The sudden and incredible vulnerability

Following millions of fellow Southasian citizens, this writer woke up early on the morning of 27 November to the horror of violence in Bombay. On television, I watched the images and narratives of the unfolding attack on civilian targets, feeling a complex mixture of shock, horror, revulsion and helplessness. In today's world, we have become used to watching such violence practically every day on the news channels, and the vast majority of such stories during the past few years have been emanating from Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan, Pakistan and my own little country of Sri Lanka. The Bombay attacks were similar to most of the stories of contemporary anti-systemic violence that we are used to. A small group of young men on a suicide mission launched an attack on a state and its civilians – civilians and civilian institutions are the most vulnerable in this type of premeditated violence – in order to create the maximum political effect within a few hours, if not minutes. In the process, these young combatants, who even the ordinary citizens now call 'terrorists', in the language of George W Bush and Condoleezza Rice, were ready to die.

The Bombay Ten (if there were indeed ten of them) are neither the first nor the last bunch of young men to practice such large-scale violence for violence's sake. The challenge for all governments confronted with the threat of shocking violence is to address it as an anti-systemic phenomenon that has acquired a global character. But, of course, nation states in such situations usually behave the way that nation states normally do. For them, violence by non-state combatants is essentially a security threat, which should be met essentially by military and coercive methods. The basic problem with such an approach, however, is that violence can only beget more violence.

The aftermath of the Bombay tragedy should remind the world once again about the results that such violence is meant to achieve. Anti-systemic violence that is being practiced in the name of nation or religion can hardly bring any measure of human emancipation. It is, in fact, counter-emancipatory. As so quickly demonstrated in the aftermath of the attacks of 11 September 2001, it could only bring greater oppression and more burdens to communities desperately in need of recognition, equality, dignity and rights. The attacks in New York over seven years ago only precipitated a counter-revolution of the rightwing on a global scale. The Bombay attacks of late November are now leading to a new anti-democratic counter-revolution in Southasia. Thus, anti-systemic terrorism not only begets more violence; it also propels new waves of state terror with more popular support and legitimacy.

Strategic culture
Those who manage and run states also continue to learn incorrect lessons and implement policies that have already made the problem of 'terrorism' wholly intractable. In the aftermath of the Bombay tragedy, India and Pakistan seem to be engaging in a debate that largely deprives the two governments – and, unfortunately, most of the citizens of the two countries – of the capacity to see beyond the faces of the nine who were killed and the one who was captured alive.

After the Bombay attacks, the Indian government came under immense pressure, particularly from the media, to act similarly to how the US did following the 9/11 attacks. When the over-enthusiastic media describes the Bombay attack as 'India's own 9/11', this has at least two ominous suggestions. The first is that India is under attack by 'Muslim terrorists'. The second is that India should retaliate against, even bomb, the so-called sources of terror, as the US did in Afghanistan and Iraq. External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee, with his tough talking to Pakistan, seems to reflect what the Indian middle class expects from the Indian state – to practice the doctrine of 'enough is enough.' Meanwhile, Islamabad has done nothing to make matters better between the two countries. The political, military, security and media establishments of both countries have thrived for decades on state insecurity. They have developed what security-studies experts call a peculiar 'strategic culture' for each country in which 'terrorist threats' are not external to the politics of securitisation.

There are some parallels and differences between what happened in Bombay on 26-29 November 2008 and what happened in New York on 11 September 2001. In both instances, a small group of non-state combatants managed to paralyse, for a period of time, two of the militarily most powerful states in the world. In both instances, the threat of non-state terror is perceived, understood and given expression in policy pronouncements primarily as a security problem faced by the individual state concerned, and not as an issue with systemic roots. The shaken political and security establishment of the US saw a global military response as the only legitimate and effective course of retaliatory action. In India, there is a crucial divergence on this point. Some sanity seems to have prevailed to prevent a rightwing ideological build-up to avenge the country's honour in a communalist backlash. The state election results subsequent to the Bombay attacks do not indicate a heightened sense of nationalist paranoia in India among the people at large, even though some media outlets might have succumbed to jingoism.

Meanwhile, there is a key lesson that both New Delhi and Pakistan need to learn. Neither war between their countries, nor a military response alone against militants engaged in indiscriminate violence as a political practice, will be effective in dealing with the phenomenon that has been described as terrorism. Islamist militancy, which has been hijacked by a new generation of practitioners of violence, is a political phenomenon as well. Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, northwestern Pakistan and Kashmir are spaces that produce the kind of Islamist militancy that the world today knows essentially as terrorism only. But does Islamist terror have anything beneath or beyond the practice of senseless and self-defeating extremism, in the horrendous acts that do not seem to suggest anything other than absolute desperation? Why do young Muslim men seem to be so angry with some of the leading Western states, as well as the Indian state, as to kill innocent people and then die in the process? Many people have stopped asking such questions. In this age of global 'war on terror', such questions seem to be seen as politically naïve queries that only belong to the past.

As the experience of the past seven years shows, President Bush's global war has only exacerbated the very problem he sought to manage. This is something the world has been reluctant to admit. The attack in Bombay has reminded the world that the 'war on terror' has not made the world any safer. On the contrary, it has made Asia, particularly Southasia and West Asia, the most militarised regions in the post-9/11 world. In a perverse sense, these two areas have been turned into battlegrounds in the so-called 'clash of civilisations', which is simply defined as a war between radicalised Muslims and the 'civilised' rest of the world. There is now a real risk of all of Southasia becoming the epicentre of the new US war against Islamist militancy. This is a potential trap from which both India and Pakistan need to work to extricate themselves. But instead, both countries seem to be getting deeper into another dual trap, that of worsening inter-state conflict and continuing internal militarisation.

