Mumbai After the Mayhem

...It was once the country’s industrial capital, in addition to the commercial hub, and that has endowed it with a vibrancy lacking elsewhere...

...The Shiv Sena, the local Hindu chauvinist party, itself admitted playing a major role in stoking the fires of those riots...

...Now is also a time to examine why most—but by no means all—terrorists are Muslims...

...They have demonstrated their strength by holding candlelight processions and demonstrations which have culminated in a “regime change...

...The prelude may well have been India’s entry into a special nuclear deal with the United States...

...He had been fiercely criticized in the past for corrupt practices and many Mumbaikars are no longer willing to tolerate such a leader in their capital...

...Neither of the two five-star hotels had an equally heavy toll, despite the disproportionate amount of media coverage they received...

...Amid all the euphoria in this country over the end of India’s pariah status among the haves of the nuclear world, the foreign policy shift was not lost on the ter rorists...

...Why was Mumbai chosen...

...The worst communal violence occurred in December 1992, after Hindu zealots destroyed the 500-year-old Babri Mosque in northwest India’s Uttar Pradesh State...

...In the late 1980s, Mumbai faced its first riots in decades following the publication in the West of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses...

...In a world saturated by the media you can no longer be isolated from events anywhere...

...As a secular country with the world’s second largest Muslim population, India owes it to itself to take a long view of the tragedy it has just suffered...

...It is therefore absurd for the elite to be calling for abstentions from elections...

...And yet, I was immediately drawn into it...

...they are already doing that...

...One has to remember that Muslim countries are located either where there are major oil reserves, or (like Afghanistan) where geopolitical strategies have long seemed vital to Western powers...

...Ineffective Maharashtra State Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh, and his equally incompetent Deputy and Home Minister R.R...

...they are attempting to strike back at the “War on Terror...

...Their actions are a message for departing President George W. Bush and his erstwhile partner in arms, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair...

...It was for all these reasons and much more...

...But a call for the apolitical elite to stage a demonstration against his appointment fizzled out, drawing barely 200 protesters...

...In the 2003 state elections in New Delhi, the gap between the turnout of the very poor and very rich was a significant 20 per cent...

...In the past, they have suggested disenfranchising slum dwellers—forgetting that they form the majority in Mumbai...

...There will be a temptation for these parties, led by the Shiv Sena, to demonize all Islamic communities and nations...

...This is true not only in India but throughout the world...

...A number of the well-to-do actually called upon their fellow fortunates to temporarily withhold their estimated income tax installments, due December 15...

...and UK...

...Corporate bodies like the Bombay Chamber of Commerce and Industry, not known previously for political engagement, were at the forefront of this campaign, along with Bollywood and fashion industry celebrities...

...Since the bulk of India’s income tax collections emanate from Mumbai, this was meant to signal to the rest of the country that Mumbaikars have had enough, and furthermore do not want to go on “subsidizing” the rest of India...

...Mumbai’s success as a multicultural entity is important for urban India, and the attackers may have sought to undermine that...

...An inescapable irony is that the largest number of people, 53, were killed at what was formerly known as Victoria Terminus, the railway station used by some 3 million commuters daily...

...Was it because Mumbai is a soft target compared with the tightly secured Indian political capital, New Delhi...

...Unlike the United States, where there is a cor relation between affluence and the tendency to vote in elections, here the reverse is the case...

...The implication, even if unintended, was that Mumbai’s population of 16 million is divided into two classes: One thinks the state should devote more resources to its protection...

...By contrast, between 1977 and 2004 urban India’s participation in the parliamentary elections fell from 61 per cent to 53 per cent...

...Patil, have both been forced out...

...It is the only one where five languages can be heard as part of the daily discourse, without anyone batting an eye...

...Less than 2 per cent of India’s billionplus population pays income tax...

...Darryl D’Monte, a longtime contributor to the New Leader and former editor of the Bombay edition of the Times of India, is chairperson of the Forum of Environmental Journalists of India...

...It was disarmingly sunny that crisp, cold early winter day...

...Mumbai, however, needs to guard against knee-jerk reactions...

...I felt safe far from the mayhem in Mumbai...

