executing people...I mean, the idea thatthey were allowed to go on...for four days is unthinkable...

So yes, I agree with Mira that to change the emphasis to these kindof draconian security laws is wrong because what you need to do isclearly to fix absence of a security machinery, you know...You needarmoured vehicles, you need proper body protection, you need aircraftto bring people to the scene of the crime, you need a coastguard whichcan guard the coast, you know... I mean, India has a very longcoastline. And y'know Karachi is only a hundred mile away fromBombay... So the idea that there can be an attack by sea is obvious,you know...And as I say, there were warnings...American intelligencesays it told the Indian intelligence, many times. Indian intelligenceitself says that it told the Bombay police, many times about it pandyet there is this colossal failure. The problem is there and to put itin the other place is to put it in the wrong place.

And I do mean to say, that when Suketu was talking about thequality of the city is what annoyed people. There is a wonderfulremark by, I think, HL Mencken that "Puritanism is the haunting fearthat someone somewhere might be happy"...And, and I do think thathappiness is a part of the thing that really, along with Cocaine, getsup their nose. The idea that, as Suketu said, that this is a city ofpleasure makes it, in the same way as the people who tried to bombnight clubs in England, y'know, said that it was legitimate becausethere were these slags in short skirts there, y'know, who deserved todie because of their sexuality, y'know, so there is in this whole areaof the Islamic terrorist project a real dislike of open society, ofthe way people ordinarily live with each other. And they attack it.....

[On the role of Media]

I think it is the wrong argument. I mean, what would you have themedia do? To look away from the burning building? To look away fromthe slaughter in the railway station? Not to cover the siege of theChabad House?

[Did the media end up aiding and informing the terrorists?]

Well there were one or two moments of clumsiness like that where itwas reported on NDTV -- which I was, I was in London at that time andI was glued to 24 hours NDTV there... because you can get it onsatellite ... and someone reported that they received a phone callfrom a room on such and such floor of the Taj .... which then informedthe listening terrorists where people were...I mean that clearly was ablunder... and I think there were no doubt others, but I think on thewhole it is the wrong argument. That's not where the problem was. Imean, you had the journalists doing their best, you know, and sometimesthe best of journalism is not good enough...but that doesn't mean thatthat's where the problem was... the problem I think is elsewhere ...

...

There was a problem of the rolling news that an enormous amount ofwhat was announced as news was almost immediately afterwards, we weretold, was not correct... So one minute these killers were supposed tobe British, y'know or some of them anyway, and five minutes later theyweren't. And originally, there were 20 of them, then there 25, then itturned out that there were only 10 of them ... and maybe some gotaway... you know, They came by ship, No they didn't. The ship had beenarrested by the coastguard which was supposed to have been themothership. Oh, maybe there wasn't such a ship. They had a room in theTaj hotel. No they didn't. They were members of the hotel staff. No,they weren't. You know, so it was very difficult, I think, which iswhy I didn't know what to write at that time because the facts werechanging so much.

[On the real issue: Pakistan]

These are not the causes of what happened. I mean, this is no doubtsignificant and We should debate how the media covers events,whichever country we are in. we can no doubt say, they got this wrong,they got that right, you know, but this is not the issue. The issue is-- and it is important as there is a new President due to take officein this country -- what should be the world's policy towards Pakistan?It is a very important matter right now. Because you have the BritishPrime Minister two days ago, Gordon Brown said that Britishintelligence, following up leads of various terrorists' activities,they informed him that 75 per cent of what they were studying led backto Pakistan. All the roads of world's terrorism lead to Pakistan

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But it needs to be very very tough, that argument. It has to bemade with enormous force. Who makes it? Let's start with the Presidentof the United States. For the last years, since the 911 attacks, theAmerican government policy towards Pakistan was to give them a lot ofaid and to treat them as an ally in the war on terror.

So billions of dollar have been handed over first, mostly, to theMusharraf government and now its successor.