As the India poised anthem says, there are two Indias in this country.
One India is straining at the leash, eager to spring forth and
live up to all the adjectives that the world has been showering recently upon us.
The other India is the leash.
One India says, give me a chance and I’ll prove myself.
The other India says,
prove yourself and maybe then you’ll have a chance.
One India lives in the optimism of our hearts.
The other India lurks in the skepticism of your minds
One India wants. The other India hopes.
One India leads. The other India follows.
But conversions are on the rise.
With each passing day more and more people from the other
India have been coming over to this side. And quietly, while the world is not looking, a pulsating, dynamic, new India is emerging.
An India whose faith in success is far greater than its fear in failure. An India that no longer boycotts foreign-made goods but buys out the companies that make them instead. History, they say, is a bad motorist. It rarely ever signals its intentions when it is making a turn.
This is that rarely-ever moment. History is turning a page.
For more than half a century, our nation has sprung, stumbled, run, fallen, rolled over, got up, dusted herself and cantered, sometimes lurched on.
But today, as we begin out 60th year as a free republic nation, the ride has brought
us to the edge of time’s great precipice.
And one India- a tiny little voice at the back of the head- is looking down
at the bottom of the ravine and hesitating.
The other India is looking up at the sky and saying,
It’s time to fly.
But while taking off & making a steady pace, it’s wings are tried to be disposed by those who want to drag it’s spirit down. Once, twice, thrice & so on… with the continuous increment in the numbers, we, India has been tried to be sacked with it’s growing prosperity in every possible way, & with every possible way; by so pronounced what we call the “Non-State Actors”. But this time, it was not just “INDIA”. There's a savage irony to the fact that the unfolding horror in Mumbai began with terrorists docking near the Gateway of India. This magnificent arch, built in 1911 to welcome the King-Emperor, has ever since stood as a symbol of the openness of the city. Crowds flock around it, made up of foreign tourists and local yokels & the joggers; touts hawk their wares; boats pop onto the waters, offering cruises out to the open sea. The teeming throngs around it daily reflect India's diversity, with Parsi gentlemen out for their evening constitutionals, Muslim women in burqas taking the sea air, Goan Catholic waiters enjoying a break from their duties at the stately Taj Mahal Hotel, Hindus from every corner of the country chatting in a multitude of tongues. Today, ringed by police barricades, the Gateway of India - the gateway to India, & to India's soul -- is barred, mute testimony to the latest assault on country's pluralist democracy.
The terrorists who heaved their bags loaded with weapons up the steps of the dock to begin their assault on the Taj, like their cohorts at a dozen other locations around the city, knew exactly what they were doing, & what they are supposed to. Theirs was an attack on India's financial nerve-centre and commercial capital, an emblematic city of the country's energetic thrust into the 21st century. They struck at symbols of the prosperity that was making the Indian model so attractive to the globalizing world -- luxury hotels, a swish café, an apartment house favoured by foreigners. The terrorists also sought to polarize Indian society by claiming to be acting to redress & set right the grievances, real and imagined, of India's Muslims. And by singling out Britons, Americans and Israelis for special attention, they demonstrated that their brand of Islamist fanaticism is anchored less in the absolutism of pure faith, than in the geopolitics of hate.
Today, the platitudes flow like blood. Terrorism is deadly unacceptable; the terrorists are cowards; the world stands united in unreserved condemnation of this latest atrocity. Commentators in America trip over themselves to pronounce this night and day of carnage India's 9/11. But India has endured many attempted 9/11s, notably a ferocious assault on its national Parliament in December 2001 that nearly led to all-out war against the assailants' presumed sponsors, Pakistan. Last year alone, terrorist bombs have taken lives in Jaipur, in Ahmedabad, in Delhi and (in an eerie dress-rehearsal for the effectiveness of synchronicity) several different places on one searing day in the state of Assam. Jaipur is the lode-star of Indian tourism to Rajasthan; Ahmedabad is the primary city of Gujarat, the state that is a poster child for India's development, with a local GDP growth rate of 14%; Delhi is the nation's political capital and India's window to the world; Assam was logistically convenient for terrorists from across a leaking porous border. Mumbai combined all the four elements of its pre-cursors: by attacking it, the terrorists hit India's economy, its tourism, and its internationalism, and they took advantage of the city's openness to the world. A grand slam.
Indians have learned to endure the unspeakable horrors of terrorist violence ever since malign men in Pakistan concluded it was cheaper and more effective to bleed India to death than to attempt to defeat it in conventional war. Attack after attack has been proven to have been financed, equipped and guided from across the border, the most recent being the suicide-bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul, an action publicly traced by American intelligence to Islamabad's dreaded military special-cops agency, the ISI. The risible attempt to claim "credit" for the Mumbai killings, firstly in the name of the "Deccan Mujahideen" merely confirms that wherever the killers are from, it is not the Deccan. The Deccan lies inland from Mumbai; one does not need to sail the waters of the Arabian Sea to the Gateway of India to get to the city from there. In its meticulous planning, sophisticated co-ordination and military precision, as well as its choice of targets, the assault on Mumbai bore no trace of what its promoters tried to suggest it was -- a spontaneous eruption by angry young Indian Muslims. This horror was not home-grown.
The Islamist extremism nurtured by a succession of military rulers of Pakistan has now come to haunt its well-intentioned but lamentably weak elected civilian government, which is still surrounded with the cloud of an unanswered question -- Who actually rules?? The bombing of Islamabad's Marriott Hotel proved that Frankenstein's monster is now well and truly out of that government's control. The militancy once sponsored by its predecessors now threatens to abort Pakistan's sputtering democracy and seeks to engulf India in its flames. There has never been a stronger case for firm and united action by the governments of both India and Pakistan to cauterize the cancer in their midst.
Inevitably, the questions have begun to be asked: "is it all over for India? Can the country ever recover from this?"
Of course the answers are no and yes, but outsiders cannot be blamed for asking existential questions about a nation that so recently had been seen as poised for take-off. India can recover from the physical assaults against it. It is a land of great resilience that has learned, over arduous millennia, to cope with tragedy. Within 24 hours of an earlier Islamist assault on Mumbai, the Stock Exchange bombing in 1993, Bombay's traders were back on the floor, their burned-out computers forgotten, doing what they used to before technology had changed their trading styles. Bombs and bullets alone cannot destroy India, because Indians will pick their way through the rubble, dust it off, and carry on as they have done throughout history.
But what can destroy India is a change in the spirit of its people, away from the pluralism and co-existence that has been our greatest strength. The Prime Minister's call for calm and restraint in the face of this murderous rampage is vital. If these tragic events lead to the demonization of the Muslims of India, the terrorists will have won. For India to be India, its gateway -- to the multiple Indias within, and the heaving seas without -- must always remain open.
JAI-HIND!