Bush's neo-barbarism
The world is becoming aware of the disastrous consequences of the way in which rightwing sections of the US Republican Party redefined the entire approach to the threat of militant Islamist movements. But one point that warrants re-emphasis is how a country's war against terrorism can destroy its own democratic, civilisational foundations. After 9/11, the US as a nation suffered immensely at the hands of President Bush, when the latter introduced, in the name of national security, unprecedented restrictions on civil liberties and democratic rights.

The new doctrine of the national security state, as originated in the US and was copied in a few other places, was a direct assault on liberal democracy. President Bush and his rightwing ideologues had no hesitation in subjecting liberal democracy to the commands of the national security state. The target of their aggressive campaign against Islamist militancy at home was not only the so-called terrorists. The traditions and practices of democratic rights and civil and political liberties, of which the US has been particularly proud, were both its targets and victims. The official American argument to defend inhumane torture of terror suspects to extract information is a shameful example of how the US, under the 'war on terror', became a model of neo-barbarism.

Compelling airline passengers to remove their shoes and belts at airport security counters, be it in Colombo, Delhi, Singapore, Dubai, London or New York, is no testimony to a more secure world established following the start of the 'war on terror'. If it indicates anything at all, it is that the world has gone so awry in the aftermath of this war that all human beings are, before anything else, potential 'terrorists' and a threat to the security of Western states. Airport security and immigration counters are now places where human beings are turned into creatures without self-respect, dignity and self-worth. It is perhaps now up to President-elect Barack Obama to alter the way in which President George W Bush has shaped the world in a manner so degrading to human beings. It would be up to Obama to restore democratic civility in the post-Bush world.

Barack Obama may not be particularly clear about how any sense of democratic civility could be extended to Southasia. What has so far appeared clear is that President Obama, if he implements his commitment to eradicate the al-Qaeda threat to US security at its source, will be committed to executing a policy of further militarisation towards and of Southasia. One nightmarish scenario under President Obama would be the extension of the US war against Islamist militancy beyond Afghanistan to Southasia in general. Frighteningly, such a policy would be able to redefine Pakistan-India relations according to the priorities of the US military establishment.

It is against this possibility that the Indian and Pakistani political establishments need to deal with the post-Bombay crisis with greater prudence than they are demonstrating at the time of this writing. Both countries should realise the immense dangers awaiting them if one country, Pakistan, avoids its responsibility towards India's security and the other country, India, 'globalises' the threat from militants operating from Pakistan. There are signs that sections of the Indian political class are eagerly awaiting closer military cooperation with the US under President Obama, with the hope that India would be the sole beneficiary of the new Southasian war against terrorism. That would be a fresh invitation to greater disaster. No right-minded Indian should think that further extension of the failed US military policy, now under a charming new president, could benefit from a scenario in which the fight in Afghanistan is extended to Pakistan as well.

Hobbes and Kautilya
While writing these words, I see on an Indian TV station beamed to Sri Lanka a statement attributed to India's serving Chief Justice K G Balakrishnan: "India needs tough new anti-terror laws to fight terrorism." This reflects the establishment consensus. In fact, within just three weeks of the Bombay attacks, India had already entered the fast track of introducing new legislation in the name of national security. The new law sets up a new National Investigation Agency, while introducing amendments to the existing Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act.

According to the newspaper reports, the National Investigation Agency will have concurrent jurisdiction. It will have powers to set up special courts that will have hearings on a day-to-day basis. Among the 'deterrent provisions' proposed in the new law is detention without bail for up to 180 days The new law will also empower the central government to decide what constitutes 'terror', and to investigate such attacks in any part of the country. This is where securitisation of the state apparatus directly collides with civil and political liberties, and even leads to the unintended consequences of identifying minority communities as representing eternal and everyday threats to the security of the state. From 2002 until it was repealed in 2004, India experienced the draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA). What has been the experience of POTA from the perspective of civil liberties and minority rights? For one reason or another, the Indian media does not seem to think that now is the right time to ask such a question. And actually, such questions do not need to be asked, because the dynamic between terror and anti-terror is a mutually sustaining process.

What would then be the alternative? Alternatives, we should not be afraid to admit, are not easy to come by. One that needs further exploration, though, is a re-fashioning of the ways in which the states look at, view, treat and encounter themselves, their citizens and communities, as well as the citizens and communities of other states, across borders. It is not too late to acknowledge that the world has suffered enough by looking at human existence from the narrow perspective of the nation state and state security in a Hobbesian-type world of anarchy. The humiliations and indignities minority and marginal communities suffer throughout the world, the global-scale hostilities that people identified as Muslims encounter day in and day out, the unbelievable degree of social inequalities that define even Bombay or Karachi – these are not easily comprehended in the Hobbesian, or Kautilyan or even Jinnah-esque imaginary of security. They cannot be addressed in a hurry, either.

Nevertheless, the young men who carried out the Bombay attacks – who, as the reports now say, came from impoverished rural families in Pakistan, were probably inspired by religious fanatics and militarily trained by Pakistani state agencies – are in fact victims of larger processes of which Indian and Pakistani states themselves are also victims. Those larger processes cannot be reduced to conspiracy theories to which the popular media and security experts are easily attracted. They are processes of how human society is politically organised, and how the patterns of relations among the political entities called nation states produce and reproduce violence and terror, as well as anti-state violence and terror, almost as a law of existence. In order to think of alternatives, we first need to emancipate ourselves from that law, as well as the imaginations and practices it has spawned, which make violence and terror a necessity.

~ Jayadeva Uyangoda is professor at and head of the Department of Political Science and Public Policy at the University of Colombo.