City by the sea

No other city in India is confronted by its own legend with as much verve and as brutal honesty as Mumbai has been. Now a bunch of individuals, of still unknown affiliation but clearly possessed of clockwork innovation, has alerted this country yet again that to strike at its cities and its commerce is to threaten the idea of India. It is easy to say after the event what the terrorists targeted: by attacking the comfort zones of South Mumbai and singling out foreign travellers, they have not been ambiguous. They have also been spectacularly successful, not just in the toll they have taken, but in the questions they have asked of the Indian Growth Story. Can India secure itself against randomly executed acts of organised terror? Can it be trusted to provide the sense of security that global business expects? Can it cope on the day after?

That last question has been asked of India, and of Mumbai, many times before. And the answer has always been emphatically affirmative. There is little reason to suspect it will not be so again. There is also the sobering thought that this time it will not be easy. The questions are too disturbing. What are the intelligence mechanisms that failed to pick up a terrorist plan with as much micro-planning as this one? What can be done so this does not recur? Because without working through this question, there can be no closure. And most importantly, because the answers to this one provide the clues to what it is that India has been confronted with: what hideous design did the terrorists have for the aftermath? To disengage Indians from the world. To undermine India8217;s confidence in itself, and its capacity to command confidence. To cause outrage and provoke a self-destructive recklessness.

The investigations would have begun even before the encounters in South Mumbai were over. The picture will, hopefully, soon become clear. But through all this, the challenge is to our politics. This is a defining moment. The Mumbai attack renders petty and pointless the discourse on terrorism that has thickened the electoral air. Politics has to rise to the occasion, because it is only through a saner politics that India will defeat the challenge posed to its globalised, growing potential. A saner, more engaged politics is also the only way for this country to constructively ask itself what it can do better to keep its people and its aspirations safe.