In his new book, Amitava Kumar makes his intention plain: “presenting the anti-terrorism state as the biggest bungler”. What follows is an idiosyncratic ramble through what used to be called the war on terror. It is part reportage, part extended art review, part political polemic, but all of it comes from a leftist perspective, one that views the police and military as innately untrustworthy, American foreign policy as trigger-happy, and Muslims, including many of those directly implicated in terrorism, first and foremost as victims.
At the heart of the book lie two fascinating stories. The first is of Hemant Lakhani, a Gujarati businessman in prison for selling what he thought was a shoulder-fired missile to an undercover FBI agent posing as a go-between for a fictitious Somali terrorist group. The second is the tale of Shahawar Matin Siraj, a 24-year-old Pakistani immigrant serving a 30-year sentence for conspiring to bomb a New York subway station.
In between these two markers, Kumar ranges widely for fuel to feed a book-length fire. By the final page, we encounter, among other things, the syllabus of a class on the literature of 9/11 that Kumar teaches at Vassar, a visit to an alcoholic colonel in Kashmir, the summary of an Anurag Kashyap film, passages from novels, and the author’s description of the work of a gaggle of obscure artists who challenge the excesses of an allegedly security-obsessed America.
Along the way, Kumar builds, with considerable finesse, a case against the brutality and incompetence of the state, both Indian and American. In Maharashtra, a Muslim family is tortured after the police mistake a harmless textile machine part for a projectile. In Delhi, Kashmiri academic S.A.R. Geelani goes through unspeakable suffering when security agencies interpret a phone conversation about a domestic squabble as complicity in the 2001 terrorist attack on Parliament. Under torture in Egypt, the Libyan Al Qaeda operative Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi makes false allegations about Iraq’s quest to acquire weapons of mass destruction that prefigure America’s ill-fated invasion of that country.
One need not share Kumar’s worldview to find much to commend in this book. The reporting is often outstanding and the prose uniformly high-gloss. The portrait of Lakhani, the convicted arms dealer, alone is worth the cover price. With a novelist’s skill and eye for detail, the author brings to life a strangely hapless creature, more an object of pity than of fear. The Lakhani who emerges is about as far from a sophisticated international arms dealer as possible. A businessman of modest means, Lakhani claims to be friends with Tony Blair, Libya’s Col Gaddafi, Benazir Bhutto and a clutch of African dictators. He is clueless enough about purchasing a missile on the black market in Ukraine to suggest paying by cheque rather than cash.
Morally, the author finds little to separate Lakhani from Habib Rehman, the Pakistan-born FBI informant who paid generously to snare the tall-talking Gujarati. Rehman too is a failed businessman, with a long history of trouble with the law. In fact, in some ways, the two men are unlikely doppelgangers. For Kumar, the case reveals “the informant as the mirror-image of the defendant: a man of small means, beset with difficulties, projecting himself onto a grand stage.”
If Kumar is at his best as an enterprising reporter, he’s at his worst as an art critic. It’s hard not to wince as he recreates, in loving detail, the story of an obscure documentary here, an avant garde art show there, a portrait of a performance artist some place else. It’s not merely that the works are probably better experienced in person than on page, but that the artists all happen to share the author’s political leanings. There are few things duller than the mutual approbation of the like-minded.
More seriously, Kumar fails to acknowledge that only in open societies like the US and India are artists and authors free to criticise the governments that keep them safe. It may be an inconvenient truth, but in the end faceless FBI agents, CIA operatives and army officers in Kashmir who Kumar effortlessly derides are the ones who allow him and others like him to practice their craft.
(Sadanand Dhume is the author of My Friend the Fanatic: Travels with a Radical Islamist).
