7/11 blowback

All that is disputed is the number. Estimates of the number of persons gathered in investigations after the July 7 Mumbai blasts vary between 150 and 1,500. But what is becoming resoundingly worrisome is that Muslims in the city feel under siege. A special series in this newspaper on post-7/11 faultlines has begun filtering perceptions of ordinary, and mostly educated, Muslims about the manner in which the Mumbai police are following up the case. The faultlines are showing up in diverse ways: a feeling reinforced that religious affiliation alone is rendering them suspect in the eyes of the police, a survival mechanism kicking in to relocate to Muslim colonies, an assertion of overt symbols of religious identity. These voices must serve as first cautions that terrorists are gaining success even in the second of their obvious targets: to wreak death and disruption and to create suspicion between innocent civilians.

It is a fact that the terrorist threat is upon India, and that it is growing. A home ministry agenda paper before a chief ministers8217; conclave today details how terrorism, coming in across the border, is seeping to ever newer areas. To keep internal security, therefore, the police would have to be that much more proactive. The country therefore does not have the option of meeting the threat softly. Intelligence gathering and preventive measures have to be reinforced. However, India also does not have luxury of adopting the community-based policing rampant in the global 8220;war on terror8221;. The efficacy of community-based profiling has yet to be established. But in India profiling by religion or ethnicity is in itself the terrorist plan that has to be defeated each time violence strikes.

Even through the worst, Mumbai has held fast to its cosmopolitan spirit. It is troubling, then, that by many accounts people are disentangling into single-community neighbourhoods. Cities are spaces that thrive when their inhabitants are sufficiently confident that as individuals they have a chance to meet their aspirations. To belong to a great city is to revel in a measure of anonymity. Mumbai has been that idea and actuality for India. It must therefore take the seeds of discrimination now being sown very, very seriously.