...Some people have been advocating a boycott of the national parliamentary elections, scheduled to be held next May but likely to be brought forward...

...In a study titled The Patterns of Middle Class Consumption in India and China (Sage, 2008), psephologists Christophe Jaffrelot and Peter van der Veer show that 64 per cent of those who earned less than $10,000 a year did not vote in the 2004 U.S...

...The mujahedin are not only wreaking vengeance against Hindu militants...

...Anglo-Saxons have been specifically singled out and the inference is obvious...

...What is more, Mumbai has witnessed a succession of bomb blasts on its local trains in recent months, but none of them have ev oked expressions of outrage among the chattering and glittering elite—very few of whom ever resort to such a lowly means of transportation...

...Patil’s blunder was saying that in a big city small events like the November 26 attacks were bound to occur...

...WHICH BRINGS ME to voting patter ns in India...

...One can say with some degree of certainty that India should gird its loins for many more terrorist assaults down the road...

...Was it because the terrorists wanted to strike at the heart of a once resurgent Indian economy by hitting the two most opulent hotels in a metropolis that is the destination of businessmen, mainly from the West, particularly from the U.S...

...The upper classes in Mumbai and other cities are baying for Muslim Pakistan’s blood and urging “surgical” air strikes against terrorist bases there...

...Although over 800 miles away, Bombay (as Mumbai was then named) burned until 13 serial bomb blasts went off one afternoon in March 1993, paradoxically capping the protracted bloody conflict...

...CITIZENS ARE RIGHT, however, to be angry about the lack of coordination among intelligence agencies, the bureaucracy and the police, despite warnings from U.S...

...Others urge greater participation in the political system rather than withdrawing from it—as the upper middle class and elite are being exhorted to do in an avalanche of e-mails and text messages...

...The Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, a splinter group of the Shiv Sena, has already been waging its own strong-armed vendetta against north Indians in the city, aided and abetted by an unscrupulous Congress-led coalition in the state...

...They are also sending an unequivocal warning to President-elect Barack Obama against continuing interventionist policies...

...In the same period in rural India, where the poor and illiterate live, the voting percentage rose from 57 per cent to nearly 59 per cent...

...The author was grieved that some of those protesting his book in the place he claims as his home lost their lives when police opened fire on them...

...The fact that the chief minister’s young actor son, a friend of the director, was in tow as well did not help either...

...Mumbai is our most cosmopolitan city...

...intelligence that Mumbai should expect attacks from the sea and that five-star hotels were a target...

...The same pattern obtains in the UK...

...Their primary demand was better security for themselves...

...When he visited the charred ruins of the Taj Mahal hotel, Deshmukh made the fatal mistake of taking along a Bollywood director who has made a name turning out realistic films on crime and conflict in Mumbai...

...Instead of seceding from India’s flawed but functioning democracy, they should demonstrate some compassion, which has been lacking in the aftermath of the November attacks...

...The latest attacks are on an altogether new trajectory...

...Was it to frighten off foreign tourists that the not very distant Leopold café, a favorite watering hole for budget travelers, was targeted...

...Guarding Against a Knee-Jerk Reaction Mumbai Afterthe Mayhem By Darryl D’Monte Mumbai When terrorists attacked my city on November 26, I was in a walled medieval Italian town, Viterbo, not far from Rome...

...the other lacks human security of any kind and includes the 55 per cent officially estimated to be living in slums...

...Presidential elections, whereas only 22 per cent of those who earned more than $150,000 abstained...

...The elites should realize the terrorist acts were a wake-up call for greater participation in the democratic process, not less...

...But the best response in the immediate future would be to emphasize that the city is proud of its multicultural character, and that diversity is its answer to efforts to divide citizens on the basis of heritage and language...

...As the respected Beirut-based British correspondent Robert Fisk, of the Independent, has said, “If Iraq’s main produce was broccoli, you can bet your last dollar that Bush wouldn’t have invaded it...

...The wealthiest constituency in the country, Malabar Hill in south Mumbai, has the lowest turnouts in every election...

...Far from being mollified, activists sought to prevent new Deputy and Home Minister Chhagan Bhujbal from taking office...