Mumbai Was Not India's 9/11

I was coasting through the long weekend on Friday morning, going through the daily dose of reading with the muted TV on CNN when I noticed the word “Cricket” on the screen. This grabbed my attention since this sport is unheard of in this part of the world and I realized that CNN was breaking the news about a series of attacks in Mumbai at various locations and was showing a feed from a local Indian news channel.

As appalled as I was about these attacks, I was also surprised by the unprecedented level of coverage of the events by the news channels—fueled, no doubt, by the large number of Americans involved and the fact that most of their regular reporters were on vacation. Now that the reporters and analysts are back on air, they have gone on to suggest that this is the test that Al Qaeda has sent to Barack Obama, as predicted by Joe Biden. Also, I have heard some one mentioning that the terrorists went after the Americans in Mumbai because they could not get them here in America. All I have to say is: Sorry, it is not always about America. This was an attack against India and targeting American, British and Israeli citizens was just a ploy to garner worldwide attention and further the embarrassment of India.

Having been born and raised in India, I do not find these attacks unimaginable. As a country, India has been under an incessant assault from Islamic fundamentalist organizations ever since its formation in 1947. It was not America's problem until the late 90s when these terrorist organizations, especially Al Qaeda, started turning against American interests.

Also, the pundits have already named this the 9/11 of India. I beg to disagree. Just because you weren't paying attention until now does not make it any more significant than the previous attacks. The city of Mumbai itself had sustained a loss of 260 lives in 1993 and more recently, 200 lives in 2006 during various terror attacks. I do not intend to trivialize this horrible, horrible massacre but this is not something that India has not seen before. Yet it is good to see the West recognize India's six-decade with fight with terrorism.

Also, Indian security forces face many difficulties while dealing with terrorism. The lack of well-kept records poses a challenge to tracking individuals that may prove to be dangerous. Even dealing with people, profiling becomes a challenge when there isn’t much that can be used to identify a possible terrorist at various situations. India is home to the second largest Muslim population in the world, which is larger than even the entire Arab population. This community had been the ruling class for many centuries before the British Empire assumed power. From that point, the Muslim community has been in a downward spiral due to institutional discrimination and the resulting poverty and despair. The branding of Pakistan and the entire Muslim community as agents of terrorism by Hindu extremist leaders has not helped either. This has given the Islamic terrorist organizations easy recruiting grounds among the disenchanted youth in the community; even if they get a few hundred young men out of the 150 million, the damage is done.

Sure, the picture that I drew shows an incredibly permeable country. In fact, the media has already been discussing how unsafe India is. The main lessons that were learned from these incidents can be condensed as the following: First, India needs to reform its fragmented intelligence system and build a system for the competent individual agencies to share information on a real time basis. Also, it has to improve the emergency management system with well-equipped SWAT teams with the ability for quick response and effective action. Nevertheless, this is the first time that the terrorists have taken an approach this vastly different from the usual fare of suicide bomb attacks or car bombs. But for an average Indian, the chances of getting involved in a terrorist attack is still slim. In short, India is not Afghanistan. It is a success story—a stable democracy over six decades.

This does not mean that people are without fear, of course. Travel agents have been reporting cancellation of trips to India. My family has some interests in the tourism-related hospitality industry in India and already there have been many cancellations and a total dearth of new reservations at various hotels and resorts that cater to Western tourists. This could take a toll on the tourism industry, which has about six percent share of the GDP and had already taken a blow by the soft economy in the West. This will be quite a concern if tourists opt out of India in the long run. However, the rising ranks of the Indian middle class have already begun contributing to a bigger share of domestic tourism and they should be able to sustain the industry from going under completely. But this also depends on the vigor of the Indian economy.

That brings to us the question of what effect these attacks would have on the Indian economy in the long run. Other than the very short-term effect on tourism, I doubt there will be an effect on the economy directly. Even with the global economic downturn, the Indian economy’s growth of has not slowed down significantly. The GDP is projected to grow by 7-7.5 percent in 2009 and does not appear to be very threatened by the global downturn due to a solid cushion of domestic consumption.  As I have mentioned, India has seen this kind of atrocity before. Even as the media want you to believe that this event has the same effect on India that 9/11 had on America, it is simply not the case. India will take this blow in the stride and will move on faster. The people of India have always been resilient.