"If there are going to be songs about World War III, we need to write them beforehand"

Jayshree, the administrative assistant at Vikramshila, called me over to her computer yesterday to read an e-mail she had received from a friend. It was a chain e-mail, declaring that the terrorists couldn’t interrupt Mumbai’s way of life—everyone went to work the next morning, taking the same train lines that had been bombed the day before. It was nice, although not particularly moving. As I got up from her computer to go back to what I had been doing, she told me that she had lost two relatives in the attacks. Neither was too close to her, it sounds like—her brother-in-law’s uncle was killed, as was a second cousin. But these are people she knows, and people who are very close to people who are close to her. Jayshree and I aren’t too close; we always talk over lunch, and chat a bit during the day, but this was the closest we’ve come to a heart-to-heart. She told me with a smile on her face, the kind you wear when you’d prefer to hold an idea out at arm’s length rather than have it float uninhibited in your mind.

All in all, the world has had a pretty bad couple of weeks. Hizbollah and Israel are doing their best to start World War III, while India has suffered three terrorist attacks from two different groups. On 7/11, bombs went off in Kashmir and Mumbai, allegedly the work of Pakistani-supported extremist Islamic groups. And just yesterday, 1,000 heavily armed Maoist Naxalite rebels killed 26 people in a government “safe zone,” and took 200 more captive.

I am perfectly safe; West Bengal, and Kolkata in particular, have very large Muslim populations, and yet there is a notable absence of communal violence. I’ve heard a couple of people talking about how West Bengal is a powder keg, but I’ve seen little evidence to support that. And the Maoist rebels tend to be situated in central and northern India.

I think one big mistake made frequently in conversations on the war on terror is the presumption that ‘terrorists’ are crazy and irrational, and that they are motivated by hatred or pride or some other immaterial entity. They (the proverbial ‘they,’ the negative image of ‘us’) want to destroy our way of life; they hate our freedom. David Cross, in one of his ultra-liberal stand-up comedy routines, remakes on this rhetoric (and I’m paraphrasing here):

“Actually, I don’t think they are attacking us because they hate our freedom. I think it’s because they’re mad about the United States’ support for the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and about the presence on American troops in Saudi Arabia that is condoned only by an oppressive monarch. Why do I think this? BECAUSE IT’S WHAT THEY SAID.”

Funny stuff, but I think his point is crucial. Individuals go on insane murderous rampages, like Norman Bates, the mild-mannered hotel owner in Psycho. And whole peoples can be spurred to violence and wreck unbelievable carnage, like the massacres in Rawanda, although even those tragedies have roots in their histories of colonization and oppression.

But to suggest that whole nations and societies can go crazy for long periods of time —that is, act without any reason or purpose—is either intellectual laziness or intentional manipulation. Often, I believe, it’s a combination of the two. It’s important to take people seriously when they proclaim their grievances. That doesn’t mean you’re required to yield to their demands, but it does mean you have to engage them as human beings.

Yesterday, I talked with Debarati, another one of the Vikramshila women, about her take on the recent bombings. I realize that it’s somewhat unfair to take people too literally the week after their country has been attacked. Debarati is a smart person, and she was willing to temper and qualify her more extreme statements when I pushed her—but her gut reactions were telling about the way people think in the aftermath of violence.

There are a lot of issues surrounding the bombings in Mumbai, including the degree of the Pakistani government’s complicity or participation in the attacks. But part of the issues comes from India’s possession of the state of Kashmir. Kashmir has been a disputed territory since Indian independence in 1947. When it was decided to partition the subcontinent, the guiding rule was for territories with Hindu majorities to form India, while the territories with Muslim majorities would become Pakistan. Kashmir was an exception. Indian-administered Kashmir is 70% Muslim, but at the time of partition, the local monarch was a Hindu, and he decided his kingdom should be part of India.

Pakistan claims, completely reasonably, that monarchs have no authority, and that the decision for Kashmir to remain in India was illegal. If the rule had been followed, all of Kashmir would belong to Pakistan. Of course, it’s hard to side to strongly with a country under a military dictatorship, which doesn’t really get points where democracy and human rights are concerned. In any case, nobody has ever let Kashmir vote to determine its fate, although it is widely agreed that an election would result in an independent statehood, unaligned with either of its huge neighbors.

In the meantime, Kashmiris have suffered terribly at the hands of the Indian and Pakistani militaries, and have seen the most consistent stream of terrorist attacks. Kashmiris, it seems to me, have a completely understandable and legitimate political grievance. And while I don’t want to condone the slaughter of innocent civilians, when a people are denied an official military by which to defend themselves, it’s not surprising that they turn to covert means. Pakistan sees in this conflict a way to undermine India’s power, and has probably provided support as a result.

It surprised me when Debarati asked, “But do you really think that they would stop attacking India if they had Kashmir?” I of course don’t know the answer to this question. But the idea that the Kashmiris would keep attacking India indefinitely, regardless of outcome, is worse than ludicrous—it is the perspective of a nation that refuses to take seriously the complaints of an oppressed people.

And to sustain this view, Debarati and other Hindus have to maintain something like the belief that, as Debarati told me, “All Muslims hate Hindus.” She told me this calmly, stating a somewhat regrettable but unalterable fact of nature. Their violent tendencies stem from this hatred.

It’s a convenient position for the Indian government to take, because it means you never have to consider a compromise, or consider that people have been wronged and deserve remittance. It’s the same way that the Israeli government views the Palestinians. I even think it’s the way the US defines terrorists—those people who act irrationally, for no real purpose, and who therefore don’t need to be treated like human beings.

Of course, after your country has been hit by a dizzying series of attacks, when Jayshree is thinking about her relatives who were in one of the train compartments where a bomb went off, such a reaction is understandable. When you are considering the death of a loved one, it is impossible to imagine that the person responsible could justify their actions. “A justification for this?” the people of Mumbai are asking. “Justify this and you destroy the moral fabric of our lives.”

But I think we have to listen, and we have to be sympathetic, and we have to take people seriously, or the moral fabric we think we’re defending becomes the basis for a perpetual cycle of revenge.