0
A CLOSED-CIRCUIT TV grab reveals that ordinary people with bare hands and grit seized the only gunman taken alive from the blistering attack on Mumbai.
Mercifully, the terrorist didn`t suffer any bullet injuries but was landed a dozen outraged socks in the jaw, hence the hospitalisation.
The heavily armed gunman`s capture was an example of what citizens with a clenched fist can achieve that lionised commandos, the darling of Indian TV anchors, could not. The last time I witnessed India`s clenched fist in action was in the 1962 war with China.
That year women, old and young, rich and poor, handed over their gold ornaments to the government because Pandit Nehru had asked for help in the war effort. Those who could donated blood across the country. “Freedom is in peril. Defend it with all your might.” Nehru`s simple handwritten message was scribbled above the mast of the National Herald for a long while after that.
Though India lost that war partly because of Nehru`s oversight, he more than made up for the failure by welding a nation of disparate cultures into an emotionally secure, self-confident people. India`s freedom as a progressive democracy was defended though his detractors continue to describe it as a Nehruvian pipe dream. They should look at Iceland. It`s a rare country at peace with itself, just as we once were.
During a US-Soviet summit in Reykjavik, the Americans were upset at the apparent lack of security for the leaders. The host government relented and got a group of girl scouts to guard the venue. It didn`t need commandos. So here`s 10 on 10 to the ordinary people at Chhatrapati Shivaji railway station who nabbed the only living terrorist from Mumbai. Who cares if the men who showed that remarkable courage were Hindu, Sikh or Muslim? There is no other way to fight off the assault we witnessed the other day.
Many innocent people were killed in the attack that took most by surprise. In response, far from a clenched fist, what was in evidence in Mumbai was something that could pass for road rage. You could see a bit of the old withered fist but no more than that.
An overzealous media didn`t help. We may need to probe the role played by some journalists in wilfully dividing the country into two unequal halves as terrorists and their victims. Innuendo and suggestion were at their peak. Moreover, in the enthusiasm to get the best angle for TRP ratings some TV channels perhaps recklessly described the location where the victims were hiding and got them killed.
Several channels praised the commandos as you would take sides in a Batman movie and they showed selected sound bites of viewers demanding army rule and overthrow of elected leaders. Another anchor handed the microphone to a completely mindless corps of actors and actresses. One of them pleaded for the carpet-bombing of Pakistan. Such was their joint strategy to defend national honour. There`s not enough space here to dissect the entire media circus.
However, the fact remains that the way some of the popular Indian news presenters conducted themselves at a crucial moment in Mumbai has invited a rap on their knuckles from the Israelis, who thought live telecast of the encounter was lethal for the victims.
Be that as it may, the Indian middle classes worship Israeli commandos. The dramatic Entebbe operation against Palestinian hijackers and its blitzkrieg on the Egyptian air force in 1967 are considered the main reasons for the legend enthralling the Indians. But the fact is that Israel had a prime minister assassinated and poorly armed non-state actors in Lebanon defeated this nation of amazing technological resources. For that matter, even the United States with its unmatched military clout is stuck in Iraq and Afghanistan just as it was stranded in Vietnam.
On the other hand, it was the poorly armed Vietnam that gave a bloody nose to three permanent members of the UN Security Council the French, the Americans and the Chinese. And Vietnam didn`t need nuclear weapons to do that. It had a clenched fist.
The Indian middle classes` love of commandos can be excused provided the commandos know how to save lives. An Israeli rescue group says the troopers in Nariman House may have inadvertently killed some people they meant to save. In India, not just the commandos but also other segments of the security apparatus are trained to be reckless shooters. No wonder they were not called in to help when the Kandahar hijacking happened when the plane was actually grounded in Amritsar for quite a while.
The approach is an outcome of the brutal methods that are allowed to pass in Kashmir, the volatile northeast and in the anti-Maoist campaigns, which actually translate into the killing of the poorest classes of Indians, not their capture.
William Dalrymple has given a glimpse of this recklessness in The Guardian. “Three weeks ago, in the Kashmiri capital of Srinagar, I met a young surgeon named Dr Iqbal Saleem. Iqbal described to me how on Aug 11 this year, Indian security forces entered the hospital where he was fighting to save the lives of unarmed civilian protesters who had been shot earlier that day by the Indian army.
“The operating theatre had been tear-gassed and the wards riddled with bullets, creating panic and injuring several of the nurses. Iqbal had trained at the Apollo hospital in Delhi and said he harboured no hatred against Hindus or Indians. But the incident had profoundly disgusted him and the unrepentant actions of the security forces, combined with the indifference of the Indian media, had convinced him that Kashmir needed its independence.
“I thought back to this conversation last week, when news came in that the murderous attackers of Mumbai had brutally assaulted the city`s hospitals in addition to the more obvious Islamist targets of five-star hotels.”
So do we want that kind of commandos to guard urban India? Or are we planning to have two grades — one for Kashmir etc. trained to kill, and the other for Mumbai etc. who will save the more precious lives? Whatever your choice, I still prefer the good old clenched fist, one in which all the fingers are equally vital for landing an effective blow.
The writer is Dawn`s correspondent in Delhi.
