-- India's response to the Mumbai attack has included possible war on Pakistan. But Arundhati Roy argues that terrorism must be fought with justice, or civil war will result. --
We've forfeited the rights to our own tragedies. As the carnage in Mumbai raged on, day after horrible day, our 24-hour news channels told us we were watching India's September 11, 2001. Like actors in a Bollywood rip-off, we're expected to play our parts and say our lines, even though we know it's all been said and done before.
As tension in the region builds, the US senator John McCain warned Pakistan that if it didn't act fast to arrest the "bad guys", India would launch air strikes on "terrorist camps" in Pakistan and that Washington could do nothing because Mumbai was India's September 11.
But November isn't September; 2008 isn't 2001; Pakistan isn't Afghanistan, and India isn't America. So perhaps we should reclaim our tragedy and pick through the debris with our own brains and our own broken hearts to arrive at our own conclusions.
It's odd how in the last week of November thousands of people in Kashmir, supervised by thousands of Indian troops, lined up to cast their vote, while the richest quarters of India's richest city ended up looking like war-torn Kupwara - a ravaged district of Kashmir.
The Mumbai attacks are only the most recent terrorist attacks on Indian towns and cities this year. Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Delhi, Guwahati, Jaipur and Malegaon have all seen serial bomb blasts in which hundreds of ordinary people have been killed and wounded. If police have arrested the guilty - both Hindu and Muslim, all Indian nationals - something's going very badly wrong in this country.
If you were watching television, you may not have heard that ordinary people, too, died in Mumbai. They were mowed down in a busy railway station and a public hospital. The terrorists did not distinguish between poor and rich. They killed both with equal cold-bloodedness.
The Indian media, however, was transfixed by the rising tide of horror that breached the glittering barricades of India Shining and spread its stench in the marbled lobbies and crystal ballrooms of two incredibly luxurious hotels and a small Jewish centre.
It's true one of these hotels is a Mumbai icon - an icon of the easy, obscene daily injustice that ordinary Indians endure. On a day when the newspapers were full of moving obituaries by beautiful people about the hotel rooms they had stayed in, the gourmet restaurants they loved, a small box inside a national newspaper (sponsored by a pizza company, I think) told us India ranked below Sudan and Somalia on the international hunger index.
But this isn't that war. That one's being fought in our villages, on river banks and rubber estates, and in the slums and shantytowns of our gigantic cities.
That war isn't on TV. So maybe, like everyone else, we should deal with the one that is.
~ more... ~From: Interview: Arundhati Roy rubbishes POTA-like law
New Delhi: Booker Prize winning author and activist Arundhati Roy has expressed a strong disapproval for the call for POTA and says following the American model on homeland security isn't a real option.
In an exclusive interview with CNN-IBN, she says the country needs to introspect and not look at the terror attacks in isolation.
Making sense of the attacks?
It’s easy to go along the path and say that there is no reason, it’s complete insanity but I just want to say that if that’s the path we are going to take, we will have to ask ourselves if it is at all possible with any amount of intelligence, and any, any amount of security. If we want to follow the American model, their Homeland Security is twice our GDP. I don't think we have that option.
We have to think about the Pakistan-America relationship. Pakistan is stuck in a war with Afghanistan, it is a war that we are stuck in, it is a part of that war and we are getting a blow back. We have half a million troops just for Kashmir. How many do you need for the whole of India?
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