MUMBAI’s 9/11

Almost ten years ago, we stayed at the Taj Mahal Hotel in what was then just beginning to be widely known as Mumbai rather than Bombay. We were lucky to be in the old part of the building and very splendid it was. We ate a few times in its restaurants, including the one into which guests were barricaded during the siege this last week. I can vividly picture the cavernous foyer that has now been gutted by fire.

At one point during our stay, we had some small reason to complain – I no longer recall about what. As a conciliatory gesture, the manager had sent down to us a dish of the mangoes to which he alone had access. These proved to be the nonpareil of mangoes, the like of which I had never dreamed of before and can never hope to experience again. They were sheer magic. If the same manager oversees the Taj today, I hope he came through the ordeal unscathed.

It is a strange sensation seeing a place you have known being forced into a new and unwelcome role. Yesterday we were watching footage of stun grenades being fired at the hotel’s first floor windows in an attempt to flush out the last of the occupying terrorists. Many rooms and suites have been burned out, many others damaged by automatic weapon fire and besmirched by the blood of innocent guests. Had we been staying there when the attacks began, we would surely have been most vulnerable. I imagine myself having the presence of mind to shout “Deutsch, ich bin Deutsch” but that’s being wise after the event. Who knows how one would behave in a real situation like that? And anyway, would a German necessarily have been spared?

In the spring of 2001, we were on the viewing floors of the World Trade Center in New York City. No doubt some of the staff we glimpsed working there were to perish there six months later. How small the world is. Who imagines they are safe anywhere from modern terrorism? When the inevitable meeting of fanatics and nuclear weapons occurs, we shall all be in the firing line, wherever we hunker down.

Some hotheads in India are now calling for war with Pakistan as a response to the presumption that the terrorists emerged in the madrasahs and training camps of that country. Those who plan and direct these attacks will be delighted at this result. They will imagine Islam sweeping through a defeated India and overthrowing the Hindu hegemony. Though they will not achieve this aim, the attempt will profoundly destabilize the entire subcontinent. The Indian government, not the most far-sighted or imaginative in the region, will surely resist this impulse. Of course, more militant factions may come to power in New Delhi.

It’s important to keep hold of the knowledge that the world is wracked by a propaganda as well as a guerrilla war. The immediate conventional wisdom is that the one terrorist taken alive will yield much useful information about the origin and methods of the attackers. But he might as easily bamboozle the interrogators with well-rehearsed and plausible lies, lies that the authorities may be very ready to invest with credence. These fanatics are trained in psychological as well as urban warfare. The western media and the politicians who believe they must keep the insatiable media beast fed are very apt to get carried away with a theory based on little or no evidence, witness the flurry in some parts of the press about whether some of the Mumbai terrorists were British. “No” seems to be the conclusive answer. But what real difference would it have made if any of them had been British? Evidently the can of worms opened by such an idea is ugly, resonant but not quite articulated. Is it another twist to the image of Londonstan, the supposed western capital of Islamic fundamentalist recruitment?

Whatever precise national borders contained these young men when their ideas were forming, what is unarguable is that those ideas centre around Islam and jihad. Once again, religious bigotry rocks the planet and brings death and misery to random civilians, some of them no doubt themselves law-abiding Muslims. How we counter, reduce and finally eliminate that blind, righteous hatred is the $64,000 question that will not wait for a definitive answer.